You think vous care about spelling!
Want a sure way to raise a little controversy about computers in education? Tell people that you think that kids shouldn’t be spending so much time on spelling lessons in school. After all, what they really need is to be able to spell a word well enough that a word processor can help them correct it….
If you think that view is controversial here in the US, in France–where language is an important sign of national identity–the stakes are even higher. But even in France new media is making inroads. The “problem” of creative spelling in text messages has apparently been raised to the presidential level.
This from Nicolas Sarkozy in February:
Look at what text-messaging is doing to the French Language… If we let things go, in a few years we will have trouble understanding each other.
But what to do? C CHIC
Originally posted 2008-05-27 16:53:29. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Gesture and Math
An interesting study by Susan Goldin-Meadow asks:
Why do people gesture when they talk? Perhaps people gesture for their listeners. After all, listeners can glean information from the gestures speakers produce. However, people also gesture when no one is watching and even when talking to blind individuals. So, perhaps people gesture for themselves. Indeed, children who produce gestures modeled by the teacher during a lesson are more likely to profit from the lesson than children who do not produce the gestures . Gesturing may not only identify children as ready to learn, it may actually help them learn.
The study looked at children learning arithmetic, and showed (basically) that if students do a simple arithmetic problem and point at the relevant parts of the equation, they do better than if they just point, and better still than if they don’t point at all.
Now we always have to be careful making broad generalizations from a small study like this. But it does suggest, as Merlin Donald argues in the Origins of the Modern Mind, and as I talk about in How Computer Games Help Children Learn, that the mind is really a palimpsest, with newer forms of thinking–new abilities–written on top of the old. When we solve math problems (a theoretic and literate activity) or tell stories (a linguistic activity), the older systems of communication, gesture and mime, play a role as well.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that video games (a computational activity) use older forms of thinking, particularly storytelling, to communicate their meanings.
The study also highlights an important process in learning. As I wrote in HCGHCL:
Vygotsky argued…. that the way we learn is by doing things with help and then progressively internalizing the process. We take what is first an external, social, and explicit process of solving a problem and gradually we do it on our own…. First we may do it individually but still need to “talk through it”—and surely we all know what it is like to suddenly feel a little foolish talking to ourselves out loud while trying to figure something out. As an undergraduate I spent hours in the library pacing through the stacks and talking to myself while writing term papers, and my daughter still needs to talk out loud to add two-digit numbers. Later we talk through the steps but silently in our heads, which I can see my daughter doing when she adds a single-digit number to a two-digit number. And at some point, when we get really good at solving a problem, we aren’t even aware of how we did it.
Goldin-Meadow’s study shows that we don’t just talk to ourselves in words as we learn to solve complex problems. We use even older and more fundamental forms of communication to solve complex, abstract problems.
