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From: throopw@dg_rtp (Wayne Throop)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: Written Literacy
Message-ID: <1733@hplabsc.HP.COM>
Date: Tue, 5-May-87 20:20:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.1733
Posted: Tue May  5 20:20:08 1987
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Ray Chen writes:

> Written information has one advantage over any other type.
> The assimilation of the information can be controlled by the person 
> receiving the information.

Agreed, and a good point.

> That is why I prefer to write ideas down.  Paper is a cold, abstract 
> medium that forces me to nail any down loose ends instead of waving
> a rhetorical hand at them.

Again, agreed.  But the advantages are not all with written forms.
Static written forms have little or no feedback.  An interesting point
is that computers can add feedback to the learning process, for example,
by simulating newtonian laws in spacewar, or by translating morse code
to ascii text and displaying it, or by correcting simple math problems,
and so on and on.

In fact, I had never been able to learn morse code from books and such,
but given a few days with a single key and a computer translating morse
to ascii, and I had the thing pretty much down pat.  (Of course, my
skills have decayed again to practically nil, but the point remains.)

The point is that, until computers, the tradeoff was strict: written
forms had the advantage of control in the hands of the reader, and
spoken forms had the advantage of feedback.  Computer mediated forms
have some potential, largely unrealized as yet in any widespread way, to
combine some of the strengths of the two forms.

Wayne Throop