1/28/2018 0 Comments Brainstorming!When I found out that we had to do a digitial literacy narrative, I felt really excited! I think that the concept of this assignment is really cool, and after hearing about it, I went right away to brainstorming. 1. For my first idea, I would want to look into when I used Facebook in middle school. During seventh grade, I first got a facebook account because my parents would not allow me to get one until I went into middle school. After having the account for only a few weeks, I became extremely addicted to it.It was the only thing I wanted to do when I got home from school, and I would barely talk to my family when I was home because I was always chatting online. The main focus that I have for this idea is that I would talk about the positives/negatives that happened to me on this cite when I was using it constantly/how it effected me in middle school. Onto idea number 2, my sister is in middle school currently, and she got her first phone (an IPhone 7) in the summer right before middle school. Just as my first example stated, my sister is also extremely addicted to here phone. One of the apps that she especially goes on is snap chat. As a young child, my sister loved to read and write, and this continued up until she got her cell phone as well. Unforently, she was bullied on snapchat and this was a very hard thing for her to deal with. For this idea, I really want to focus on her first love for reading and writing and how it was effected after she got bullied by the form of communication on snapchat. I would also want to talk about how I helped her deal with this struggle based upon digital literacy and helped her overcome it as well. 3.Finally, for my final brainstorming idea, I might want to discuss the website AIM. This was my first instant messaging cite that I ever used. I used this throughout sixth grade mostly because the girls in my sixth grade class, and I wanted to get one to be able to talk to the girls in my class more. For some reason, they would not really talk to me in class , but when I would chat with them on aim, they would answer. My username was something I would never use today (being rooty6767 (what was I thinking!), and it was my first time using abbrevisions in messages online. I believe that this impacted my digital literacy in a pretty positive way as well. I am looking forward to completing this assignment because I have never done something like this before in college!
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1/27/2018 1 Comment My ArtifactI feel that I can think of 100 memories and experiences that I have had with this artifact of technology from my childhood based upon a social aspect. Back when I had a slider phone, I was on the travel soccer team in my town of Bloomfield. My best friend who was on the team lived all the way across town, and before my cell phone, I only got to talk to her during practice or soccer games. When I got my cell phone, I put her contact number in right away, and we texted constantly. Every time I would hear the "beep beep' of my cell phone that always smelled like turf field because of soccer to a text from her, my eyes would instantly light up. There was also something incredibility satisficing about the way that my phone would slide up to answer any text messages that I had with friends. I loved that I was finally able to communicate with her outside of soccer as well, and this is what really mattered to me the most. "As the world neared the end of the millennium, both mobile phone networks and the Internet continued to expand on a global basis at an unprecedented rate—a fact not lost on the participants in the study. And while such growth continued to favor many of the wealthy industrialized countries, cell phone networks, the advent of prepaid calling cards, and mobile phone plans had begun to link populations in other countries as well." When reading, quote stood out to me as I read "“Digital Literacies, Technological Diffusion, and Globalization” from the online book Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times by authors Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe. In this article, it is overviewed that 13 international students were documented, and there interaction with digital literacy/technology and their lives were looked into. They were able to communicate with their loved ones when they were on this journey thanks to the advancement of different technologies. Thanks to the impactful changes that were happening at the end of the millennium that is discussed in, cell phone networks and the internet were expanding greatly in a globalized way. This did not just impact wealthy countries, but other countries as well, which I find to be so important. When I came across this quote, it made me think about how my life was impacted in a positive way when I was able to receive a specific "enhanced" form of technology when I was younger. It allowed me to communicate in an easier way with the people who are important to me, just as these 13 students did with new developments of communication technologies in the first decade of the 21st century. Due to overall expansion of mobile phones and the internet, my life and our global world have been shaped for the better. I am glad that they have (but espically cell phones) been a part of my every day life since I was a young teenager. In my eyes, this is what I could consider to be my first personal experience with digital literacy. This is a picture of my very first pre paid cell phone that I received when I was thirteen or fourteen. I had begged my mom for around two years prior to get me a cell phone so I could talk to my friends more often. Finally, after two years, she finally caved in to get me to shut up about wanting a phone, and I jumped like a kid in a candy store when I received it. I considered my phone a part of me because I never went anywhere without it. The cell phone is incredibility significant to my literacy practices in my domains of friends