This is not a new idea.

At many schools in Minnesota, when school children are learning to type the teachers will place a three sided box over the keyboard so the children can't see the keys. They do this through middle school. This is how I learned to type and I think it is one of the best ways! I almost never look at the keys and depend fairly heavily upon the bumps indicating the home row.

We all learned to "touch type" (later referred to as "keyboarding") in middle school and high school. Most of us got up to 50 words per minute. This certainly is not a new idea!

Typing without looking at the keys is called TOUCH TYPING. A cursory google has it being developed in the late 19th century.

Geez. I had no idea that touch typing was NOT the way people learned how to use a keyboard.

Jiminy, I feel old and cranky now.

OK, I think I'm feeling cranky this morning, but if you look at your keyboard while you type, then you are not a "pretty good typist."

I took typing class freshman year at my public high school in 1986. We still had manual typewriters. Hell no we could not look at the keys. This post makes me feel old and I am only 40. @lorelski I hear you!

I can't remember the last time I looked at my keyboard...

On someone else's, thought, I might need a little visual help because I've mapped my keyboard for my needs. I use a French-Canadian layout on a Mac, but I remapped a couple of keys since I don't like how the Mac French-Canadian layout places some of the accents.

The rare time someone uses my keyboard, I get the inevitable, "Uh, what's written on your keys doesn't match what the key does!"

And, yes, I also know where other keys like delete, fn, esc, volume, etc. are without having to look. I type for a living, so I get lots of practice!

And count me in with those who are feeling old about having learned to touch type. I learned in the early '90s on a manual typewriter. I even learned how to use a ruler to determine margins and placement of text!

When I read the headline, I thought great, another weirdly out-of-touch article... Obviously touch typing is faster. However, it turns out a lot of schools aren't teaching typing anymore because they figure most kids already know how to do it. What they know how to do though is hunt and peck. You have to type that way on phones and iPads.

Here's an interesting article from MIT: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425018/out-of-touch-with-typing/

My mind was blown when I discovered that my thesis advisor used the "Hunt and Peck" typing method. HOW DID HE WRITE PAPERS LIKE THAT?!

I understand that you can 'touch-type', or use the 'home row' without hunting and pecking but needing to glance at the keys every now and again... but yeah, I thought everyone learned to touch-type. We had to do ten minutes of 'All the Right Type', a learn-to-type program, at the beginning of every computer class starting probably in grade two, though it was really the advent of chat in middle school that got my typing properly.

I learned touch type in high school. Didn't everyone?

PS - I'm only 33.

Same as everyone, this is how I was taught to type back in High School, I'm 31 years old now. I don't know how anybody can be taken seriously as any kind of professional if they can't type without looking at the keys. You would have people laugh their pants off if you worked in an office environment and had to watch your keys.

Same here, I was taught touch typing in high school (I'm 32). I'm always surprised when I see people who work with computers but never learned. I was the only one in my grad program who knew how to touch type as well. This is something we should be teaching in elementary schools, if we aren't already.

I'm 25 and only used the touch type method twice in middle school. I hated that stupid box! I did however, enjoy sessions at home using Mavis Beacon.

I learned touch typing in elementary school (26)...

"The key response was . . . responsive."

Once again, I find myself begging you to hire a copy editor.

I learned touch typing (in the 1960's!!!), but never got amazingly good at it, so, I admit it, I look. Maybe I could learn to NOT look, but what I do works just fine for what I need to type.

Isn't there some famous author -- maybe James Patterson or sometbody like that -- who types all his MANY books with two fingers?

Touch typing is by far the ideal system to learn, but whatever works, works.

SXSW really??? sad, i thought everyone had some form of typing class ....
must be a hipster thing.......................

I learned to touch type in 9th grade (I'm 28) and I can type without looking for most things. I usually need to look at the odder punctuation (like [ or \) and sometimes the numbers towards the middle but for the most part I don't look. This comes in handy when traveling to non-English speaking places because I can reset the keyboard to "American English" and then type normally instead of having to constantly hit the wrong key. Even relatively similar languages like Spanish or German have a very different keyboard sometimes so it's definitely useful. I think the touch-typing skill is more rare than it should be among people my age because my friends tend to get freaked out that I can look at them and have a conversation wile typing something different.

Yeah, this is typing 101: don't look.

