Learning To Read With Click and Jane 115
theodp writes "While earlier generations learned to Read with Dick and Jane, the NYT Magazine reports that today's tykes are getting their reading chops at online sites like Starfall (free) and One More Story (subscription). Quoting the Times Magazine: 'In their book "Freakonomics," Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books.' So how will kids who learn to read online fare when they grow up?"
They learn to read online? (Score:1, Insightful)
Aye tink day will bee find.
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Re:Kid that grow up with houses packed with books. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
Who modded this comment 'interesting'? more like troll...
Your comment is total BS. 2nd generation 'working class', we get by paycheck to paycheck, and that didn't keep us from acquiring a 4000+ volume library over the years - some from my own childhood.
It has entirely to do with interest in knowledge, not wealth. If you were raised with that, you'll wind up with books.
An interest in money doesn't correlate at all with knowledge - look around at the economy today. It took some finely focused stupidity to create this mess.
Books are NOT expensive. Compared to the plethora of other ways to waste 10-30 bucks, a book is an investment. A GOOD book is a gem.
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Your comment is total BS. 2nd generation 'working class', we get by paycheck to paycheck, and that didn't keep us from acquiring a 4000+ volume library over the years - some from my own childhood.
You appear to have fallen into the old pitfall of "taking statistics personally." You may have done an awesome job of exceeding the expected educational outcomes for your tax bracket, and you may even have found it pretty easy.
And it does nothing to change the fact that people with money generally have more books than people without.
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(or is it that people with books generally have more money than people without?)
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Libraries are great unless you are a child who has a parent that doesn't bother to transport you there.
Kids value what their parents value, religion, money, books, knowledge.
The current generation can actually benefit from the fact that some parents Don't care. Because when parents don't care, they let their kid do what they want. So when the kid finds something like starfall.com and is interested, the parent isn't there to stamp out their dream, and the learn to read and enjoy reading. Thus breaking the
Re:Kid that grow up with houses packed with books. (Score:4, Interesting)
...people with money generally have more books than people without.
Within the context established by previous posts (where 'people without money' == 'working class'), above quote is a bald-faced assertion and more than likely wrong.
From what I've seen of middle class life styles in America, most people in the USA who have significant disposable income have more space devoted to their collections of CDs, DVDs, and computer games than they do in bookshelves. And then there is the camper with the water ski boat on the trailer, the TV in every room, the gaming computer for each family member, and the multiple iPods. With all that to play with, there is not a whole lot of time left for reading, so of course a big home library is not that important to the lifestyle.
A single bookcase in the study does not a home library make. A working class home with boxes of used paperbacks stacked in the corners of the living room and the bedrooms, brought home from the Goodwill Store, is a more literate home.
There are an awful lot of people in the USA who are living close to the hand to mouth level who are more literate than most of the upper middle class. Books, especially used paperbacks, are cheaper and in many ways much more satisfying entertainment than the unaffordable toys of the middle class.
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Books are cheap, but the storage of the books is seen (by both (some)"wealthy" and (some)"poor") as expensive
However, "rich" parents with no interest in knowledge are more likely to indulge their offspring with an interest in books than "poor" parents with no interest in knowledge.
Hence, "rich" kids will tend to have more exposure to books than "poor" kids (excepting those cross-class boundaries of those interested in knowledge for its own sake)
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I'm not sure that is entirely accurate - books in general are not that expensive, but some (arguably necessary) books ARE somewhat expensive. As any professional or college student, or many precocious high school students, can attest.
It really all depends on many factors: areas of knowledge, level of education we're talking about, geographical location, and availability of used books sales.
Some of this is balanced out now by easy access to public libraries and to basic information online (in my opinion, the
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How do you make a small fortune? Start with a large one.
Re:Kid that grow up with houses packed with books. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
While I think it's true that the children of the wealthy are more likely to get a better education, I don't think that's the main force at work here.
Reading a book is a very different experience than reading something online. It requires a greater commitment/attention span, and the reward in return is a greater understanding of the subject (for non-fiction) or immersion in the story (for fiction). This is assuming the books are good, of course.
