Termination of the teaching of the Continuous Cursive Handwriting in Schools

Handwriting is a skill that is a requirement for all individuals, however, there is a deep and decisive debate about whether or not the cursive handwriting is necessary in this era of technological innovations. While the necessity of compulsory cursive handwriting education is generally addressed by educators and politicians, there is no consensus on it, and the opinions of the people with interest or concern in education (e.g. teachers, students and parents) are not so often asked. For this reason, the aim of this study is to reveal the views of teachers, students and parents on the cursive handwriting education. 57 classroom teachers, 230 primary school fourth grade students and 14 parents participated in the study from four public primary schools in Ankara. Data were collected using ‘Personal Information Form’, ‘Cursive Handwriting Education Attitude Scale’, ‘Parent Questionnaire’ and ‘Student Questionnaire’. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics techniques and qualitative data were analyzed by content analysis. According to the findings of the study, teachers and parents are not satisfied with the use of cursive handwriting. While teachers indicated that they would prefer print letters instruction if they had given a chance to choose.  Parents affirmed that they could not give support to their children during their writing education. On the other hand, most of the students stated that they had difficulty in reading even their own handwritings, although most of them declared that they like to write with the cursive handwriting

A comparison of the speed and quality of manuscript and cursive handwriting at the college level.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--Boston Universit

Agendas for Digital Palaeography in an Archaeological Context: Egypt 1800 BC

Handwriting raises issues alive in archaeological debates, philosophical and historical. In turn, by their extreme fragmentariness, the earliest archaeological manuscripts could generate usefully different questions for the field of palaeography. Here, digitisation offers new common ground for the separate disciplines in the study of the past. For current archaeological discussions of structure and agency, manuscripts pose the act of writing, between social and individual. For debates over literacy and power in part- literate societies, an archaeological hoard of manuscript fragments offers opportunities to assess our chances of knowing, for one time and place, how many writings and writers. The largest earliest group of writing on papyrus-paper comprises several thousand small fragments from Lahun in Egypt (about 1850–1750 BC). Traditional methods of recording similarity and difference across the collection can now be accelerated to a point of qualitative change, by applying image-matching software. This paper considers the potential of computer-aided palaeography for generating new research agendas

The Impacts of a Revised Handwriting Curriculum on Independent Letter Formation and Motivation in a Montessori 3-6 Classroom

The purpose of this action research project was to observe the impacts of a revised handwriting curriculum on motivation for handwriting and independent letter formation in a Montessori 3-6 classroom. Participants in the four-week study included eight students aged 3.6 to 5.9 in a private Montessori school located in a small New England college town. The revised curriculum utilized Orton-Gillingham sequencing, plus new handwriting materials and opportunities. Data sources included a daily tally sheet to track handwriting work, daily writing samples, student interviews, and lesson plan/reflection sheets. Data showed that the average daily participation rate for all optional handwriting work was 80% and that age impacted work choice. Handwriting samples showed improvement in independent letter formation. Further research could study the impact of the new letter presentation sequence on the areas of reading and spelling; and explore the use of cursive handwriting materials with this age group

Premature thoughts on writing disorders

Three papers appeared in the 19th century describing the dissociation between speech and writing: Marce (1856), Ogle (1867) and Pitres (1884). An account of the convincing evidence of dissociations put forward in these papers is presented. Three explanations are proposed as to the reason why the observations reported by these authors were overlooked or rejected by their contemporaries, namely: (a) in the first half of the century it seems that very little knowledge of the processes underlying writing (as opposed to speech) was available, (b) the debates focussed on the independence of speech versus motor control and language versus the intellect, (c) parallelisms between phylogeny, ontogeny and aphasia impeded the application of the principle of double dissociations, including the dissociations between speech and writing. It is argued that this phenomenon in the history of aphasia is best captured by the concept of prematurity in scientific discovery proposed by Stent (1972, 2003)

Text Line Segmentation of Historical Documents: a Survey

There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines),automatic text line segmentation remains an open research field. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of existing methods, developed during the last decade, and dedicated to documents of historical interest.Comment: 25 pages, submitted version, To appear in International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, On line version available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2813176280456k3

Downs and Acrosses: Textual Markup on a Stroke Based Level

Textual encoding is one of the main focuses of Humanities Computing. However, existing encoding schemes and initiatives focus on 'text' from the character level upwards, and are of little use to scholars, such as papyrologists and palaeographers, who study the constituent strokes of individual characters. This paper discusses the development of a markup system used to annotate a corpus of images of Roman texts, resulting in an XML representation of each character on a stroke by stroke basis. The XML data generated allows further interrogation of the palaeographic data, increasing the knowledge available regarding the palaeography of the documentation produced by the Roman Army. Additionally, the corpus was used to train an Artificial Intelligence system to effectively 'read' in stroke data of unknown text and output possible, reliable, interpretations of that text: the next step in aiding historians in the reading of ancient texts. The development and implementation of the markup scheme is introduced, the results of our initial encoding effort are presented, and it is demonstrated that textual markup on a stroke level can extend the remit of marked-up digital texts in the humanities