As technology changes the way we communicate, the emphasis of the education system will change with it. The widespread deployment and acceptance of spell checkers and with declining standards for written communication combined with the universal need for computers in our working world will give rise to a new competition: the typing bee.

Students must type difficult and convoluted sentances without making any errors. In-line spell checking will allow errors to be corrected but will take valuable time and/or cost points. The first one will be sponsored by Microsoft.
-- ooys, Oct 07 2004

(sp: sentences)
-- Worldgineer, Oct 07 2004


This puts me in mind of the old time Thesis Raisings, where all the students in the community would gather together for a weekend of food, singing, and dancing, and at the end of the weekend one of the students would have a thesis completed by the cooperation of the community.
-- normzone, Oct 07 2004


Baked. Done at my school... when I wasn't homeschooled, that is.
-- ghillie, Oct 08 2004


Can you tell I'm a child of the spell checker age? Heh.

[jscottpete]: Speech / thought recognition is of course inevitable but we are many years from the place where typing will no longer be a needed skill:

1) There will be a long period where speech recognition is reliable and widely used but not universal.

2) Some things, like computer programing, require a precision that is hard to acheve in speech. Sure, once the computers are smart enough, they will formulate the low-level routines themselves and human programmers will concentrate on high-level programing - but that is a long way off.

3) Voice recognition is not practical in public spaces. Imagine a college computer lab or office cube farm with hundreds of SPEAKING users. Of course you could link it with a cone-of-silence type device (too lazy to search for HB solutions, I'm sure someone will chime up with a link). Also imagine trying to use your compact super-laptop on a bus - speaking to your computer would likely be more frowned on than loud cell-phone use today.

4) Of course, remember privacy - it's tough to overhear typing.

5) As children grow up immersed, typing will become faster and faster

I will be first in line for the mind- reading computer interface... well once it's past the FDA anyway. I'll also cheer on my future children as they QWERTY their way to academic fame!
-- ooys, Oct 08 2004


Ghillie, I'm interested in the degree of what your school did. I'd like to see competition between schools and on a national level, like what happens now with spelling bees.
-- ooys, Oct 11 2004



random, halfbakery