LITERACY AMONG US

Christine Valenzuela 

The thought that there are people in the world who suffer because of their inability to read and write is baffling. To get to the stage of literacy where I am now has taken years. However, my literacy abilities are still being perfected. Every single day I usemy literacy skills to get around town whether its pressing an elevator button, typing as I am now on my keyboard, or simply flipping channels while I watch television. Just like the environment, our literacy skills are constantly evolving. New technological discoveries made in our time are causing us to develop new methods for reading and intaking information. 

Lets take the keyboard for example, this literacy artifact is part of the lives of thousands if not millions of people every single day whether it is on a laptop, on a cellphone, or any other device that consists of a keyboard. People may not realize but if they weren’t able to read or write they wouldn’t be able to use keyboards to simply email a professor, text their family and friends, or write term papers for different courses. The keyboard is something that I personally use every single day, several times a day. As a student in college you can say the keyboard is like my best friend. Its always with me wherever I go. Who knows . . . it is probably your best friend also! 

On a broader note, many documents whether verbal or written have been made indirectly showing the importance of literacy and how it impacts people. In an NPR music radio interview, RZA, the multi-talented man who occupies his time being a hip-hop rapper, a producer, and a performed, was interviewed by Terry Gross. He experienced much struggle and eventually realized that school was not for him. For his journey, he created the terminology the  “zig zag zig which represents knowledge, wisdom, and understanding .. sometimes you may know something and understand it but if you don’t live through it its not fully understood by you.” This gives a glimpse  of the different paths he took in his life to get to where he is.  Nonetheless, he did not stop bettering his literacy skills simply because he was no longer attending school.  He studied on his own for at least two hours every day before going out anywhere. This method in my opinion is the best way to better ones literacy. Although, seeing this kind of dedication is rare from students who do not attend school, RZA was on who possessed the kind of dedication it took to do something like this. As a freshman in college, I am learning to adapt some of the skills that RZA has. Unlike high school, college material is mainly self taught meaning that I have to go back home most of the time and read for myself several chapters and try to master the material on my own. It is a hard concept to master but with much practice it can be mastered. Reading is a common way to better literacy skills.

 

RZA lived in a very different time period. He lived during a time where things were transforming to be digital and technology was becoming more common. It was not common to see people in a trance walking down the street on their cellphone or someone taking notes in class on their laptop. Some may say that it was easier for students to study and sit down and read a whole chapter before this era. His era consisted of much more time spent interacting with the world and with each other. He makes the comparison between his son and himself. At the age of nine, RZA had already been exposed to drugs, alcohol, and women. In fact, he says that by the age of eleven he has already learned everything he needs to know about women. On the contrary, his son who was nine at the time of this interview is completely oblivious to all of these kinds of things. As a result of the advancement in technology, RZA’s young son is involved in mostly video games. This brings many questions to the table such as “Is RZA’s son at a disadvantage when it comes to bettering his literacy skills?” 

  Providing an entirely different point of view are the ideas displayed by Dennis Baron, Pencils to Pixels. In this article he discusses many forms of technology that began to lead to where we are today. From the article you can conclude that the pencil was seen as a great advancement once it became familiar to the people. Soon the telephone and the computer came into existence. When they were first introduced they were not very popular. It took some time before people actually began to give these new advances some importance. Most likely, the people of that time did not realize that they were soon going to incorporate new forms of literacy to their everyday lives. Now, who’d think that the telephone would become crucial parts of millions of peoples lives today. The article also goes on to discuss many future ideas about the possibilities of computers being involved in a classroom. He says, “… the computer is simply the latest step in a long line in writing technologies.” Which leads to one of the limits found in the article, the fact that it is not very recent, therefore, it was not able to discuss the many advances seen today. From this article I learned that technology is something that makes our lives easier in many ways. It s sometimes to think of something like a pencil as a form of technology but it is. In fact, literacy is a technology. Not a man made one but one built within ourselves. It makes peoples lives easier daily. Those who are not literate tend to struggle more and lead a more difficult life. 

Literacy is an aspect of everyones life. Many people, including myself, fail to see how crucial this aspect of our lives is. We take it for granted that we can sit by a keyboard and type our lives away. Reading and writing is our main way of gaining knowledge. Ever so often one should take time to appreciate their literacy skills and observe the impact they have on his/her life. 

