I recently bought a new tablet PC and had a revelation: ‘Writing is the new typing’!  Many of you are probably thinking that it I am not stating anything new – and I would be the first to agree with you.  I had previously dismissed handwriting recognition and had not thought it would play much of a role in our technological future.  Certainly early attempts at creating software that would work efficiently were a little hit and miss and many people were discouraged from sticking with them.  So it was with trepidation that I started ‘training’ my tablet to recognize my most hasty scribbles.  After writing a large number of random sentences on the screen while watching TV and making my way through a couple of mugs of coffee, my tablet and I came to an understanding.  I can now scrawl all over the screen and have my tablet recognize what I have written with ease. 

For years some of my best IT students have had the worst handwriting skills.  Over the last ten years, faculties across the entire school have gradually moved from accepting work in written form handed from the student directly to the teacher to accepting all manner of electronic forms delivered via many different electronic methods.  In our quest for innovation, have student writing skills been the main casualty?   

When I first began teaching (in 1991), amongst my teaching load were a Year 7 Typing class and a Year 8 Typing class.  Both were elective subjects, but they were well attended and considered important for a number of reasons.  The primary reason was related to secretarial skills and the central importance that typing has in this context.  The second reason was related to computer use.  Interestingly, both of these reasons were considered very separate pathways then but are now really one and the same. My typing classes soon evaporated with changes in the curriculum.  The standard of student’s keyboard skills were increasing exponentially as we began to be overcome to wave after wave of digital native.  It was no longer necessary to be able to type ‘correctly’ as long as you could do it quickly.   But is a new revolution coming?  Is there a not too distant future where the focus on handwriting starts to shift to the ways in which we interact with PCs?  Perhaps teachers will report on the legibility of student’s writing as determined by the handwriting recognition software of the day?  If your handwriting is poor, could it take longer to complete your work due to the number of corrections that need to be made?  Will writing speed replace typing speed?  Perhaps the next generation of computers will dispense with keyboards altogether? Predicting the technological future is a very tricky thing indeed – and this is merely food for thought.  Mind you, before the advent of the mouse / pointing device, who knew it would become such an integral part of the way user interfaces have been since then?