I suspect that children who "learn to read online" are going to have an even worse attention span than I do (and mine is pretty terrible). I also suspect that they will have a much more superficial understanding of the things they've read, and that their comprehension of spelling and grammar will be abysmal.
Re:Kid that grow up with houses packed with books. (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading a book is a very different experience than reading something online. It requires a greater commitment/attention span, and the reward in return is a greater understanding of the subject (for non-fiction) or immersion in the story (for fiction). This is assuming the books are good, of course.
I read books online at both the Baen free library http://www.baen.com/library/ [baen.com] and Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org]. Other than being able to click directly to the chapter I'm at, and to scroll instead of turn the page, I don't consider it a "very different" experience. Perhaps you meant that short-form reading -magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, cereal boxes- is a very different experience from long-form reading. And most web material tends toward essays, articles and short blurbs. There's nothing about the words being displayed as pixels rather than blobs of ink that makes for a different experience, at least for me. I understand that some people find it more difficult to focus on a screen for long periods compared to paper. But then again, some people find glossy laptop screens to be annoying as well.
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I agree. About 8 years ago I had an HP Jornada PDA, and I found a library of some thousands of books, classics and sci-fi that had been ripped and scanned into either txt or .lit formats that I could load on the PDA and read. Didn't bother me in the slightest. I read probably 100 books that way. Click for the next page, always have my book in my pocket, I can read at night (backlight) or during the daytime...it was a good experience.
I wish they had better ebook offerings for the iPhone, as mine is alway
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I wish they had better ebook offerings for the iPhone, as mine is always with me. It would be great if you could buy the Kindle versions of books and load them on the iPhone.
I use Bookshelf [iphonebookshelf.com]. I've used its predecessor on the 1.x iPhone before the app store and found it to be quite nice for loading up txt and html. I'll even download PDFs and convert them for text for offline reading. Funny they metioned Freakonomics, because I read that on my iPhone too.
Re:Kid that grow up with houses packed with books. (Score:5, Funny)
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At least i don't have to turn some stupid ass page.
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I hear you. There's nothing like a book. However, I'm also a fan of electronic text. Some reasons are...
I can pack a couple books in a easy-to-carry form factor. Even a single "pocket book" softcover is larger than my trusty 'ole PDA. And when I'm almost done with the book I'm reading, no problem, I have the other one (or several) loaded and ready to go.
I don't need a nightlight to read my book in bed. No problems with bad lighting. The PDA's backlight keeps everything nice and easy to see (if it doe
Not enough data (Score:4, Interesting)
That may be true, but it's not enough to tell which is the cause and which is effect. It could be that money is needed to buy books, and maybe poor people would have other priorities.
An alternative explanation would be that intelligent people read more, and intelligent people are more likely to be wealthy, because few people like being poor and if one's intelligent enough one will find ways to avoid poverty.
It could be that having books is a consequence of being wealthy, or being wealthy is a consequence of having books, or they are both consequences of another factor.
And what if having kids that do well in school is a cause, not a consequence, of having books at home? Because if kids do well at school they will have an incentive to read more, and will ask their parents to buy more books?
Re:Not enough data (Score:4, Insightful)
More likely the opposite- if the parents own a lot of books, they likely care about their literacy and learning. That influences their children's opinions of both. And if they find learning important, they're more likely to help tech their kids and to take an active interest in their schooling. So its not likely the presence of book, but a root cause behind both of them.
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This is pretty much exactly the conclusion given in Freakonomics.
Re:Not enough data (Score:5, Interesting)
Grew up dirt poor. Like... half a step above "christmas is for other kids" kind of poor.
That said... My mother recognized my desire to read and learn at an early age... so when I asked if we could get an encyclopedia set.... She found a way. A few weeks later, a local grocery store started selling a new volume of the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia... one at a time, every two weeks I think it was. We weren't able to afford a new volume every time one came out, so we skipped around a bit... but when the set was done, and the store went back to the As... we got the ones we were missing.