 

Where Are We Now?

So around early fall of my senior year of high school, while I was legally permitted to drive and nearing my road test, my mother told me to take her car to go pick up my sister from school. Once I had my sister in tow, I told her that mom was not feeling well and that tonight was a takeout night; I asked what she wanted. She replied, McDonalds, and I said, no. “I’ll filibuster,” she said. Filibuster? What ten year old says filibuster, much less knows what it means? Evidently my sister.

My sister attends a local law primary school, much unlike the run-of-the-mill public school I attended at her age. She has daily computer program assignments in addition to literary and historical readings. In her Legal Studies class, every week or so, the students would watch a video depicting some of the events and laws which they learned. Because of all these mediums of literacy, I find my sister to be much more articulate and well read than myself at her age.  Her experience with literacy is much like Brittney Moraski’s (Devoss). She learned through the computer and it allowed her to absorb adult information and skills at a much faster rate than she would have received through books alone.Technological advancements in literacy such as the internet and media are the key in the upper hand today’s youth has over people my age and older. While almost everyone had a television, we only had about sixty or so channels available to us. Today, my sister has about one thousand channels. It’s advancements like this that expose youth to history and news much more quickly and effectively than in years prior. The change from basic cable to scanning cable tv just shows the rapid progression literacy and technology undergoes regularly, as explained in the article “From Pencils to Pixels”, by David Baron.

Easily, my biggest qualm with all of these literary advancements is the downplay of vocabulary. For as many historical facts and laws my sister knows, that I only recently learned, I can confidently say that my vocabulary blew hers right out of the water. There were not very many resources out there that were directed at children, so the literacy we did receive was generally aimed at people much older than us. It is because of that, I was able to hold my own in adult conversations and understand much more that I heard. I genuinely believe that the neglect of children’s non-fiction literacy is what gave my age group such strong inference skills. We actively used our skills to identify derivatives and suffixes to decipher words and phrases that we did not know. (While it may be a stretch, I think this idea will show itself when the number of Latin language students drops significantly as my sister’s peers enter high school and college.) More to the point, however, there is a serious difference between the age groups. My peers tend to be more verbose (for better or for worse), while her peers tend to be more concise.

It comforts me greatly to know that students are still forced to write everything in pencil until middle school when they are first allowed to grace the sheets of their agenda books with pens. It’s just nice to know some things do not change. Like school lunch for instance, they have always been horrible and goopy and served by a (wo?)man who appears to be an escaped felon with arm hair so thick it requires a net. Despite all the reforms in health and the crusade against trans fat-come child obesity, lunches remained gross; and in a world of change, lunch ladies remained even grosser. However, it horrifies me to know that schools are slowly eradicating cursive handwriting as a part of the curriculum. Cursive handwriting was my first tangible memory of literacy. The skills I learned in that second grade language arts class helped me to go on and forge my parents signatures in my agenda book so consistently throughout elementary school that to this day my signature reads my mother’s name. Cursive is slowly going to fizzle out and wind up on the shelf of our existence next to shorthand, as nothing more than a special skill on a resume for an entry level job.

I remember in language arts around fourth grade, my teacher would assign us a series of homeworks to do regarding a list of twenty or so vocabulary words. One of those assignments each week was to write each word four consecutive times. The whole point was to reiterate the spelling of the words by using properties of repetition and memory and so on. One day while turning in the assignment, my friend, Vani, handed my teacher a typed sheet with the words written four times. Later that day, Vani told us she did it because she realized she can just copy and paste all of the words. Brilliant! Quickly, we all began typing up our words. After a month or two of typing, selecting, copying, pasting and repeating, I grew tired of the system. It occurred to me that I was wasting precious time. From then on, I typed each word individually. Surely enough, I gained speed and accuracy in typing which gave me plenty more time to focus on the style of 3D rainbow word art I used to header each assignment.

All and all, what I am trying to get at is that things have changed a lot in the past ten years. Skill sets I have from my experiences are denied to my sister’s age group and replaced with skills that my peers and I do not possess. Everything comes with a catch. Literacy as I knew it at age ten is completely different than it is now. Kids today have access to media like online news, or resource apps on their phones and tablets. Youth are entering adulthood with a plethora of skills that generations prior do not have, and that puts them at the forefront of society with an unprecedented edge in competition.

