"Voice recognition software can help students bypass their problems with lower-order writing skills by dictating their written work"
- Assistive Technology: Empowering Students with Learning Disabilities by Karen E. Forgrave
People with bad handwriting get worse grades. That lesson was instilled in us in elementary school and I have no doubt that it carried true through college, unless you had a professor with equally bad handwriting.
I think with each generation their will be some new tool that is introduced to shortcut a longer process that was once deemed as an all important process. For me it is math and typing. I believe that people need to know how to type and students should be able to do calculations in their head without calculator. The generation before me believed that spelling was important and that handwriting was an indication of careful thought.
As speech-to-text software is introduced first to students with learning disabilities then spreading to the general population, there will be more voices against the need for typing or even word processing - given the frantic progress of text messaging.
Who knows what important mental practice will be lost in all these fast changing processes of communication, and also what might be gained.
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You raise great points about technology and what it allows us to 'bypass' in terms of skills that were once deemed critical for all of us to learn!!
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