Longhand

So, what you're saying is that children process on a higher level if they handwrite, versus type? I'm curious, as I have six children.

Your article on Longhand looked suspiciously familiar to me, but I ran it through the Plagiarism Checker and it turned out all right.

Redneck Wife,

It's not typing versus handwriting. It's the fact that with a word processor and online sources, you don't even have to type - you can just cut and paste, or drag and drop. The question is: Does that put you at a further distance from actually understanding the material than if you're forced to at least write it out or type it out.

Personally, I would say that the answer is yes, though I certainly don't have any proof of that. To me, this is just one aspect of a much bigger question about how the internet may influence our minds and memories over the long term.

Nick

"at a further distance"?

I would say this further distance is akin to comparing 1000 miles versus 1000 miles plus one step.

And then going off into cut-and-paste punditry: "Oh my God, It's GREATER, It's MORE. What's the matter with kids today? This Googified generation, going to hell in a handbasket. Not like in my day, where even if we were 1000 miles away, that was better than 1000 miles plus one step".

That is, it's a very poor example, in my view, since it appeals to those-rotten-kids geezer grumbling, over a *comparative* triviality.

Seth, I hope you're right that it's a triviality, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it. And the broader issue that this is just one manifestation of doesn't strike me as trivial at all. Nick

Considering what *many* people think is typing--that weird annoying hunt-and-peck thing they do with a couple of fingers--really isn't typing at all, I wonder how much some students process even if they "type" out a paper. Perhaps if students were taught actual typing techniques, they might begin to process information in a manner similar to writing longhand. (I type roughly 75-85wpm, a high typing speed--and also process information fairly quickly. I would love to see if there is a correlation between fast typing and fast info processing.)

However, cut and paste isn't even a form of hunt-and-peck typing. Cut and past probably doesn't, as you note Nick, require much processing of information.

It would be interesting to do some studies on the correlation between how we process information and how we manifest it on paper or computer screen. Ah, but who'd fund the study?

At my son's school they start typing instructions at second grade. And it's mandatory - unlike when I *cough* was a kid *cough* *cough* and it was an elective in the High School.

"That's a good word, "longhand." You almost never hear it any more, though. It's fading away."

Don't know about that. John Thackara says that fountain pens are back in fashion again. He talks a lot about selective slowness, in his book, in the bubble. We are building our information systems based around the notion of speed. Here is a quote from Hitachi, speed is god, time is the devil. But we have no time to reflect on decision making anymore.

This could relate to the point in Jaron Lanier's essay, on Digital Maoism. That perhaps, since we are driving around at speed, covering huge miles in cars etc, and zipping thoughts and info around on blackberries and mobiles, no one gets a chance to reflect. This could account for some of the stupidity that Lanier sees in the hive 'intelligence'.

I work in project management, and I daily hear comments at work, that people managed to do something in a day, which took others six months or more, to do in the past! As if this kind of speed was a measurement of competence.

Therefore, a kind of selective slowness, built into the system is a positive aspect to the design. Lanier mentions, the brakes that institutional politics etc, applies to the system, which are important. But it is hard to do, to make people stop and think, when we live in this 'always on' kind of world, of mobile phone commercials showing 'successful' people doing business deals in real time, while on the move.

At some stage people will realise, the Emperor has no clothes. Most of the designers I work with, try to apply this copy n' paste approach. I always prefer what Mies van der Rohe, the architect taught his students at MIT. Learn to understand the building through the weight of the lines you draw on the paper with your pencil.

I try to build, this slowness into my system of design, and guess what, inevitably, it results in a better design, at the end. Which encounters less bumps in the road, because you have a model of what you are doing in your head, as well as in the computer. Similar arguments could be made against, books like 'The Power of Now', which seem to captivate business people around the world at the moment.

Another example, I like is Borg the tennis player who won Wimbledon five times. He wasn't a natural grass court player, and could barely hit the ball for the first few games at Wimbledon every year. By today's definition, Borg shouldn't even be allowed enter. But by careful practice, and allowing his body and rhythms to adjust to the surface, he kept on improving. That is how I approach every new design problem - I build slowness into my process, and let it happen.

Brian O' Hanlon.

yes, I also get frustrated with grocery clerks who cannot add in her heads and freeze when they make a mistake on their POS computer ...and Europeans look down at us for not being able to drive stick shifts. ...and my father in law used to lament modern sailors could not figure out dead reckoning without instruments, Far as I can tell books have always footnoted other precedent references...we build on the past and create new stuff and life gets better...

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