And boy did I think that was cool. The minute we bought a new volume, I'd obsess over it. The words and concepts I didn't understand I'd ask about. I got my first dictionary and my first thesaurus that way at a yard sale... Thinking back, it was very cool what my mom did... There were a lot of things that she didn't know, but she always found a way to help answer my questions.... and more importantly - she'd learn with me so that she could better understand the things I'd want to learn and be able to help me more in the future.... and we'd read and discuss what we read...
Got my first library card (shortly after we completed the encyclopedia set) from the hospital library (I was kind of sick growing up, but I digress..)... and when I wanted to know more about something from the encyclopedias.... the librarian and my mom would help me out. I started spending a great deal of time there, and eventually exhausted their very small collection of books. So I discovered the public library system, and intra-library loans... and then inter-library loans. I got my second library card when I was nine because my mom couldn't afford the gas to take me to the library more than once a week, and my library card was only good for a dozen books I think.
I started building my personal library when I was fourteen and got my first summer job. My family wasn't rich at that point, either, and neither was I.... but used books from the library are cheap, and I discovered used book stores. An friend of mine used to drive me up to Half-Price Books, which I thought was the coolest place ever.
Anyway... the point of all this being that I have several college degrees, my own business, and I'm a partner in three other businesses. I went from being so broke that Kool-Aid was a treat.... to being 20 years old, too young to drink, and making more in a month than most people make in a year. When the economy changed, and I wasn't able to travel for personal reasons.... I re-tooled my business, adapted, and came out pretty damn well. I can't speak for others, but I can tell you that the secret to my success was the never-say-die attitude, the intuition, the hunger for understanding, and the resourcefulness that I learned from books and the mother who always found a way to entertain my curiosity.
Without books, and without the kind of parenting and tutelage I had... I can say for a fact that I wouldn't be the person I am.
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In the book Freakonomics, this is one of their conclusions. The fully admit that the 2 datums are correlated, but books do not necessarily make the children smarter. It more likely genetic predisposition. Smarter parents are more likely to have more books. They then pass their genetic disposition for intelligence to the child. Or it could be they care more, thus try harder.
Very interesting book. I highly enjoyed it. Especially the section on parent intervention into a child's education.
Re:Kid that grow up with houses packed with books. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
I'd say that a family that has a lot of books in their house probably gives a shit about learning things whether they're wealthy or not. When I was a kid, we were frequently at or below the poverty line in terms of family income, and my parents had never been wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but we had thousands of books in the house--far more than any of my friends with wealthy parents.
I'm sure there's a correlation between wealth and academic performance, but it's probably two effects from the same cause in most cases: the parents have a habit of learning things, and that makes them more likely to have better jobs and children that care about learning.
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I do not think that number of books in the house is related to disposable income.
Large numbers of people with significant disposable income spend it on ski lift tickets, fancy automobiles, DVDs, iPods, and other non-literary goodies. Large numbers of people who have little disposable income find their entertainment at the used book section of the local Goodwill store and at the local library. Turning the kids loose in the children's section of a library or used book store has always been, and still is, a
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"if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy"
I realize that you have a possible disclaimer in using using the word "probably" but I don't think it's accurate. I doubt my story is all that unique. I grew up very poor but we always had quite a number of books around. So I started on those and then when we moved near a library I spent most of my free time either at this new treasure trove or at home reading the piles of books that I checked out. It wasn't long before
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Aye tink day will bee find.
close enough
It's true. (Score:3, Funny)
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Me too! I learned such things as:
internet speak? (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL WTF OMG
This will be how kids speak if they learn to read only with the internet.
then again, some people already do.
Re:internet speak? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget that it's a big internet. If we're lucky the kids will find their way to Project Gutenberg.
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I can scarcely believe the preceding two comments were by a registered user and an AC respectively, rather than the other way 'round.
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I learned to type in school. Typing class with Underwood manual typewriters, where I was the only boy in the class. However, I never really learned to type the numbers very well. I could (and still can) out-type most secretaries, but numbers were something that I was never good at.
Until I got my Commodore 64.