and school. For the first time, I was able to experience literacy by communicating with friends when they were not "physically" with me constantly, and look up information for projects in school in new ways. My first cell phone meant so to much to be because it was a part of my personal digital literacy for around three years. It truly impacted me in so many ways from the immense amount of literacy that is a part of it. One standout moment with this cell phone would have to be the dance that I went to with my previously mentioned bestfriend. Pictures and videos (that can also represent literacy) are very important to me because of the memories that are behind it. We took a countless amount of photos and pictures of us at the dance. and with every click of my cell phone button to take a new picture/video, I felt such happiness. Honestly, without having a cell phone, I feel that I would not be the person that I am today because I would not have had these significant moments in my life that connected my literacy in a social way. lFrom reflecting back on personal memories with my first form of digital literacy technology in my social life, I was able to ponder about how my literacy practices are embedded into our global reality. First of all, text messaging (the main thing that I used this artifact for) has greatly changed our global reality. It really struck me that text messages have truly changed the way language has been used throughout world in the 21st century. According to Laurel Storm from itstillworks.com, Storm expresses that, "To increase the amount of information they could cram into each message and save time on tapping them out, people started inserting abbreviations, skipping punctuation and using phonetic spelling." (p.1) When I used to use this artifact on a daily basis to text, I constantly would abbreviate writing (simple narratives) in my language/use emojis to get down everything I wanted to say in a fast, easy, and literacy way to communicate with others. People around the world constantly do this, and rely on this as a main source of communication in today's society. Students around the world also use cellphones for the same common goals, to communicate socially and look up different forms of information quickly. Even if this may be true and our society feels more comfortable when they have their phone, some people take advantage of this simple way of interaction. They will forget that there are others ways to communicate and do things, like talking in person, or using paper. To sum up about my artifact, Luce quotes that, "Mobile phones allow people to talk to the world, but they can do so much more. We must teach people how to really maximize the global linkage available to them through their mobile devices, especially if we expect them to be used for any kind of social good."' (p.1) What people do not realize is that cell phones will impact people in our global reality if they use them in the proper way. I believe that I did "talk to the world" with my artifact, but I have learned to use cell phones in so many more ways from this first experience because of the expansion and development of the cell phone.
Sources: https://itstillworks.com/cell-phones-changed-world-1856.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-luce/the-impact-of-cell-phones_b_508011.html Considering you are reading this on some form of technology, I would say that this concept is extremely significant in the 21st century. Just waking up from the alarm on my phone, checking my twitter, and clicking on my computer to do this blog, I began to think about technology, including how digital literacy has truly become a part of my world. I do feel that it will continue to help our world grow and development too. After reading Rhinegold's very in depth introduction titled "Why you need digital literacy-how we all need it", I was able to look deeper into his viewpoint on digital literacy , think more about my thoughts and feelings about it. I noticed that Rhinegold quotes in the start of his introduction that , "I believe that learning to live mindfully in cyber culture is as important to us as a civilization as it is vital to you and me as individuals. '(1) This is one of his insightful outlooks in terms of digital literacy that struck out to me about how he feels that individuals need to look on websites that will benefit them only. Going along with this a little, people in today's society are constantly preoccupied in their technology so they won't fall behind on importrant things in life (such as the example with his daughter.) However, people still need to be aware of how much technology is taking over there lives because it effects their attention according to the author.Take the "Me Too Movement" for example. Individuals were using twitter in a positive way to empower females. This is a mindful and correct way to look into digital literacies, rather then watching pointless youtube videos of people eating. It seems to Rhinegold that digital literacy is something powerful in our society to learn things through ourselves and others, such as my cell phone that is always by me to look up information. Five process are currently "changing the world", and these include attention, participation, coloration, the critical consumption of information (crap-detection), and network smarts, and these can improve our world. What I began to think about while reading this was if we are mindfully aware of what we are doing with digital literacies in different venues, then an empowered society can develop from us connecting in an effective way. Looking through the pages of this introduction, I came across multiple passages that stood out to me personally, but I wanted to address this one to my own life: "Today's digital literacies can make the difference between being empowered or manipulated,serine or frenetic. Most important, as people who are trying to get along day to day in a hyper scale, warp -speed civilization that seems so often to be beyond