More and more articles, blogs and online thoughts on the
decrease of printed news are filling my computer screen, but the ones I have
read are all running on the same theme: don’t let print die out.

Many people seem to want the same thing, appreciate the need
for things to change with time, the need for the availability of online news
but just generally enjoy the act of relaxing with a cup of coffee (white mochas
in Starbucks can’t be beaten, especially in the upstairs lounge of the Briggate
branch in Leeds, where shoppers don’t seem to go ) and reading the news, paper
format.

It’s by no means efficient compared to new ways of keeping
up to date, but the news can be an enjoyable thing to keep up with, a way of
taking our minds off the work we have, which works best when reading from a
different medium than the computer screen where the rest of our work is going
on.

The matter of printed news isn’t the fact it’s much less
needed now, but more wanted for enjoyment, which of course isn’t great for
those hoping to make a profit from it.

This reminds me of a point I was discussing earlier after
seeing a TV ad for the Daily Star, selling for 20p: how does that make a
profit? Advertising fees, salaries of the entire workforce (ok, so here it
could be cut down by being run by one 15 year old boy while maintaining the
same content standards), but otherwise, unless most of the staff are
volunteering, how has the paper not died out yet?

Here’s hoping it could be one of the first to go, we may as
well save the ones worth it, even if expensive, they wouldn’t be enjoyable
otherwise would they? I’ll debate that in the morning when all this wine has worn off…*amazed at the lack of spelling mistakes*

With endless ways to communicate we are always sending
messages to each other, leaving them a handwritten note, text message or
writing on their Facebook wall. However, all of these non-verbal messages are
flawed with the inability to express emotion in the same way as speaking to
someone in person.

The progressive ‘text speak’ has made some contribution to
the ways we interpret messages. Adding smileys or abbreviations to messages can
help convey the emotion you are trying to communicate, but this is still
proving a relatively difficult process.

I was texting my friend earlier today about her night out to
a club that chose to play a song from High School Musical, why, I’ll never
know. Trying to joke that she’d mixed the night up with an under 18s club, I
wondered why I didn’t receive a reply for a while. It then occurred to me that
after over-use of the ‘lol’ phrase, this message without the use of it could
have been interpreted not as sarcastic but slightly offensive.

New communication has been developing for a couple of
decades now, so why do we still not know how to use it effectively, or at least
developed a way of understanding meanings behind hard to interpret messages?

Best reply and apologise for the misunderstanding, lol.

As I Twittered yesterday, the lack of current opportunities
has resulted in me taking a completely different route to what I imagined this
week, Primary school teaching.

I have just spent the morning in my old primary school,
assisting a year 3 class. It wasn’t the first time I’ve done teaching work, but
it was the first time since so much technology and interactive media was
available to schools.

I’m still not sure how I feel about it, some children with
learning difficulties were showing me how they were using computer games to
solve maths equations on a screen with numbers camouflaged in colour so the
maths didn’t even seem apparent, yet doing the same task on paper proved
impossible for them.

The same thing was apparent during an English-history
lesson, all eyes were to the front of the class while learning about Florence
Nightingale interactively, but once asked to carry out the same exercise on paper,
it seemed as if the information they had just so keenly learnt evaporated.  

Making the transition from one learning method to another is
obviously an issue, or is it just a case of how things have changed? The
children may have struggled with the methods I was taught at school, but then
again I struggled to grasp their preferred methods as quickly as they did.

I’m sure they’ll get through school fine as long as
technology continues developing its uses in education, or will it have the
opposite effect and get to the stage where even simple interaction must be
carried out through a computer?