No more books, no more handwriting

Of course books are going to go by the wayside, just as newspapers are doing. Anything "disposable"--and yes, our textbooks are disposable--is going to disappear. Trying to keep them updated is essentially impossible. As soon as they go to the printer they're outdated. I think that the trade-book market will stay alive--people like to hold pages in their hands, and keep them on the shelves like old friends. But few people get textbooks for fun and run through them over and over ....

Handwriting is going to disappear, also. Why learn to write when you can type so much faster? (If only Dvorak was standard on the keyboard. Instead it's a sign of computer geekism. It's sort of like being bilingual, for me.) I took handwriting classes when I was a child, even caligraphy, and yet my handwriting is nowhere near as meticulous as that of educated people 100 years ago. How will people give legal consent and agreement, if they can't even sign their name? Perhaps they'll learn only that, or we'll switch to the much-touted DNA, fingerprint, and retina-scans instead.

Words represent thoughts. It's my belief that having mental access to more words allows for more flexibility of thought, more intricate and intelligent thoughts. If IQ's are getting higher, there must be some compensation for the change in vocabulary level.

The generation in basic education now, born around 2000, may be a gap-generation. Neither fish nor fowl. Not accustomed to learning from online textbook sources, learning handwriting and grumpy about taking keyboarding classes, yet completely up-to-date on technology (that I fall behind on ... I'm too cheap yet to own a cell-phone). But brains are flexible and people learn a huge amount in their early 20's, too, so now's the time to switch over. Good place to do some research, checking out how children's brains change if they don't learn to write, but instead learn only to keyboard.