I remember the day I told a friend of mine, “I don’t know if I chose the right subject to study at college. Though I have always liked linguistics and partially literature, I sometimes find it too tedious as it’s mostly focusing on just one thing: “writing”. I think technology is flowing in the veins of every aspect of our lives while as Literature students, we are focusing on poems and fictions, and when it comes to technology, we only do blogging to respond to what we learned again about “writing” .To me, science sounds more like business, while literature is like vacation. Maybe I should have chosen another discipline as a college field, and could read literature at my leisure time.” My friend had a different point of view, claiming that literature teaches us how to live a better life, and that scientists become more like robots. I did not fully disagree with my friend in that Literature teaches us how to live a better life but I still think no matter what field, we do need to learn more science and technology because in this century it is everywhere around us. When Professor Gleason told me about Digital Literacies and gave me a description of the course, I thought this is what I have been yearning for.
I am so pleased that this course is offered in the English Department, and for Language and Literacy students because it is a totally different subject from all the other courses we take; helping students get more familiar with technology and the modern digital world we are living. I believe it is a must for anybody who wants to be a teacher, because we cannot simply teach using the same strategies used centuries back. Besides, modern techniques and basically iMedia can be substantially effective in making the class more dynamic and eventually facilitating learning. What I most expected from and liked in this class was the practical parts. Working with different software, programs, and tools, which helped us create our own contents, was very useful. Learning how to make user-generated content was the most interesting part, and I will definitely put this knowledge into use in my future classes. I will not only use the websites, and tools already on the Internet, but will also make my own videos, which would fully serve the purpose of instructing a particular subject. For example, to teach grammar, I was thinking of taking different dialogues (preferable humorous ones), making videos and teaching that grammatical point through the funny video.
In the Digital Literacies class, we got familiar with different tools such as jing, and prezi with which we could make videos and photo stories. What I liked about Professor Peele’s class was that not only did he introduce different software to us and taught us how to utilize them, but he also had us find more effective new tools that would be useful in teaching strategies. One tool I found was TypeItReadIt; some free software in which you could type, and then convert your text into audio files. It would help one with proofreading, improving speaking and listening skills in different languages, and would be very beneficial for people who are visually impaired. Another useful software by which I made my instructional video as the final project was camtasia. It helped me make my video, edit it, add audio tracks to it, adjust the sound, and send it on youtube.
Apart from the software, we also read some articles as well as some chapters of Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous” and Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows”. They were all very insightful and interesting. What I liked best about each text was that it not only taught us technology and the digital world but also gave us new insights into the society. For example, in Danah Boy’s “White Flag in Network Publics?” although the focus was on comparing Facebook with Myspace, we saw very vividly that racism is still around. That some of us are still racists while we do not consider ourselves racists and that is only implied in our words: “It’s not really racist, but I guess you could say that. I’m not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever.” –Kat (1)
Other articles were all so absorbing in different ways, such as Danha Boyd’s “ Teen Sexting and Its Impact in the Tech Industry” which opens the eyes of the reader to outrageous act of sexting, especially child pornography, and its horrifying consequences. In other words the digital Literacies class thought me how the digital world is similar to the physical world in that there is communication but its threats, there is crime but some solutions, there are products but some limitations, but most interestingly, a place to count on individual’s creativity (web 2.0 and user-generated contents).
I also feel more digitally literate in a sense that I more technically know about the digital world and basically its jargons, which have been helping me a great deal in reading the news, and websites on technology. After taking this course, I feel I am a better analyzer of blogging, knowing how to change the visual face of my blog posts to better attract the audience, and also add remixes to make it not only more meaningful but also more interesting.
In the end, I can say that it would be great if this course by Professor Peele could be offered in fall or spring semester and as core course. The integration of this course into the other courses we need to take as Literature students will help not to have that feeling of Literature as vacation and science as business but make me feel technology, literature, reading, and writing are all blended into one another. This course can be a new dimension in our field, and a great deal of help to anybody who wants to teach. Although I was under a lot of pressure, (as I had taken two summer courses, unaware of how much time and energy I would need to devote to summer courses), Professor Peele’s being understanding and flexible also gave me more motivation to stay ambitious, and in the end feel it was all worthwhile.
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