Works Cited

DeVoss, Danielle, Gail E. Hawisher, Charles Jackson, Joseph Johansen, Brittney Moraski, and Cynthia L. Selfe. “The Future of Literacy.” Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States. Ed. Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. 183-210. Print

Baron, Dennis. “From pencils to pixels: The stages of Literacy Technologies.” Passions, pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 15-33. Print

21st Century Literacies: Where Are We Now?

Unit 1 Assignment

Shaquille Kessi

The joys of simplified shopping in the 21^st century have come a long way since coins and notes were first used to make transactions. As we all know, places like malls, supermarkets, stores and markets are being used to accommodate this activity. Technology has played a huge role in advancing the form of literacy with which people perform these transactions.

 In his article “From Pencils to Pixels”, Dennis Baron explains how the pencil is a technology or at least was considered one when it was first invented and how it appears more naturally to us now perhaps because it’s likely reached its final form of design “… We have a way of getting used to writing technologies that we come to think of them as natural than technological….” I agree with this concept and I feel that many types of technologies like the pencil can relate to it, one of them being transactional technologies, which I would like to define as devices or tools used to make payments.

 The coin is an early form of literacy used to make transactions. Despite the lack of their desirability due to bulkiness even today, they are still very useful. For example, one Sunday evening I was about to do my laundry, not knowing I needed about eleven quarters to operate the laundry machines until my roommate told me so. Coming from a country where laundry machines are not necessarily used, coins are used for minor purchases or not at all. Sometimes we don’t realize it but we are fonder of coins than bank notes. Some people don’t even need to see the coin to know how much it is; some of us can just feel it and know right away. That being said, the coin, like the pencil, can be categorized as a technology. What we have been brought up to consider as technology, i.e. PC’s, mobile phones, may not seem like the simple coin, but with the computer , similarly to the coin, we train ourselves how to use and recognize its different parts; most of us can type without looking at the keyboard. 

The banknote, lighter and easier to handle, has improved the coin although inventors didn’t settle just for that. I like the way this next transactional technology has been described in Ben Woolsey’s and Emily S. Gerson’s article “The History of Credit Cards” as “plastic payments.”  Most of us may consider the credit card a new technology because it is very young and somewhat new to us compared to the coin and banknote. We are too busy to realize that it is simply made from plastic material similarly to metal for coins and paper for banknotes but why is it the only transactional technology which gets or may get the “technology status” and not coins and banknotes? Perhaps how it works has not appeared as natural to us just yet.

So now that we have either one of the transactional technologies let’s go shopping! Shopping in the supermarket is certainly different from shopping in the market. In the supermarket everything has an identity, also known as a barcode, in which its price is encoded. Every item having a price tag attached to it suggests the concept of fixed prices. I have never witnessed someone requesting a discount in a supermarket but in the market that is not something new. This fixed-price concept has also penetrated into our own retail stores, especially when retailers don’t want to give discounts. I noticed this trend when I worked at my mother’s retail store this summer. All items in the store have a price tag and sometimes customers would ask if prices are fixed and if I said no, I was more likely to give discounts even when the costumer was willing to pay in full.“… Our voices …” as Zadie Smith, author of ‘Speaking in Tongues’ would describe, change when we are at the market and supermarket. They do so to adapt in the environment we are in. In the supermarket we are sophisticated individuals and communicate mostly with our eyes while in the market we ask for prices and even negotiate them out with sellers. This is quite similar to how Smith uses Obama as an example to show how he changes the way he speaks to address different kinds of people. In her article she suggests that this doesn’t make Obama two-faced, although it might, but a person who “… doesn’t just speak for other people. He can speak them …” Not only does he change his speech to engage with a particular group of people but he also speaks from their perspective. I remember as a kid when my mum would shush me whenever I would talk a little loud in the supermarket and she wouldn’t mind how loud I am in the market, these different sides of her came out so as to correspond to the different environments.

As I mentioned, technology has had an impact on how we buy and sell products in today’s world. We can buy and sell from wherever we choose to be as long as internet access and a credit card are available.  Online shopping is one of the behaviors that have led to an increasing demand for and use of credit cards, especially in developed countries.  Personally, I had never shopped online before I came to the States.  So it is something quite new and it doesn’t come across as a natural activity just yet.  I feel even if it’s something many Americans have been doing for a while it doesn’t occurs as naturally as physically making payments with coins or notes to them either because generally it is a technology that’s rapidly changing.