Then I started typing in programs out of Compute! magazine, with their MLX program, and learned to type the numbers. To this day, I never use the number pad on the side of a keyboard. I always use
Dick & Jane (Score:4, Funny)
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I learned a lot of things by watching videos on Dick & Jane's paysite.
Run Spot!, Run! is a bit disturbing.
Yo Editors. (Score:3, Informative)
Good job on the link.
"One More Story" != http://news.slashdot.org/&%238221;http://www.onemorestory.com/tour/ontour.html&%238221 [slashdot.org];
I'll remain illiterate (Score:2)
YUCK!!!
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I'd say this whole article is made of FAIL.
Bad links. Bad sites. IM SP33K. And if you search for "Dick and Jane"..
Not cool.
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Quick question, have you actually visited the starfall site???
I'm afraid to say that it looks like a dogs dinner to me. Chances are it probably works as well as it looks.
Like most stuff that sticks to the "html than thou" attitude it comes across as a rotten 90s throwback. Definitely unfit for consumption.
If you actually ever have anything to do with educational software in any way shape or form (as I do) then you might find out that this is just another example of why Flash is king, like it or not.
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My kids love Starfall. They read with me, they read by themselves, they read everywhere, but they also love to go to Starfall and play with it. The younger one (4 years old) gets reinforcement (whe knows them all now) with letter and sounds (that's level 1 on the screen) and is playing with level 2. The older one (6 years old) has pretty much outgrown it, but it was good in helping her.
The fact that it's flash means that it's interactive. The fact that it looks like a dog's breakfast means that kids are
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Point taken matey.
I wasn't having a go at the fact that the sites design was childish - it just looked very dated and i couldn't see any evidence they used recent web technologies.
The link you included indicates that actually they use flash in their activities so my initial judgment was off.
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completely off topic (or is it*)
love the sig.
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*The on-topic bit: knowledge of how things should stay put or move can be garnered by experience or reading about other people's experiences.
Or, put more simply - "learn more by doing, or by reading (whichever is quicker)"
I hate this tag, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The kind of parents who own a lot of books are generally of above-average intelligence, and hence produce offspring that are as well.
2. The kind of parents who own a lot of books are likely to either read books to their children, encourage their children to read themselves.
The medium through with the information is conveyed likely matters very little, if at all, and so long as the children receive adequate instruction on how to access materials to read, and encouragement to actually do so, they will fare just fine.
Re:I hate this tag, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Your points 1 & 2 are precisely the same conclusion drawn by Dubner and Levitt in Freakonomics. They make it in reference to a program the city of Chicago enacted to send books to kids in hopes that they would get smarter by osmosis or something. You'd think by the off-handed way the Freakonomics reference was made that the submitter would've recognized that. I guess reading the allusory material is about as highly regarded as reading the original article around here...
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Your points 1 & 2 are precisely the same conclusion drawn by Dubner and Levitt in Freakonomics. They make it in reference to a program the city of Chicago enacted to send books to kids in hopes that they would get smarter by osmosis or something.
And yet sometimes it might just work - my wife is still astounded by her own mother looking at our bookshelves and commenting "have you read all them?"
Clearly, she became a voracious reader in spite of, rather than because of, points 1, 2 & your comment above
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Agreed, though I'd add:
3. Kids emulate their parents, so if the parents read a lot, the kids will tend too, as well.
My kids are 4 and 6, and I pretty much let them do whatever they want media-wise (no X rated, but otherwise, fine.) They mostly make choices we parents approve of.
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I grew up in a house full of books. I will say my parents were above average, but not by that much. My dad worked in a mill, my mom was a housewife. They had high school educations.
At some point dad's younger co-workers asked what he did to encourage his kids to read -- "When they picked up a book, I didn't bat it out of their hands." That's fairly accurate. Dad and mom were pretty normal TV-watching suburbanites, but they also liked to read. Newspapers, novels, sci-fi, magazines, history -- it wasn't somet
Freakonomics (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the books that cause the kids to do better. It's the fact that type types of parents who stock their houses with books are those who will produce better children. In other words, the books don't cause the good output, they simply reflect the environment that causes the good output. Thus whether one learns to read via books or computers isn't important; it's mainly what the parents do.
