I have to say that when I first introduced social media to my class, I was surprised by the poor quality of my students' writing. And then I was puzzled and then, I got it.
Students who could write a reasonable paragraph with paper and pencil were ignoring the conventions of language when writing digitally in social media. Punctuation and capitalization rules were ignored. Thoughts were often incoherent.
When I pointed out the poor quality of writing, the response from my entire class was, "but you don't have to, because it's like facebook".
This is a generation of children that writes daily - on paper for their teachers at school, but also at home on sites such as Facebook. Facebook is not the problem. Lack of instruction on how to write in digital media is the problem. They have taught themselves how to write in these mediums!
If the medium is the message, then the message is, "Use digital media to teach writing."
Students who could write a reasonable paragraph with paper and pencil were ignoring the conventions of language when writing digitally in social media. Punctuation and capitalization rules were ignored. Thoughts were often incoherent.
When I pointed out the poor quality of writing, the response from my entire class was, "but you don't have to, because it's like facebook".
This is a generation of children that writes daily - on paper for their teachers at school, but also at home on sites such as Facebook. Facebook is not the problem. Lack of instruction on how to write in digital media is the problem. They have taught themselves how to write in these mediums!
If the medium is the message, then the message is, "Use digital media to teach writing."
You are absolutely correct... If your blog is filled with spelling errors, are people going to take you seriously?? Just like traditional writing, there are different forms online. Text talk is fine if you are texting, and Twitter uses a different form (140 characters!). There's blogs and status lines... and spelling incorrectly or poor grammar CAN actually cause the message received to be different than how it was intended. I suppose a great lesson would be to find examples of this and have the students analyse them. (You can probably even find lists of these in a Google search!)
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