In her book Culture and Commitment, Margaret Mead illustrates world changes with a cultural style she calls ‘prefigurative.’  She describes this culture as the 21^st culture where changes are happening so rapidly that younger people can only depend on themselves and their peers to learn new things.  These changes are visible in our literacy technologies and due to this they shape our daily activities, in my case, shopping.

 

Lydia Fowler- Literacy

Literacy can be defined as “the ability to read and write” (Merriam-Webster). I believe that literacy is much more than that. The definition can be expanded to describe the thirst for knowledge, as well as the ability to think critically about a topic. Literacy has developed over the past fifty years into much more than reading and writing. Now, literacy can be interpreted as the ability to interpret social media sites, emails, and other technological advancements made recently. In years past, a simple lecture and note taking was enough to teach the average Joe. In this day and age, we now need to reassess how the worldwide student learns.

This dramatic change from textbooks to online instruction has also changed the way we learn in general. My cousin is a toddler and she learned to read and write off of a tablet last spring. Thinking back to the days without these devices, the pencil was the first of many astonishing inventions we now take for granted. Writing with such a tool as the pencil has changed how we communicate and think of literacy.

As a society, we have had the pencil around for so long that we no longer feel the importance it holds. Without this piece of technology, I, as an aspiring engineer, would go through pages of calculus in scribbles without a pencil and eraser. We no longer acknowledge the importance of the pencil and this is illustrated in the flashpoint, “As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new” (Baron). This quotation shows us that as a society, we lack the appreciation for inventions used on a daily basis.

In the classroom, we are now beyond the basic textbook and notebook. We have advanced to tablets and laptops, which in turn, have increased the level of literacy and critical thinking. Dr. Michael Wesch spoke at a TED talk about the advancements of learning processes and he describes his ideas, “We need to move our students from simply being ‘knowledgeable’, that is knowing a bunch of stuff which is basically what we are doing when we line them up in these big lecture halls and dump information on them and we need to move them to being ‘knowledge-able’, that is able to find, sort, analyze, ultimately criticize and even create new information.”

Wesch addresses many crucial points in his lecture about the average classroom and student. The teaching styles of generations before us must undergo changes in the near future if we, as a society, wish for graduates to have the appropriate analytical skills and critical thinking required to enter today’s work force. I want my friends in engineering to be up to date and have the skills we need to safely design buildings and other structures. Dr. Wesch concludes with a key statement about our learning environment in the quote, “knowledge ability changes over time based on the communication environment they are in” (Wesch). Students undergo changes as our environment does, and professors need to recognize this as well as alter their teaching style to accommodate the learning gap present in many classrooms today. The quote, “In this environment, the literacy education that teachers and parents provided to students a decade or a century ago will no longer do to equip people for success; too many major changes have altered our world in unexpected ways,” directly prompts the challenge at hand (Devoss).

The computer has drastically changed how we, as students, learn but it has also changed writing and literacy in our daily lives. The transformation that a device like the computer has had on the world is astonishing, but one must ask, “What will come next?” This question has baffled many minds in the past and Dennis Baron addresses the question with wonder, “The computer has indeed changed the ways some of us do things with words, and the rapid changes in technological development suggest that it will continue to do so in ways we cannot yet foresee” (Baron 439). What will come next and how will this device change literacy?

In the classroom, these devices have become both a benefit and a nuisance. Many professors allow students to bring their laptops to class and interact with them throughout lectures. I believe that these devices are a distraction due to the number of Facebook pages I have seen open in lectures. While a professor is speaking, I look around and see students playing solitaire, tweeting, and playing angry birds online.

Laptops hold a vast amount of information with connection to the internet, but they should not be allowed in the classroom due to distraction and cheating. The technological advancement of computers is described about their levels of deception as, “[The computer] raises the specter of digital fraud, and the latest literacy technology is now faced with the task of developing new methods of authentication” (Baron). Personally, I think these tablets and laptops should not be used in the classroom due to the many negative influences they give.

