There were a couple of interesting stories last week that I found to be related.
First was a report that said that as many as a third of university students at some Canadian schools are unable to pass an English language proficiency exam. The story suggested the blame is spread between insufficient attention to grammar in the schools, coupled with students migrating their texting and social networking shortcuts into papers.
The second story was documenting a finding by the Pew Research Centre that blogging by teens and young adults has declined over the past 3 years. As any of us with that demographic in the household knows, Facebook has become the medium of expression.
I’m not convinced by the researcher’s explanation:
Teens in the U.S. have been told that putting your personal information out there publicly is a very bad idea — that it’s not safe, that people will come and harm you and your reputation. And I think because Twitter is so often used in a public way, teens, given all those cautions, don’t see the utility of it.
I think this is wishful thinking; there is still way too much personal information being shared on too many sites. [As an aside, I am going to ‘un-follow’ people who insist on tweeting the fact they are at Harveys or the bank or wherever; I just don’t care! Mark Evans also questions the viability of Four Square]
Is the decline in blogging, together with a migration to ‘short update’ tools like Twitter or Facebook, related to the decline in language proficiency?
Loosely associated with these articles was a presentation that I attended yesterday by Robert Watson of Sasktel. Among the takeaway messages I learned that Sasktel is expecting an enormous turnover in employees over the next few years due to retirements. The company has been active in area high schools, helping to increase the future labour pool by stimulating more kids to study relevant fields for future employment with the telco. A few years ago, I wrote about the need for us to inspire an innovation generation and I also wrote optimistically about some programs I have seen that are stimulating the pool of candidates.
Now, we need to make sure that we also find kids who can express themselves without resorting to emoticons for punctuation.