anyone's control, digital literacy is something powerful we can learn as well as exercise for ourselves and each other.'" (3) For example, in my own personal life, I do struggle quite a lot with anxiety on a daily basis. YouTube has been a powerful source that has helped me to strive with this problem that I deal with. The youtuber that I always search for is Laurdiy. Instead of manipulating and making me feel negative about my anxiety, this influencer who has 7.1 million subscribers has empowered me to feel better about myself. She does this because she always makes videos and tweets sometimes about her struggle with anxiety, and it makes me feel better about what I deal with as a whole. Having this youtuber express herself in a strong way allows me to connect with others who are going through the same things I am through the online world. I also look at the other people's comments and comment on them sometimes to learn about strategies to overcome my anxiety. Learning more into the importance of digital literacy in a better way will allow myself and others to have a better outlook on how to deal with the stress of anxiety in an effective way. I feel that I can be a part of an empowered society/making my life better (like in Rhinegold's eyes) rather than an uncontrollled one when I use digital literacies from this manner. Paying attention to digital literacy in the right way is helping me to become a better individual in today's 21st century. For my first experience with blogging for a class, I had to read "Situated Literacies" by Barton and Hamilton. Barton and Hamilton express what literacy practices mean to them, and it allowed me to personally think about what literacy practices are. Barton and Hamilton provide a pretty straight forward explanation in terms of what a literacy practice is when they state that, "in the simplest sense it is what people do with literacy (reading and writing)/ the general cultural ways of utilizing written language." (7) I agree with Barton and Hamilton that literacy practices are based upon individuals beliefs, attitudes, values etc. One literacy practice that I thought of in my own life is taking my own personal beliefs and writing it for a story for class here at Rowan. What I have never taken into account until reading this article was that literacy is a form of a social practice, which is incredibility significant as well. It is quite amazing to me that when literacy is seen as a social practice, it "connects people with one another" (8)Literacy as a social practice are driven together by people, and this is where literacy interlocks with how we communicate and relate with others in our daily lives in multiple forms of domains in life. One social practice of sharing a recipe for example in my house happens constantly with me and my sister because she loves to cook. From learning more about technology in this class, I feel that this can also help individuals to communicate and interact with one another in a social, literacy form too. Literacy is not just based upon reading/writing, but also about the interaction of communicating, reaching, and educating others who have a common goal in life. This ties into how discourse communities and how they personally shape literacy practices in their own social way. As discussed by Barton and Hamilton, a discourse community is, "groups of people held together by characteristics ways of talking, acting, valuing, interrupting, and using written language." (11) . What I have noticed since coming to Rowan is that people who talk/interact in Northern Jersey (where I am from) act differently in terms of talking than South Jersey too. This ties into a literacy practice that is online, such as Facebook. Individuals who come from different areas would defiantly write in different ways online because of their common language and similar form of communication. Also, a discourse community of individuals/friends who value a certain type of music will revolve around communicating about this, and may discuss this in different forms of social media, such as twitter. However, a discourse community of individuals ( coworkers) who truly value and have an interest in education will use literacy practices in an educational way. They will focus on using the social aspect to do things like email about how to improve a classroom too. There is a specific social group /discourse community that I am a part of that defiantly mixes print and digital literacy. When thinking about this for a few moments, the social group that came to my mind is my job that I work in the student center here at school called Rowan After Hours. At my job that I have developed a very social community with, I have noticed that we do use a mixture of print and digital literacy to reach a common goal of being successful in the workplace since we value the student center. For example, my boss will set up different tasks for us to do during the night in a print, paper form sometimes. Other times, she has her job descriptions for us on her ipad that she uses, and we are allowed to look at them. Going along with this, we embrace digital literacy a lot at this job, and I love that we do this. At my job, we have a Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/rowanafterhours/ where we deliver important information about the job, and we interact with one another with this form of technology. Emails are also sent out on a daily basis about staff bondings that we are having. I feel that I would not be successful at my job without the mixture of print and digital literacy here. Just as Barton and Hamilton explain, different domains have their own practices and they are not random. My job decided to have these specific practices of literacy to develop success in this wonderful discourse community that I am part of. |
AuthorI am 20 years old and am very passionate about working with young children. I am excited to write blog posts for this class. Archives
May 2018
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