Dennis Baron talks about how the computer has changed literacy in his piece Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology. He mentions how politicians and educators have pushed for children to have access to computers and the web, believing exposure to such technology will improve their literacy. Baron also gets into his own dependence on new writing technology. There's a little anecdote in the piece that describes him struggling to write out a memo in a boring meeting. He describes feeling restricted by the act of handwriting. He realized he couldn't copy and paste, and he actually had to write out every letter-- not press a button. Writing by hand, something that he'd been doing since he was four was no longer good enough.
In this piece Baron states that writing itself is a technology, in fact the first technology. He compares a bunch of noteworthy people like Plato, Bill henderson and Henry David Thoreau who all in their time were against new technology. The pencil is a technology, something I never thought about. Baron confuses me when he argues that no one knows why writing was invented, I always assumed it was created to record speech. There's a theme of evolution in technology. Writing wasn't what it is now when it first began.The pencil was not invented for writing, the computer was first invented to calculate data and complete complex functions. After some time all these technologies became more accessible to the public and transformed the lives of people everywhere.
Baron explains how it's common for people to resists new technology before it becomes commonplace and necessary. He repeats throughout the piece that it is impossible to predict how the computer will further change our thinking, and what effect that will have in our literacy.
Questions for class: How do you believe technology will evolve?
What was writing invented for?
What new technology do you want to see?
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