Even shorter attention spans ... (Score:3, Interesting)
For one, even shorter attention spans than today ...
Second, they'll want to see a [citation needed], and if it's not on the net, they'll refuse to believe it exists.
Third, since they won't be "into dead tree newspapers", expect to see a rise in the number of people who bring their laptops into the john with them ... and also expect to hear more of "the sound of one hand clapping" ...
Fourth, most "science projects" will degenerate into "does it blend"?
Fifth, teachers will have to accept "a virus ate my homework" since they'll be saying "a virus ate your final mark" much of the time.
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2. This is actually a good thing, it may teach them to be critical of the world. There is plenty of bias, and tons of new age junk science out there.
3. Dead trees? That's what they are. While they still have value, online news sources have reader comments, better retractions, and the ability to research the topic immediately.
4. Science projects have already devolved into this. At least when I did mine, our class was not allo
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Of course on the positive side, kids will become incredibly skilled at making animated powerpoint presentations with dancing chipmunks and disco soundtracks, to cover up their ignorance.
They should make ceo in no time with skills like that!
Re:Citations needed? (Score:2)
That phrase bothers me.
I know there's a lot of flotsam in the threads, but "citation needed" comes out really arrogant because either he's right and Mr. Citation won't admit it, or he's wrong and Mr. C. won't bother to post the counter example. It's "I'm not even going to bother to read your post at all" - the internet version of "Talk to the Hand".
Your average poster with solid karma is likely to be at least half right, but botching a detail. Anwswer the thread instead.
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I tend to use it strictly literally. That is:
You might have a good point, but I have sufficient doubt that I won't take it on faith without numbers to back it up. Either I'm too lazy, or I can't find that information. Either provide sufficient evidence to convince me, or we'll have to agree to disagree.
I think "citation needed" is a lot more succinct than all of that, and I think it's useful to know which of our ideas are based in actual fact, and which are merely speculation we've repeated until we believe
Incredibly well (Score:5, Insightful)
Children who grow up with the web should read incredibly well. The web is a massive library and without being able to read you won't be able to do much in internet and computer land. It solves a huge problem for parents and that problem is getting children interested in reading in the first place.
That said, a child growing up on the internet will be exposed to improper punctuation and grammar more frequently than a child growing up reading proofread and edited printed materials. That is probably a good thing. Those children will be less pedantic, and have less difficulty discerning intent and meaning from written text.
This is no different than the gamer generation versus their parents. The problem was not merely that the parents had difficulty with electronic interfaces, the problem was they had difficulty adapting to varied interfaces. The gamer generation can hope between operating systems, not to mention individual applications for the same purpose without too much difficulty. Their parents could learn and master an OS or application but when confronted with something different had/have a great deal of difficulty.
Why? Because every console video game has a unique and non-standard interface. Instead of learning the interfaces themselves, gamers learn the common elements that need to be and should be present in all video game interfaces. When they pick up a new game they don't stare at the foreign interface confused they start by figuring out how to navigate and then immediately proceed to look for the elements they know should be there and take note of extras found along the way.
That difference in how a new (insert almost anything here) is viewed while minor gives amazing flexibility when presented with tasks and arguably is the difference between genius and ignorance.
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Oh! Look! A t
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I'm not worried. Video isn't a bad or evil thing. Video doesn't rot brains. And good luck getting to interesting video content on the web without being able to read.
Load google, okay maybe you know the big blue e and google is the default page or you have firefox with a handy lil bar in the corner. Next.... ooops can't google without knowing how to read and write.
Well what about youtube? You'll need to know how to spell youtube to start with. Then you'll need to be able to read the categories and understand
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That's very insightful. Thanks for the thoughtful post.
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a child growing up on the internet will be exposed to improper punctuation and grammar more frequently than a child growing up reading proofread and edited printed materials. That is probably a good thing.
You think? I h8 txt spk*
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*gt of mI lwn
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I'm not so sure.
While I have little doubt that children growing on the web will be able to read very well in the most literal sense, I'm not so sure they will be 'literate' as we know that term.
