Several years after I graduated from high school, my alma mater sent me an alumni survey soliciting feedback from my high school experience. I went to a strong academic Catholic school in Southeast Texas (Kelly High School). One of the questions asked was what was the most important class that I had taken during my years there. I'm guessing they were looking for responses like third year French or New Testament.

My answer: typing! Hands down!

Now that typewriters have been replaced with computer keyboards, we don't call it "typing" anymore. We call it keyboarding. And many schools are loathe to teach even that.

Big mistake.

On yesterday's posting, I talked about a recent survey comparing users who text message with an iPhone versus a numeric keypad versus and old-fashioned QWERTY keypad.

For those of you who don't know what I mean by a QWERTY keyboard, it's that old fashioned layout of letters. It's three rows of letters (top row, starting left to right goes QWERTY. Thus, it's name.)

Here's why QWERTY is on the endangered species list.

- More people are relying more heavily on their handheld devices to communicate than their computer keyboard.

- The world's getting smaller everyday through the Internet and global marketplace. QWERTY was developed for the English language. For example, France uses the Matra Alice keyboard . Norwegian's use the Dvorak keyboard.

So is all of this a bad thing? Well, yes, I think so. People don't express themselves in writing by actually writing anymore. It's all word processing. But the increasingly preferred ways to process words don't actually process words. More often, words are abbreviated and mispelled. Sentences are shortened to phrases. Phrases are shortened to two or three words. And then there are emoticons and acronyms.

There's a word for all of this - illiteracy.