Most children start typing on cell phones and computers long before they take keyboarding classes, so many schools, noting this trend, have stopped teaching typing. "The kids already know how to type," the staff at my son's school told us at curriculum night, "so we have decided to use computer time on something else."

But how are kids typing? Most develop idiosyncratic, personalized hunt-and-peck methods. Many do not touch type, or type without looking at the keyboard by placing the fingers on the home keys (asdf jkl;). As one of my undergraduates at Oberlin College put it: "People from my generation grew up with a computer so they knew how to use one before entering junior high school. However, I think most of us never learned how to type. I see many young people typing pretty fast, but some of them only use two fingers and no home keys...if there's one "right way" to type...I don't think many of us know it."

There has been, since the late 19^th century, a "right way" to type. In 1889, there was a "duel" between two teachers who claimed to have devised the best methods. The winner, who used something called "home keys," typed a then-astonishing 126 words per minute. Afterwards, the inventor, Frank McGurrin, toured the country, performing his feat in front of large crowds. Over the next few decades, international typing races—a sort of So You Think You Can Type? trend—were the craze. Touch typing was eventually taught in high school.

Those classes are gone. Ironically, in our era of keyboard ubiquity, typing has fallen out of the curriculum.) Nor has anyone invented a rival to the home keys method (that we still cling to the QWERTY keyboard, despite the advantages of other layouts, is yet another puzzle). Since most students come to school familiar with keyboards, including cell phone keypads, educators are letting the ad hoc habits of six-year old computer gamers stand, although these same teachers spend hours laboriously showing their pupils how to hold a pencil and the correct way to write a cursive capital G—skills that the kids will likely rarely use once they get to high school, when typed assignments are the norm. (Not to mention how little handwriting will figure into their adult lives). As a K-3 technology teacher in a Philadelphia area public school explained to me, "I only see students at most for one 45-minute period per week, and it may be the only time the students have on a computer that week. With various other projects, there is no time for real keyboarding instruction and practice."

Does it matter how we type? Yes. Touch typing allows us to write without thinking about how we are writing, freeing us to focus on what we are writing, on our ideas. Touch typing is an example of cognitive automaticity, the ability to do things without conscious attention or awareness. Automaticity takes a burden off our working memory, allowing us more space for higher-order thinking. (Other forms of cognitive automaticity include driving a car, riding a bike and reading—you're not sounding out the letters as you scan this post, right?) When we type without looking at the keys, we are multi-tasking, our brains free to focus on ideas without having to waste mental resources trying to find the quotation mark key. We can write at the speed of thought.

Many of us, and particularly digital natives, have practiced elaborate hunt and peck methods enough for them to be automatic and allow us to look at the screen, not our fingers (it requires about 400 hours of practice to achieve the reflexes to become a skilled typist, another 600 to be expert. However, the home keys method is, as far as extant research goes, the fastest technique. And it is not going out on any limb to suggest being able to type fast without looking at the keyboard is a 21^st century basic skill.

But the letters keep shifting below our fingers. Keyboards morph, and smart phones and tablet computers render the home keys method almost impossible. Most iPad users hunt and peck: the technologies so many Americans are clamoring to adopt are far less effective for writing than previous devices. Strangely, we are adopting new devices at the cost of cognitive automaticity. On the iPad, tweeting, e-mailing and Facebooking takes more time, requires lots of looking down at the touch keypad. Hopefully someone out there is tinkering with a new typing system for the iPad, as Frank McGurrin did for the typewriter (although then we may have to practice it for 400 hours to master it).

There was a 15-year lag between the development of touch typing and when the neologism "touch typing" entered the English language. Perhaps we need another duel—a reality TV iPad typing show? —to spur new keyboarding innovations. Until then, even the littlest ones should be taught why the "f" and "j" keys have those funny bumps on them.

Anne Trubek, associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College, is the author of A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses.

Millennia hamming it up for the cameras. Credit: Ada Brunstein

On Saturday, July 16th in lower Manhattan the sprawling red carpet in the Three Legged Dog Art and Technology Center lit up with flashes from cameras snatching shots of the evening's stars.

But the most photographed woman of the evening wasn't a Hollywood starlet, it was Marilyn Monrobot, also known as Heather Knight, organizer of the first Robot Film Festival. And the stars weren't just of the human variety; some of them were battery-powered.

A pint-sized humanoid bot made by Aldebaran Robotics donned a flashing bow-tie as he shuffled down the red carpet.

Aldebaran's robot getting a hand on the red carpet. Credit:Ada Brunstein

Pleo, the robotic dinosaur first developed by Ugobe and later acquired by Innvo Labs Corporation, also made an appearance.

