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I’ve always advocated that you don’t have to be intelligent to have rights, but this idea from Defective Yeti has wondrous, if perverse, appeal. What if you had to prove that you had a grasp of basic grammar before you could log on to the internet? You’ll find a rotation of these at the site, with working buttons that will determine whether you are worthy. Link -via Rue The Day!
Danny, a greyhound, has an important job at Oakhill primary school in Tamworth, Staffordshire. He trained for five months to become a “listening” dog. As a representative of the Reading Education Assistance Dogs (READ) program he listens to children read. He is a registered therapy dog who helps children improve their literacy skills by listening nonjudgmentally to students. The program has been found to improve the confidence and self esteem of young readers.
Link - Via boingboing
Wouldn’t you love to browse a shop like this? Hoxton Street Monster Supplies in London is a Ministry of Stories project that gives children a place to go for inspiration and where they can write and get help with their school work. It was inspired by Dave Eggars’ 826 project responsible for the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store in New York. The Hoxton Street store shelves are filled with items like brain jam and organ marmalade, pickled eyeballs, human snot, and my favorite, a canned vague sense of unease. Link -via b3ta
The Letter People was a literacy program that began in 1972 and grew into a TV show. In today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, we’ll see how well you recall the individual Letter People of Letter Land. You’ll be given the character, but can you remember their original alliterative “characteristic”? I couldn’t! Link
New technologies are often blamed for the “dumbing-down” of new generations, but it’s hard to see that any generation is “dumber” than the one before it in a historical context. Professor Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University studied college students’ writing and how it changed from 2002 to 2006.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.
Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Mads Berg)