The web provides invaluable access to information - it is accessible, global, searchable and 'to the point'. It may encourage a type of learning that is less narrative than we've historically used, and more... staccato, for lack of a better term. You can jump from fact to fact without necessarily going through a lot
Please re-read 'Freakonomics' (Score:5, Insightful)
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By the way, here's the link: http://rapidshare.com/files/86824084/freakonomics.pdf [rapidshare.com]
Now YOU can read it to see if the article is right.
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Clearly his parents didn't stock the house with enough books.
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or the article author is another victim of a slashdot editor mangling a submission to increase the controversy quotient.
Corelation etc etc (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, that's a strange way to put it. Yes that statement is probably true, but it doesn't necessarily follow that if you pack any kid's house with books they would do better at school tests. I think it's more likely that parents who tend to read a lot, and therefore happen to have a lot of books in their house, also tend to place higher value on learning and knowledge in general and then pass on that inclination to their kids. It would be more useful to say that kids whose parents read a lot tend to do better on school tests than those whose parents read less.
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When I was growing up we had a saying: We buy him books and we buy him more books and all he does is eat the covers.
No Problem (Score:2)
7h3y \/\/1ll B 1337 r33d3rz b4 7h0z3 BuX l4/\/\3rz!!!
ur so ossum! lol! bff! ;-) txt me 2C wassup!
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Ah, you show your age! The kids these days all use this: XD. Look in any youtube comment section.
...although I do consider it a bastardization of the insane genius that was lolspeak.
It could be interesting.. (Score:3, Funny)
online literacy (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:computer skills (Score:2)
I'll go further.
It's a dead heat between ReadWrite, Math, and CompSci. A perfect tripod.
We wail and moan the lack of computer skills, and if you don't learn early how the computerized age mindset works at a gut level, it's basically like a lost language. Unless they wake up and study like demons later say in college, such as my exact generational strata, the minute they graduate without comp skills they get hosed applying for a job.
Or, check out www.childrenslibrary.org (Score:5, Informative)
Or, a really good source of free children's books is the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org). It has thousands of free (current and public domain) books from around the world, many of them available in multiple languages.
The new Roland Piquepaille? (Score:3, Funny)
They'll probably post half baked, inaccurate stories with misleading summaries to forum based websites.
Don't know about reading ... (Score:1)
Fortunately for me and my (lack of) game playing skills, he lear
in my school district (Score:5, Interesting)
Same as they did reading books (Score:1)
To those who moan about "they'll all learn chat-speak", I would say it depends on what a child reads online. Some sites have more value in them then others, and a good parent should try to direct their child's interest towards the more valuable ones. However, when you think about it, doesn't the same thing
I'm sold ... (Score:5, Informative)
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I can relate to this. My boy is around the same age and is just starting to learn to use the computer and interact with learning games. Using the computer with him on good quality educational sites is great fun but it is only a part of the bonding and learning we do. He already has around a hundred books and bedtime wouldn't be complete without reading a selection. He also loves playing with the games on my phone and even with simple things like Arkanoid on the DS - again he can't actually play them which c
Bad idea (Score:3, Funny)
Probably better, it will be their adult world (Score:1)
A generation of equally asses (Score:2)
A generation taught to read online will be very rarely exposed to the kind of polished prose that can teach you both style and clear thinking. Almost any book ever published has been first rewritten by its author once or a dozen times and then vetted by an editor for spelling, grammar, style, structure and contents. Just about everything on the net is first draft - this present post included.
So it is not just the atrocious apostrophes, the equally asses, the complementary compliments and their brethren that
More than just reading skills..... (Score:1)
Submitter didn't read Freakonomics (Score:2)
I thought the entire point of that section of Freakonomics was not that kids with lots of books scored well on tests (which was proven wrong when governments stepped in and offered free books) - but that
1) Kids who do well on tests are usually smart kids.
2) Kids are smart usually because their parents are smart.
3) Smart parents generally have more books in their home anyway.
The entire point of the article was that correlation doesn't imply causation. What this means is that even if kids learn to read from