Although they are a distraction, they also prove to be a great way of connecting and digging deeper into the educational realm. I use the internet to further grasp topics on YouTube lectures and examples of calculus problems. Many browsers now hold games to teach those who do not understand mathematics and other courses. These resources are extremely helpful and I use them outside of class on a daily basis. Many professors are transitioning to email with students and I love it because it’s a great form of direct, fast communication to ask questions.

A major change must occur in the next few years to address the issue with our overdeveloped minds and the technological advances we have grown attached to, such as our smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Girls in my dorm start shaking when they are without their iPhones. Professors must change their teaching styles and learn from the newest forms of literacy so they can, “work collaboratively with students to develop meaningful assignments that will bring new forms of literacy into composition classrooms in ways that both engage and challenge contemporary learners” (Devoss). As students, we must work to improve our focus around such devices, but our professors also must teach to the devices to engage our minds on another level, which we can connect with easily and will learn greatly from.

Work Cited

 Baron, Dennis. “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies.” Writing about Writing: A College Reader. By Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St.Martins, 2011.42241. Print.

Devoss, Danielle. “The Future of Literacy.” Writing about Writing: A College Reader. By Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 395-421. Print.

“Literacy.” Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2013.

Wesch, Michael, Dr. “Michael Wesch – From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able.” YouTube. YouTube, 12 Oct. 2010. Web. 16 Sept. 2013.

Work Cited-Photos

Alexh. Stock Photo of a Child Using an Ipad Tablet Computer. Digital image. F.57: Freshly Brewed Stock. WordPress, 22 Mar. 2012. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.

Google Play Adds Textbooks. Digital image. Teens Talk Tech. N.p., 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.

Pasetsky, Mark. Anderson Cooper Attacked Again. Digital image. Forbes. N.p., 3 Feb. 2011. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.

Where Are We Now?

21st Century Literacy: Where Are We Now?

My parents will never understand why my brother and I spend so much of our time consumed in technology. They will also never really understand what it is like to be surrounded by technology at all hours of the day. Growing up in this society has made technology a staple to our lives. Technology is beginning to steer us and these skills are almost a necessity to our lives. Everyday, I am using technology to self-educate myself and improve my literacy. If you think about it, technology and literacy go hand in hand. When you receive a text message, you are reading the text and using literacy to send a reply. Technology has impacted our literacy greatly and will continue to affect the way we communicate with each other.

An English teacher at my high school working with a student on her laptop.

At my high school, my district provided every student, teacher, and administrator with a MacBook laptop for educational purposes only. The laptop was used as a tool to help better our education as students and also provide us with the technological knowledge that is useful in today’s society. For us students, the laptop became useful in ways beyond those intended by our district. The use of laptops in our classroom allowed us to self-educate ourselves about technology. In this day and age, navigating technological devices seems to be like a sixth sense to us and as a student with a laptop, I was able to further my ability to use such devices. The use of laptops in an average school setting may not fit the standards of a normal education since it is very rare to have such a large number of students with access to this technology.

Students in a physics class using their personal laptops for a lab experiment.

My high school experience with a laptop is very comparable to the ideas from the article “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies” by Dennis Baron. Throughout the article, Baron explains how advances in technology guarantee changes in our literacy, for better or for worse. He says, “The Speaker of the House of Representatives suggested that inner-city school children should try laptops to improve their performance. The Governor of Illinois thinks that hooking up every school classroom to the Web will eliminate illiteracy” (Baron, 423). The idea of integrating technology into school systems is exactly what I experienced. Having the World Wide Web at the touch of my fingertips completely changed the way I learned in class. Instead of turning the pages of a textbook, I was scrolling through online textbooks on my computer. Notebooks and writing utensils were used sparingly because all of my class notes were stored on Microsoft Word documents. This revolution of an E-School took over and overthrew any means of “old school” literacy.

Although the use of laptops in school was extremely useful and convenient, it has caused me to become very reliant on technology. Much like Baron, I admit my reliance on technology and how I am almost unable to get by without it. When talking about trying to use a notepad to record a memo, Baron says, “I found that I had become so used to composing virtual prose at the keyboard I could no longer draft anything coherent directly onto a piece of paper. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t think of the words, but the physical effort of handwriting, crossing out, revising, cutting and pasting, in short, the writing practices I had been engaged in regularly since the age of four, now seemed to overwhelm and constrict me, and I longed for the flexibility of digitized text” (Baron, 424). This quote shows how dependant we have become on technology. The old ways of literacy, like handwriting, are laborious and inconvenient for us. When I am in a class where laptops are not allowed by the professor, I find it difficult to take handwritten notes since I am so used to typing everything out. Our reliance on technology may be causing us to lose important literacy skills such as handwriting and public speaking, however there is no denying technology is going to continue to transform our literacy.

