Keyboard versus Pen
Unlike a lot of colleagues, I don’t carry a pen or a pencil anymore. I only take my PDA to school everyday and it works for me… except that routine of signing the presence control. So you are right, in the last months all I have handwritten was my name and my student card number (and my ID number occasionally). I do all my writing on the computer and I take notes, manage my calendar and contacts on my PDA with its keyboard. And in a few months I will be using a RFID card that will allow me not to borrow a pen anymore. So why did I learn to handwrite?
There are computers for children at a very low cost and schools could even provide computers to students, like the EEE pc targeting kids and at a very low price with all they need, not like that dirty business we have in Portugal for students and teachers to have standard laptops for 150 euros.
But on the other hand, mobile devices such as PDAs, UMPCs and Tablet pcs already have handwriting support and are improving in order to make writing on it as easy as using a piece of paper, but without killing a tree for it.
So what do you thing? Kids in a near future will learn how to write in their keyboards and forget how to draw by hand that beautiful letters we have? Or it will be still taught, used for note-taking tasks on tablets and keyboards will be only used to long tasks?
Marco Campos