Response to Technology Article

"People will stop confusing real paper with virtual paper. " I think we are at this point. So much is professional correspondance is done elctronically now, it is almost a hassle to use snail mail. I wouldn't be surprised if the postal service became the next dinosaur.

"Grading will become more dependent on the kinds of data available from style checkers. " I disagree about this. We used something like this at our school called MY Access that would grade papers electronically. It did a pretty bad job, giving much higher grades than the papers deserved. I think human eyes are still a necessity to grade writing roperly.

More education will take place in the home through instructional databases and telecommunications networks.

"Writing labs will become like studio art courses, in which instructors can monitor and give immediate feedback on students’ developing texts—and have their advice almost as quickly incorporated into the emerging documents. " Maybe. If enough teachers have the skills to use these labs. It would not be a bad thing, in any case.

"Software that generates its own text will change the nature of writer-text-reader relationships. " Maybe. Not necessarliy a bad thing either. Some writing tasks are rather mundane and could proabaly be handled effectively by software.

"Spelling and style checkers will make it even harder to convince students to learn many of the basic skills. " Definitely here. But as long as there are tests, kids will learn the rules. And those that don't learn the rules, probably wouldn't have learned them anyway.

"Handwriting will degenerate for more students. In general, it will develop as one of the fine or applied arts. " People's handwriting in the past was often very nice because kids were punished severely for not writing neatly. Not convinced this is a problem.