My experiences with technology can also be compared to The RZA and what he speaks of in the Fresh Air NPR Interview tilted “Rapper, Producer, Composer: The RZA”. Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, otherwise known as The RZA, is one of the founding members of the hip-hop group, the Wu-Tang Clan. During this interview, he discusses his troubles with standard schooling and his alternative means of self-education. The RZA would skip out on class because he was unable to focus, instead he would wake up and study his textbooks himself. By doing this, Diggs was able to teach himself and is just as knowledgeable as anybody else. Just like Diggs, technology forces people to educate themselves. With all of this new technology, the older generations are unable to keep up and learn these new technologies as fast as the younger generations do. It is almost like the roles of teaching have switched. Ror example, when using laptops in my high school, we, the students, often found ourselves explaining how certain applications and programs work to our teachers. Since I have grown up using this technology, I have taught myself how to navigate and use such devices, while my teachers are very unfamiliar with the way certain things work. Technology puts a very large generation gap between now and the years of our teachers and parents. The RZA talks about how his childhood and the way he self-educated himself and then compares himself to his child. He explains how his child is exposed to technology and does not have to grow up as fast as he did. The RZA is comparable to my parents because my parents did not have technology as a tool when they were younger. Everything that is made easy with technology now was not as convenient to them. I am comparable to The RZA’s son. I often feel as though technology makes things almost too easy for us and I find myself using it as more of a crutch than a tool.

Technology has become such a significant part of our everyday lives. Although there are many limitations to this rapid growth of technology, it is going to continue to grow and affect us in ways that are uncontrollable. There is no stopping technology it’s impact on our literacy.

21st Century Literacies: Where Are We Now?

Media literacy has traditionally valued quality of life and the pursuit of happiness; however, these goals are increasingly difficult to achieve because of the complexities of life in today’s information and technology dependent society. (flash point)

The cultural and educational opportunities available in an average community are often missed by people who lack the ability to keep informed of such activities. In an attempt to reduce information to easily manageable segments, most people have become dependent on others or technology.

 Media prepackaging in schools through broadcast and print news media, in fact, media encourages people to accept the opinions of others without much social interaction. When opinions are biased, negative, or inadequate for the needs at hand, many people are left helpless to improve the situation confronting them. Media literacy is a means of personal empowerment. It allows people to verify or refute my expert opinion and to become independent seekers of truth. It also provides me with the ability to build my own arguments and to experience the excitement of the search for knowledge through different social media and blog cites. It not only prepares me for lifelong learning; but, by experiencing excitement of my own successful quests for knowledge, it also motivation for young people so they can pursue learning throughout their lives.

Businesses and individuals need to have opportunities to have up-to-date technology. When businesses have these technologies they have an advantage over the competition. Media literacy incorporates both generic and situated aspects; that is, those aspects that are universal, and those that are contextual. The experience of students in the higher order category of learning as a social responsibility indicates that social media influenced students’ experiences significantly and allowed students to transcend the generic dimensions of media literacy.

            There are different approaches to enhancing global literacy through teaching. This involves tying global information to all material taught in the class and has been argued to be the most efficient and effective way to teach from an international perspective. Some type of instruction is a necessity given that students often lack the skills to find, evaluate, and effectively use information. In the article, Writing about Writing Danielle DeVoss says, “I learned pretty much by looking over my brother shoulder and then jumping on the computer when he and his friends were gone.” Students are completely learned and understand new technology and when they are able to use these technologies. The students heavily rely on the Internet as the primary source of information for coursework, neglecting library databases and print resources. College students almost never make a judgment about the quality of the information that they obtain from the Internet or other media sources. Not only has there been a significant increase in the amount of information available, but the rate at which that information becomes obsolete has increased as well. The area of “expertise” in which the average person can expect to keep current has grown proportionally smaller. The ability to sift through large amounts of information, and by making connections to prior knowledge and gain understanding, is a highly marketable skill. Those who know how to access and use information are likely to be more successful in competitive marketplace.

