Writing in the 21st Century

Writing in the 21st Century

Alright, folks! This is the blog you've all been waiting for. We're going to be talking about the latest and greatest research on writing in the 21st century. Many argue, now that writing is done online and in print, we need to develop "new models of writing" and a "new curriculum" to support those models (Blake, 2019). Personally, I don't believe we need a whole new curriculum. But I do believe in the notion that we have to adapt our outdated 2006 language curriculum to meet the standards we have today... 2006 was fourteen years ago. When we look back briefly on the history of writing we see that in the 20th-century reading was the main focus for children, society was less focused on writing (Blake, 2019). This is because writing was seen as a way to give control to its users while reading was a way for children to read what adults had to say and obey them (Blake, 2019). If you look at it this way society has come a long way. You can even begin to wonder if this is why we have had such exponential growth in technology and evolution in the last couple of decades. Instead of focusing on purely writing and reading specific things adults tell you, we now focus on kids' creative writing... Or so we should. It makes sense why reading was such a heavy focus back in the day it was so adults could instill their values and obedience at a young age (Blake, 2019). In that type of society, there is no growth. This is something that goes beyond writing, you can see that the brightest ideas are coming from companies like Google. Google's main hiring process is to see how creative each candidate is. They put creativity as one of their most important qualities. Speaking of Google, in my opinion, there is something lacking from the curriculum that I believe should be an essential skill in both writing and math.

Proposition

Listen, I've done extensive theoretical and hands-on research into implementing technology into the classroom. All teachers have been focusing on so far is using technology as a teaching tool. Whereas we should be implementing technology into the curriculum by teaching how to use and do certain things. Computer programming/coding sounds very abstract to most people! That is because you never learn about it unless you make a very great effort to learn it yourself or take courses at university. Coding uses many skills from math and writing and can be implemented to solve problems in science, geography, and just about every other subject. However, if we focus on writing we can see that coding and writing are more similar than one would expect. In coding, you're writing paragraphs of carefully formatted words and numbers that all have meaning so that a computer can understand them (Atwood, Coding). While in everyday writing you're writing paragraphs of carefully chosen words so that a human can understand them. Coding involves proper grammar called syntax, spelling, structure, and so on and so forth. There are multiple languages you can code in, just like we have multiple languages as humans.

This correlation is best explained with an example:

names = ['raymond', 'rachel', 'matthew']
colors = ['red', 'green', 'blue', 'yellow']

n = min(len(names), len(colors))
print(n)

For a writing assignment, imagine having a student read this python code and convert/explain it in words. This is somewhat of a higher level code but any snippet of code can be explained.

Explanation:

In the first sentence, the word "names" is storing a list of names - raymond, rachel and matthew.

In the second sentence, the word "colors" is storing a list of colours - red, green, blue and yellow.

In the thirds sentence, the letter "n" is storing the result of the line of code it equals. To solve that we use the BEDMAS we learned in elementary school to determine the order of operations. We also must know that "min" means the minimum value of a set of numbers and "len" is the total amount of things in a list. So starting with the inner brackets (len(names), len(colors) we can determine that the length of "names" is 3 and the length of colors is "4".  Then that sentence would look like
n = min(3, 4). To solve that we just take the "minimum/smallest" value of those two numbers, so "n" would equal "3".

In the fourth sentence, the computer is simply going to "print" out for us the answer we found already "3". When I say print I mean it's just going to show us that the answer is 3.

Continued

Now that code was written in a language called Python. Despite how intimidating it looked at first glance, that is something a student should be able to complete by the latest Grade 7. As all they need is prior knowledge of the order of operations and some problem-solving skills. However, that type is coding is pretty ugly to kids and they're more interested in the beautiful coding games and activities many educators have created over the years. A great example is the website Tynker.

On Tynker coding is fun and you get realtime results. A big aspect of it is how visually stimulating it is. 

Writing and Social Media

I can't talk about everything on writing in this blog so I've decided I would focus on the technology side of things. Social media is an enormous aspect of students' and adults day to day lives. It incorporates everything from real-time news, politics, updates from friends, and many more aspects. The thing about social media is that it has doubled the amount that people write in a day! Through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, people are keeping society updated on their lives through... Writing! From what I've seen is that it cultivates precise writing through the word limit on the platform Twitter. This article I found on Yahoo also states its many other benefits!

Check them out:

- Grammar and spelling errors

- Writing too fast

- Using text language

- Lessons about sharing

- Encouraging creativity

- Expressing thoughts

(Social Media Effects, Yahoo!)

Citations

Atwood, Jeff. “Coding Horror.” Coding, https://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-its-just-writing/.

“Social Media Effects on Student Writing Can Be Positive.” Yahoo!, Yahoo!, https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/social-media-effects-student-writing-positive-003059758.html.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Writing in the 21st Century.” National Council of Teachers of English, NCTE, 2009, http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Press/Yancey_final.pdf.