Pleo, the world's most modern dinosaur. Credit: Ada Brunstein

Most impressive was Millennia, an endearing huge-headed robot used for "techno-marketing" developed at International Robotics, whose clients include IBM, Reebok and General Motors, according to its website. This picturesque cast of characters gathered to celebrate the cinematic integration of man and machine.

The world through Millennia's eyes. Credit: Ada Brunstein

In putting together the film festival Knight, who is a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, was motivated by the power of narrative. "In Western Culture there is often a dirth of positive storytelling about robotics, but as a robotics researcher, I know that that undersells the innovations and exciting moves forward of our field. With this festival, we hoped not only to highlight the great work and machines that are already out there, but balance the depiction of mythologies around the creation of robotics," she said.

The evening was a visual and musical extravaganza which included comedic robot reggae by Reggie Watts, and a dance lesson in how to do the robot by street performer Josh Ventura. Donning a sparkling black gown, Knight handed out Botskers (Robot Oscars) to each of the 10 winners.

The films ranged in genres from fiction to documentary and from comedy to uncanny.

The Audience Award (determined by the number of tweeted votes) went to Operation daVinci, in which a surgical research robot at John's Hopkins University deftly removes body parts from the perennial patient in the children's game Operation.

The Machine by Rob Shaw was a surprising choice for Best Picture given that Knight generally wanted to avoid the clichéd images of world-dominating robots. But the film, which Knight said, "blew judges away in artistry and construction" is visually exquisite, so much so that I had to check the credits carefully to make sure Tim Burton wasn't one of the creators. In the dark animated film a man creates a humanoid robot that kills the men he meets and ravages the earth in a manner eerily reminiscent of human habits. Having destroyed everything in its path, the robot becomes bored and, in a haunting ending, creates a man.

The Ethics and Impact award went to Chorebot by Greg Omelchuck who created a world in which a dog becomes robot's best friend because man has become too machine-like.

Other categories include Most Uncanny, Best Story, and Scientifically Hard Core. According to the film festival website, criteria for selecting films from among the 74 submissions included relevance to robotics, storytelling, depiction of interaction between robots and people, and inspiration of future technologies. Winners received a 3D printed statuette depicting an energy efficient light bulb.

All categories and winning films can be found here.

Credit: Technology Review

In just a couple of weeks, Google's new social network, Google+, has drawn an estimated 20 million users. For some, it offers the chance to "do a reset" on Facebook by starting over without the legions of unwanted friends they've acquired on Facebook. For others, joining means adding yet another major social site to monitor—besides Facebook and Twitter.

A browser add-on for Google Chrome, and soon for Firefox, offers a way to combine Google+, Facebook, and Twitter posts into users' Google+ stream of status updates. Start Google+, created by programmer Zane Claes (who currently lives in the south of France), uses Facebook and Twitter APIs to let Google+ users incorporate updates from those networks, and to post back to those networks via Google+ as well. Start Google+ also adds a few as-yet missing features to Google+, such as a box in the upper right of the Google+ interface that tell you when you have a new Gmail message.

Installing the add-on takes only a few seconds. A user then only has to click the Facebook and Twitter icons it adds atop Google+ to login using those services. Once you've done that, Facebook and Twitter posts appear on your Google+ Stream page, marked by a Facebook or Twitter icon to differentiate them from Google+ posts. Each item includes a link to reply or retweet on Twitter, or to comment on Facebook (there's no Facebook Like button yet.)

There's just one downside to the current version of Start G+: It incorporates your unfiltered main feeds from Twitter and Facebook; you can't invoke Facebook's Top News filter, or select specific Twitter lists of users that you've created. So you may find your Google+ page overrun by the very people you'd come to Google+ hoping to escape. Claes says that he is working on filtering options next to address this.

So far, more than 100,000 Google+ users have installed the add-on, of whom Claes says 60 percent are actively using it. The add-on hasn't been blocked by Google, Facebook, or Twitter yet. Although Facebook and Twitter declined to respond to requests for comment, both companies already allow third-party apps to incorporate status updates into their feeds. (Twitter declined to comment on whether the company will add Google+ support to its popular Tweetdeck app, which would connect its large existing user base to Google+.)

It seems unlikely that Google+ will completely supplant Facebook or Twitter as the social network of choice, any more than Twitter and Facebook have undermined each other's popularity. Instead, these big three social networks may need to play nice with each other in order to maintain their audience reach, and more mashups like Start Google+ will make it less of an aggravation.

But until Claes gives me a way to filter my Facebook and Twitter feeds inside Google+, looking at them reminds me why I long ago stopped reading those streams. So many people with so little to say, but they're saying it anyway.