For the end of class, we had to reflect on our larger assignments over the course of the semester using a website called SMORE. Here's mine!
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My blog, Melissa’s Misadventures, is going to be about some struggles I’ve had in my life—such as being born with a heart defect, losing pets at sudden and unexpected times, and going through my parent’s separation/divorce as an adult. An important aspect of my blog and my discussions about these topics is completely indulging in the negative feelings these events bring up. Our society and culture has a “get over it” attitude towards tough situations, and that attitude isn’t particularly helpful when you’re in the middle of a crisis. Furthermore, many blogs about tough issues are aimed at advice and solutions. While I would like to possibly feature advice/solutions in my blog, I really want the meat of it to be about indulging in those negative feelings, why it’s better to do so, and how you can still be a happy person and enjoy a good cry.
My blog will be different from others because while it discusses tough topics and it may possibly discuss advice, I don’t want it to be seen as a self-help or inspirational blog. I want my blog to be a place where I can discuss my emotions unabashedly, and hopefully others will be encouraged to do the same. I’m a very strong advocate for showing emotions and discussing them openly, as our society wants us to conceal our feelings and keep them to ourselves. That trope helps no one. Not only do I want my blog to be a safe place to discuss emotions, but I also want to break the stereotype about people who are chronically sad or happy and that everything you do in life has to stay true to whatever central emotion you’re feeling. I want to show people that you can wallow in self-pity and cry in the shower but still be described as a happy, cheery, and optimistic person. I do feel like my blog would apply most to people who have been through similar situations that I have been through, like having a disability or being a child of divorce. I feel as though it would be very comforting to other people who have been through the same situation to be allowed to wallow in self-pity and sorrow/anger/sadness/frustration/etc. I also feel like my blog may be most applicable to people around my age, like high school and college students. This age is a pretty emotional and dramatic time in life, and adults may not be able to relate to any intense feelings I share because they may simply be older and more reserved when it comes to their emotions and internal thoughts. In an ideal scenario, I would want my blog to apply to everyone. We all experience emotion and we’ve all tried to hide or conceal our emotions, regardless of age, gender, interests, etc. These experiences shouldn’t be reserved for a few people who fit a certain demographic. One of our main projects for this class is to create a digital literacy narrative. In other words, we have to craft a story around the technology we used at some point in our lives, whether it be insightful, significant, or just funny. In this post, we’ve been asked to document three ideas for our digital literacy narrative:
“We are convinced that narratives are a form of ‘social action’ available to all humans.” This quote comes from the article “Digital Literacies, Technological Diffusion, and Globalization” from the online book Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times by authors Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe. The project follows thirteen international students, who documented their interactions and experiences with literacy and technology, as well as other aspects of their lives. After reading a few pages, this quote caught my eye and related to my topic of digital literacy. Literacy and personal narratives are a social action, only perpetuated by technology and social media. And narratives can take on many forms, as evidenced by this picture. This is what I consider as my first “introduction” into digital literacy. Sure, I had access to a family computer since I was four years old, and I had a Nintendo DS (a Nintendo DS Lite, to be exact), but this cell phone was the first piece of technology that gave me my first experiences in digital literacy. I could read game prompts in Nintendogs, and I could read instructions on my pet store CD-ROM game, but a real-life cell phone allowed for communications with actual people via phone calls and more importantly to eleven-year-old Melissa, text messages. My first phone was an LG Chocolate in the color “Ice Blue.” I received it for Christmas when I was eleven years old. My father decided to call the cell phone while I was unwrapping the box. However, his plan quickly backfired, since the box had a High School Musical 2 bookmark taped to it, and I thought I had just received a musical bookmark. Man, those were the DAYS. Any time I bring up my first phone and connect with other LG Chocolate users, there’s this instant moment of connection (no pun intended). From the picture, you can tell that the structure of this phone was a bit unique and a “high edge” piece of technology for the mid-2000’s. The phone had a mini turntable that allowed its user to scroll through the menu, and it would slide up to reveal the keyboard. Any other LG Chocolatier will recount the countless times friends would steal your phone on the school bus just to get the satisfaction of gliding the turntable around in circles or sliding the phone up and down into oblivion. My parents originally got me the phone because they were ready to take the step of leaving me home alone for bits of time, but helping me score some brownie points with my peers for having a cool phone was a plus. Thinking back to my early cell phone days, I have come to the realization that something as simple as text messages can count as a social and digital narrative. Even what I thought were meaningless text messages to my friends about going to dance class or what server I was going to be on in Club Penguin were all documentations of my personal life put into written