Personally, I think that since the DVORAK keyboard layout is now (actually has long been) built into windoze we should be insisting that all students learn DVORAK instead of QWERTY. As in-the-know and responsible parents, we should be setting up computers for our children to use DVORAK and making sure that the schools make it available. Asking that keyboard manufacturers dual label all keys wouldn’t be too much too.

You might want to note that on the logon screen if you have more than one keyboard defined there is a little button on the bottom left corner of the screen to select the one input language and keyboard layouts you want to use. Also, there is a languages button that you can have displayed in the task bar (I just can’t find how to enable it at the moment).

Like most of you, I was quite young when I learned to type on QWERTY. What I didn’t know—did you?—is that QWERTY was designed to slow typists down so they wouldn’t jam the keys of early, primitive typewriters, over 100 years ago. It’s not just un-ergonomic; it’s ANTI-ergonomic!

I was a 65-word-per-minute QWERTY typist for 20 years. When I read about Dvorak, I switched, cold-turkey. I didn’t re-label my keycaps, or try to switch them around, or anything like that. (Remember, the whole idea of “touch” typing is not to look at your fingers.) Instead, I kept a small diagram of the Dvorak keyboard nearby, and consulted it only when necessary. (If any of you decide to switch, I highly recommend this method.)

In two weeks, I’d passed my previous typing speed. In two months, I was typing over 100 wpm.

The Dvorak layout is just a ton less work, too, because your fingers don’t have to travel nearly as far to reach the keys you use all the time. You’ll notice the comfort right away. You’ll realize how much unnecessary work you were doing.

I “auditioned” for a customer-support job a few weeks ago, and it included a typing test. Before starting, I opened the Windows Control Panel and switched to Dvorak. As I typed, my progress was monitored over the testing network. When I finished the test, I turned around—and three people from the office were standing in the doorway, trying to figure out how the heck I’d typed so fast. It was pretty funny. YOU can do this too!

So pay no attention to the skeptics. Switch to Dvorak, and never look back—except to laugh at the pokey 19th-century QWERTY typists you’re leaving in the dust!

There was an often quoted study done in the fifties where it was determined that it would be an inefficient tradeoff to train qwerty competent office workers in Dvorak, does this ring a bell? If so it was performed under fairly dubious circumstances. There’s a little bit of info about it on the Wikipedia page linked to above.