Touch typist here. Learned on a manual in the 70's. I type in excess of 100 wpm (a secret I learned early on to guard very carefully). I'm amazed at the number of people who get by with the hunt & peck method.

I'm 29. We did not learn touch typing in school. Typing wasn't even required. I still have to look at the keyboard about 20% of the time, so I could probably benefit from this! (hey, I typed all that without looking! Score!)

I took touch typing on a PC in 8th grade, and can even carry on a conversation looking someone in the eye while I type something completely different. My husband never took a class and still uses not only hunt & peck, but only 2 fingers. He's a teacher & published author. Oh the irony...

It was never a required course, and I've have heard most schools have done away with it even as an elective because most children are using a computer long before middle school and everyone assumes that means you've learned to type. Maybe it would make more sense if it was a required lesson in elementary school?

My dad was a writer/editor and typed all day. He only used four fingers (peace fingers on both hands) and was ridiculously slow. When I became a writer full time, I thanked my high school typing teacher for making it possible for me to type as quick as I could think. Jeez, it only takes a couple weeks to learn how to touch type.

Who looks at their keyboard when they're typing? I was taught in high school (during typing class - can't believe that even existed) to look at the paper (I learned on a typewriter!) where the words were coming up. Otherwise, you'd have no idea what you were writing.

I'm glad to hear that so many people took typing in high school. It's one of the only things I learned in high school that I still use everyday.

The class itself was pretty miserable, but that was probably due mostly to the teacher. I'm thankful now that he was such a stickler.

Back in 1980 when I was in school we learned to type with keyboards that were to labelled. As others have said, this is not new.

I never took typing because I didn't have room for it in my HS schedule (too many science and music classes). I cannot type without looking at the keys and I make tons of mistakes even then. No one laughs at me or, frankly, even notices, and I supervise a team of nine at a Fortune 100 company. So....

Well, if you are a supervisor, would someone point it out to you if they were saying something behind your back? Touch typing is a good skill to learn and you can get things done faster if you can type faster ~ assuming you need to type a lot.

With regards to the article, Das Keyboard and the and the IBM Model M are pretty much legendary in the IT community as a whole so I'm kind of surprised that the author hadn't heard about them. Also, it strikes me as very unusual that there are people out there that haven't had to learn to touch type. Along with everyone else, I remember being taught to touch type way back on first grade and typing on electric typewriters fast enough to finish half a line while the carriage was coming back around.

Having come from a home where my father and all his friends were computer programmers in the 80s, I already knew how to touch type when I took that required class in high school.

As far as the keyboard goes? I've had the same keyboard since the mid 90s. In that time almost all of the letter keys have been rubbed off completely, haha. You don't need to pay $130 (WHAT?) for a keyboard with the letters missing. Good lord.

If anyone here actually knows someone who hunts-and-pecks with a standard keyboard, they better have popped the keys off and moved them around at least once. April Fools is coming up, after all!

James Patterson doesn't write his books. He tosses an idea to his sidekick who does all the work. That's all his books are 'James Patterson with Maxine Paetro', 'James Patterson with Whoever'.

The letters on half my keys at work are worn off, and whenever someone uses my computer to grab a file or fix a problem, they ask me how I type with it, and I've never understood the question. With my fingers, not my eyes?

I'm surprised that so many people here didn't take typing until high school. I'm 29, and it was part of a computer class that everyone had to take in 6th grade. We also learned about floppy disks. Ahhh, memories.

@SherryBinNH- you're thinking of Stephen King.

I'm almost 33 and my middle/high schools did not teach touch typing (or any typing at all).I still don't know how to do it--I'm looking at the keys right now.It's okay,it's not important to my life (I'm not a professional anything).But boy,are these comments making me feel stupid.

In the school I used to work at, the emphasis was on "keyboarding" as opposed to "typing". The idea was that the kids would hit the keys anyway they wanted, just so long as the got the feel of the keyboard. Some got pretty good at it, most still hunt and peck, even in 8th grade (our highest grade).

We got a new computer instructor who was appalled at the poor skills the students had on the keyboard. He even joked that he could beat all of them on his dad's Underwood typewriter (a thing of beauty, if I may say so). As the school used laptops with external keyboards and mice, the students used full sized boards. The new teacher put silicone key covers on the board, forcing the kids to memorize the keys to type. This dramatically improved the typing skills (he refused to say keyboarding, even though he was only 28) of the students.

