QWERTY- Call for Special Issue
Oct 16th, 2009 | By Luca | Category: NewsQWERTY-Journal of technology, culture, and education
Call for Special Issue
“Generation Y, Digital Learners and Other Dangerous Things”
In the last years a growing awareness about the importance of studies on usages of new Information
and Communication Technologies (ICT) has led to hypotheses about generational gaps in the use of
ICT and in related learning practices. Expressions like Generation Y, Nintendo Generation, New
Millennium Learners, Digital Learners, Millennials, Screen Generation, Homo Zappiens, and similar, have acquired great popularity and are widely used.
This special issue of QWERTY is fully devoted to explore this topic, analyzing the practices of young generations with ICT in education (eLearning), mapping and interpreting them as well as, if necessary, demystifying unverified assumptions and/or overgeneralized conclusions.
Submitted contributions can approach the topic from different viewpoints, ranging from psychology to sociology, from communication to media history etc.
Editors
Lorenzo Cantoni, Stefano Tardini
NewMinE Lab – New Media in Education Lab
Faculty of Communication Sciences
USI – Università della Svizzera italiana
6900 Lugano
Switzerland
{lorenzo.cantoni, stefano.tardini}@usi.ch
Important dates
* • SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MARCH 31st, 2010
* • NOTIFICATION TO AUTHORS: JUNE 1ST, 2010
* • SUBMISSION OF FINAL PAPERS: AUGUST 31ST, 2010
English
” When typewriters were first introduced, the keys were arranged in alphabetical order.
However this order meant that people typed too quickly such that the keys soon became entangled.
To counter this, the keys were displayed in random order and typing speeds accordingly slowed
down. In later years, despite the fact that the problem of speed had been completely overcome, the
keyboard retained its random order. ”
From the description of QWERTY in http://www.ckbg.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/qwerty-call-for-paper-2009.PDF .
Tsk, you digital natives who never used a mechanical typewriter!
.
There was nothing random in the elaboration of the QWERTY keyboard design, otherwise its authors wouldn’t have been able to sell it to Remington. And the idea was NOT to slow down typists, but to separate the typebars for letters that often come in a sequence in words lest they jam when people typed the sequence too fast, as would have happened if they were too close.
And the user’s viewpoint was also considered in keyboard layouts: see the AZERTY layout for languages where you have lots of accents.
Of course, this does not invalidate your following sentence:
” In our view, this [QWERTY] represents an excellent metaphor for the entanglement of culture and technological tools.”
But it hints at a less chaotic and arbitrary relation between them.