The Importance of Handwriting

Two and a half millennia ago, Socrates complained that writing would harm students.

With a way to store ideas permanently and externally, they would no longer need to memorize.

Today a different debate is raging about the dangers of another technology—ChatGPT—and the prompting AI to write for us. Primary school pupils to Ph.D. holders gleefully use their new superpower with a greater-than-ever reliance on ChatGPT to take notes and write papers. Parents are concerned about the children's screen time while university professors complain of rampant distraction in classrooms, with students reading and messaging instead of listening to lectures.

From learning the shapes of letters to the quirks of spelling, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The arrangement of squiggles on a page feeds into visual memory: people might remember a word they wrote down in French class or a sketch of the bottom corner of the textbook.

One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be note-making. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.

Handwriting—which takes longer for nearly all university-level students—forces note-takers to synthesize ideas into their own words. This aids conceptual understanding at the moment of writing.

Many studies have confirmed handwriting’s benefits, and policymakers have taken note. Though America’s “Common Core” curriculum from 2010 does not require handwriting instruction past 1st grade, about 50% of states since then have mandated more teaching of it, thanks to campaigning by researchers and handwriting supporters. In Sweden, there is a push for more handwriting and the UK national curriculum already prescribes teaching the rudiments of cursive by the age of 7.

Kaligo ???? (for english speaking schools) is an AI Handwriting aid for Apple iPads complimenting and making learning handwriting easier, engaging, and encouraging for young ones.

Socrates may not have agreed with the benefits of handwriting, but his student Plato famously said,

“Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.”

The quest is does chatGPT

Tells us a narration?

shows us based on our prompts?

and,

How might we be able to Humanise AI in Teaching and Learning to be involved and better understand handwriting?