This use of covered external keyboards with laptops did introduce a funny irony. While the kids were trying to remember what key was what on their covered keyboards, just an arms length away, right below the laptop's screen, was the uncovered laptop keyboard.
Greg and I saw they situation and irony, but none of the students looked to the exposed laptop keyboard for help!

I took typing back in the 70s. Now I freak younger colleagues out when I talk to them,looking right at them, while continuing to type. Of course, being left-handed, I mouse with my right hand and take notes with my left, which also freaks them out.

I'm 30 - husband is 27. I was taught in high school to touch type and part of our lessons were to type, very quickly mind you, text from books/pieces of paper. That quickly teaches you to type without having to look at any of your keys. The keyboard I'm using right now has almost none of its letters on the keys because they've disappeared with use. My husband, who never had the opportunity to learn typing in school, cannot comfortably use my keyboard. He becomes flustered because he can't find most of the letters.

Just for fun, I sometimes go through the alphabet with my hands when I'm no where near a keyboard. I can type close to 100 WPM, more when I'm practicing speed typing.

I learned touch typing in high school, first on a manual typewriter and then on an electric. I still do it on a laptop or a full keyboard. Heh, I still write shorthand (Gregg) too.

This is exactly the kind of comments I was expecting. I'm 34, and I learned touch typing in grade school and high school. My students (who range from 18-23) are always amazed at my typing speed. Do students no longer learn typing in school at all? That's sort of an amazing thing as we have moved into a nearly paperless age.

This is really interesting. It never occurred to me that anyone who types frequently would have to look at the keys. I teach college, and I assume that my students can type papers quickly. But maybe their texting is making them less competent touch typists?

Typing wasn't taught in any of the schools I went to in the UK, I'm a 3 to 5 finger typist and do need to look at the keys.

Do I type as fast as a touch typist? No. Do I need to type as fast as a touch typist? No.

I graduated from high school in '81 and through clever scheduling, I managed to avoid both typing class and science, because I'd heard (from other students) that they were both useless.

I got caught for omitting science and ended up in Biology 1 my senior year, along with a now-famous musician who'd also avoided science and been caught at last. Together, we had a blast that year.

Unfortunately, I did not get found out for neglecting to take typing class.

So I earned a 5-year college degree without a lick of typing skills. When I had to write more than poetry, which I did on my Underwood, I hired someone for $1/page to type for me. I took a lot of literature classes and often turned in handwritten papers.

I never even got remotely good at hunt and peck typing, so finally, at 40, I decided to learn to type by taking a course at the community college.

It was liberating, absolutely freeing to learn to type.

When I see people hunting and pecking, while I play my keyboard like it's a piano, I don't know how I lived like that. But now I can talk to my kids and type at the same time. I can look out the window and dream while typing. I can take notes when I'm on a phone call or a webinar or in a seminar with my laptop.

What a handicap to have to look at the keyboard. If we're going to all but abandon handwriting because of all the keyboarding we now do, then yes, we should go ahead and actually teach people to type.

another voice - I too learned to touch type at an early age - I think it was grade 8. We had big old manual Underwood typewriters with blank keys. The chart with the letters was at the front of the room. Most useful course I ever took, bar none - it has served me well going on nearly 50 years now. I can't imagine having to type a paper by the hunt & peck method.

I learned touch-typing, too, but we weren't even allowed to look at the paper while we were typing. We had to look at whatever we were transcribing, or at the blackboard. I'm not as fast as I once was, but I'm grateful to be as fast as I am.

My 5th grade child is expected to type up her writing assignments, but has never been given any instruction on typing. I type them for her and make her use that time to do a touch typing program for free from the BBC! i think kids are not being taught typing unless they happen upon a teacher who finds away to add it in.

We didn't have typing at school (Australia, I'm 30 now) and I managed to avoid computers all together until I was 18 and had to write essays at uni. Self taught typing and rarely look at the keyboard - I find that I'm slower and make more mistakes if i look.

My problem is more that as a graphic designer I use a tablet and pen instead of a mouse and often type while holding the pen in my right hand (it would waste so much time putting it down every time). So half the time I end up typing using only three or four fingers on my right hand and five on the other. I've never really thought too much about it till now, I guess it's just about adapting to what works best for you.