and digital form. Writeawriting.com defines a personal narrative as: “A personal account which offers details, analysis and a personal opinion from a particular happening or event, experienced by the writer” Phone calls and text messages I sent through this phone hundreds of times certainly would have contained details, analysis, and opinions from my personal accounts. Even though this personal narrative wasn’t written down in a traditional long-form story, it certainly encapsulated my personal life. So, I finish with the other half of my beginning quote: “we understand the stories told to us in words and videos not only as vehicles for formulating identities—people's ways of telling themselves into being—but also as personal efforts to tell about and bring into being a new kind of globalized world” (Berry et. al). Not only were my very early text messages bringing my identity into being, but they were also the early trends of the massive personal, technological, and digital world we know today. Sources: writeawriting.com/essay/personal-narrative/ http://ccdigitalpress.org/transnational/ch1.1.html Okay, so the second reading for class was HEFTY. It was a thirty-two page introduction called Why You Need Digital Know How—Why We All Need It by Rheingold. In the piece, Rheingold thoroughly—very thoroughly—details why a basic set of rules, education, and knowledge is essential for those who dwell on the internet. Rheingold makes the argument that we have to be well educated in order to interact: “I didn’t let my child loose on the streets without teaching her about traffic ad looking both ways. I don’t like to see otherwise well-educated people loose in a digital culture without knowing something about what makes a small network work” (24). For a majority of reading this article, I was pretty unimpressed. I saw it as basically an old-person’s guide to the internet. My opinion changed, however, when I came across this little nugget of info: “Networks are where personal and public lives intersect” (24). That sentence made me realize that these are rules that apply to everyone, because I see young people—those who are considered “tech-savvy” and who were born into the digital and social media age—don’t follow it. I’m sure everyone and their mother can recall an instance that they have either heard about or seen themselves where a young person looks like an idiot in the public scope, seeming to forget the “public” piece is the central theme and essence of all of our digital interactions. This rule—that is quintessentially ignored by masses of people—is what made me realize that everyone could use a brushing-up on proper digital discourse.
Rheingold doesn’t make the internet the bad guy, however. He speaks about the many people—including himself—whose jobs and livelihoods depend on the internet and social media. The internet is super beneficial to both the content creator—journalists, bloggers, YouTubers, etc.—and the audience. However, it can only be beneficial if we are mindful, and collectively mindful at that: “we need to learn literacies of cooperation, mass collaboration, and collective action” (32). Online technology and the literacy that lives there is empowering and impactful and we need some balance, intelligence, and respect for all those who graze past our screens. For my first reading for this semester, I had to read the article Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context by David Barton and Mary Hamilton. The main argument they pose in their writing is that writing, surprisingly, is inherently social, and that there is a clear link between reading and writing and “the social structures in which they are embedded and which they help shape” and how literacy and its practices fit into people lives, not the other way around (7). They also distinguish between literacy practices and literacy events. Literacy practices are “the general cultural ways of utilizing written language” while literacy events are “activities where literacy has a role” (7-8). The key difference between the two is measurability. Literacy practices are difficult to measure, as they contain intangible aspects like ideas, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, etc. Literacy events, however, are directly observable. What I found to be the most important part of the article was the argument that “literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these are observable in events which are mediated by written texts” (9). Furthermore, there are different domains of literacy, such as literacy for school, work, etc. At first this article definitely did not look interesting, put after the first page, Barton and Hamilton were making some interesting points. The first point of how literacy is a social practice struck me as surprising, and then not surprising at all. We never think of reading and writing as such, since we often read books solely on our own and reading is a “solitary” activity. However, our earliest forms of literacy engagement are purely social; they cannot exist otherwise. A one-year-old cannot experience a picture book unless an adult reads it to them. A four-year-old cannot write their ABC’s unless an adult teaches them first. On another point, I was surprised that Barton and Hamilton didn’t mention that literacy can cross domains. For example, I have recently gotten into a series of books written by Temple Grandin and her mother, Eustacia Cutler. Grandin is a famous spokeswoman for those with autism, and after being diagnosed as brain damaged in the early 50’s, she has seen and experienced the long journey autism and its diagnosis has made. As a student pursuing special education, this sounds like something I would be reading for school. However, I stumbled upon these books for my own pure entertainment, but also to grow my own knowledge on the topic. In this instance, the domains of school and leisure intersected, as I’m sure it does in many other circumstances. |
AuthorAll blog posts are for class, but hopefully I can add a little bit of flair. Archives
May 2018
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