Reflection

I used to think that I was rather tech savvy for my age and other demographic characteristics. I rely on my MacBook it to write letters, to watch TV shows and movies, to listen to the radio, to play my music collection, to make phone calls and video conference calls, to do my morning yoga, and to make art. In this class, I learned that I was a consumer, and a pretty passive one at that. When I started this class, I didn’t know how to use any of the applications that I know how to use now.
Now I am a prosumer. I dislike the neologism “prosumer” just on general principles, but I do like the idea that it conveys. The idea that I could be a producer at the same time as consumer, and that I could chose to involve myself in the creation of digital media.
I would prefer a word like “creasumer”, because I think of myself as creating digital text as well as consuming it, but “creasumer” conjures images of sci-fi villains of the predatory, humans-as-food variety so it would probably never catch on.
I am writing this reflection in Word, and not being able to link out is making me uncomfortable. I can’t drag a picture in or I can’t make sparkly letters that play music. Most of all, I can’t bring another page into the conversation that I am having with you. I cannot produce a source with a mouse click. It seems one dimensional and limiting. If Blogger wasn’t being so glitchy tonight, I would be doing this on line. I never thought I could learn to read on line and to write directly into a digital space. I always believed that I would have to print on paper, edit by hand and then upload. This change may not seem like much on the surface, but I am experiencing literacy acts differently. That’s a big deal. This class has changed me in a fundamental way.

The breakthrough came for me when I learned some html language. (Word did not even try to correct that, by the way.) I had always believed that it was beyond me. What I thought would be the most difficult part of being digitally literate was one of the easiest. Before this class, it never occurred to me that I could learn essential conversational phrases in html that would help me get around the same way I learned, “Donde esta el banio?”
I intend to use digital media in my teaching practice, and I don’t just mean throwing up a blog so I can keep track of student papers. I would like to teach my students to be prosumers. To give them the opportunity to create some of the information that they are swimming in, invite them to dive into one of the conversations going on in the Burkian parlor of the digital age.