The Unimportance of Being a Paper-Based Writer
Education Reform, FE, In The News Friday, September 21st, 2007
We at EducationState have started the new academic year with all the enthusiasm of the last but still face one wrongly-held belief after another.
Take Literacy. Why can’t the powers that be understand that in today’s economy higher-level paper-based skills are not as crucial in the world of work as keyboard-based ones? Clearly, a well-structured essay on the importance of feminism to Jane Austen is not going to have as immediate an effect on a individual’s job prospects as learning how to organise an e-mail. Indeed, it could be argued that aside from note-taking and written exams, there is no call for paper-based writing skills in academia and even less so in the world of work. Many more learners would benefit from keyboard skills, both in terms of producing assignments and more significantly, in terms of finding work. Why then do we persist with a focus on writing in the old sense of the term?