If you're willing to put in the effort of teaching them touch typing on a real keyboard (by blanking out the keycaps or whatnot), go ahead and teach them on Colemak or Dvorak or whatnot.
I don't care much for the arguments of the ubiquity of Qwerty for multiple reasons:
1. They will be exposed to Qwerty on devices where touch-typing is meaningless, such as smartphones and tablets.
2. They will learn Qwerty eventually anyway, and they'll be proficient in both. Why set them off on the worse of the two options from the start?
3. I'm sure schools and other parts of society are moving away from shared workstations onto personal laptops, where they get to control keyboard settings.
4. If I had to choose between being doomed to RSI or encountering keyboard incompatibilities every now and then, I would not pick RSI lightly.
Learning Colemak was painful for a while, but worth it many, many times over in retrospect.
1. They will be exposed to Qwerty on devices where touch-typing is meaningless, such as smartphones and tablets.
I'm not sure having a keyboard layout completely interalized is ever really meaningless. For example, I typed this entire reply on my phone without looking at the keyboard once, based solely on knowledge of the positions of the different keys in relation to one another. Furthermore, even if I had been looking at the keyboard, having memorized the locations of everything in some part of my mind would definitely make it faster to type than if I had no idea where anything was. Besides, if someone were most familiar with a non-Qwerty layout, why wouldn't they just set their phone to that?
Comments
If you're willing to put in the effort of teaching them touch typing on a real keyboard (by blanking out the keycaps or whatnot), go ahead and teach them on Colemak or Dvorak or whatnot.
I don't care much for the arguments of the ubiquity of Qwerty for multiple reasons:
1. They will be exposed to Qwerty on devices where touch-typing is meaningless, such as smartphones and tablets.
2. They will learn Qwerty eventually anyway, and they'll be proficient in both. Why set them off on the worse of the two options from the start?
3. I'm sure schools and other parts of society are moving away from shared workstations onto personal laptops, where they get to control keyboard settings.
4. If I had to choose between being doomed to RSI or encountering keyboard incompatibilities every now and then, I would not pick RSI lightly.
Learning Colemak was painful for a while, but worth it many, many times over in retrospect.
I'm not sure having a keyboard layout completely interalized is ever really meaningless. For example, I typed this entire reply on my phone without looking at the keyboard once, based solely on knowledge of the positions of the different keys in relation to one another. Furthermore, even if I had been looking at the keyboard, having memorized the locations of everything in some part of my mind would definitely make it faster to type than if I had no idea where anything was. Besides, if someone were most familiar with a non-Qwerty layout, why wouldn't they just set their phone to that?
Is the situation with QWERTY really that dire?