            As the importance of media literacy grows, so does the importance of the role of librarians as integral members of the teaching and learning mission of the college and university. There is a growing emphasis on teaching and learning as a component of the mission of twenty-first century libraries. At the same time, there is a growth in collaborative endeavors involving librarians and teaching faculty in efforts to reach larger numbers of students. Instead of relying on reference encounters in the library and formal library instruction, librarians are working to promote collaboration with faculty in an effort to integrate media literacy into the curriculum.

 Although the concept of librarian and faculty collaboration is not new, the commitment to an integrated approach has not become a trend.

Schools are beginning to focus heavily of bringing resources to students, introducing them to what is available to them. In my high school, they city gave every student an ipad. This I pad was for school use only and it had mandatory assignments for everyone in the county including different assignments for the teachers and administrators. This was just to make sure that the city was keeping up with the new change in schools. Students are learning at a young age that information, content that only a decade ago would be out of the reach of children, now is no more than a few clicks away on a computer. Teachers and administrators also are included in the mix of those benefiting from advancement in media literacy. The ability to have instant access to records, accounts, real-time happenings and other valuable resources leads to more effective education and more efficient learning. While standard textbook and lecturing may have been acceptable for generations, what problem solving does occur in that method of education is within artificially constructed and limited information environments that allow for single “correct” answers.

             The media age provides both opportunities and challenges for the future of education and the future of society. Managing large amounts of information, developing learning strategies to facilitate effective learning, and assuring that all citizens are skillful in the application of information are critical importance. Media literacy, as a theme, provides a means to bring about the revolutionary changes call for by the evolutionary transitions in economics and education. The one common ingredient in all of these concerns is an awareness of the rapidly changing requirements for a productive, healthy, and satisfying life. To respond effectively to an ever-changing environment, people need more than just a knowledge base, they also need techniques for exploring it, connecting it to other knowledge bases, and making practical use of it. It therefore contributes to a more holistic and situated understanding of students’ experiences of information literacy in a formal educational context.

 

Where are we now?

Ben Graniero
Where are we now?

High School and often college are places where the idea of literacy and the study of it can often go undeveloped. Yet, students and faculty experience it and use it every single day. Schools often limit the curriculum to reading books, writing essays on said books, and doing maybe one research paper per grade. Not one time do students study the idea of literacy, an important tool for helping create exceptional readers and writers. Furthermore, students are taught more about the how aspect of writing, an easy and simple method to produce adequate writers in order to let them graduate where they now aren’t the responsibility of the school. But what does this do? Isn’t the purpose of school to become intelligent and to master certain studies, not to become good enough citizens? This is where I think schools lack depth in their curriculums.

One great article explains the mistakes writers make that could stem from limited depth in education, it is called “Rewriting, How to Do Things With Text”. Basically, he creates solutions to simple mistakes writers make. I think the biggest idea I could take and learn from Harris is the idea that the reviewer should write more about what the writer is trying to do, what his goal is, and what the writer is attempting to do. While this thought is brought up on a very limited scale in high school, students are taught to write more about what the subject of the paper is. Now in college, it is different, and it may vary from school to school. Perhaps it’s the tuition that makes payers expect more out of their writing classes, or the idea that college students are more prepared to write about what Harris explained. However, I believe that high school students shouldn’t be viewed as unable to perform such a task, especially in AP classes. Rather, I think AP and honors classes should focus more on the writer and less on the literature. The ability to read and write has never been so important, especially in the age of global connectivity, and in an age where more and more people share a similar language. The world is rapidly evolving, and schools are falling behind. I’ve noticed that the differences between my high school English classes are so much more different than college writing classes. First of all, the high school I attended is one of the top schools in the country, yet somehow they seem to lack depth in developing writing abilities. Also, college writing curriculums seem to be more personalized around the changing world and around the student. Utilizing TED talks, podcasts, and blogs to make students feel more comfortable when learning to become better readers and writers. On the other hand, high school uses a “narrower” and more primitive curriculum: books, articles, and more books. Why do schools not see the need to evolve their subject material to match the changing world?

This brings me to another point; schools need to include technology in their writing classes. I know as a high school student, writing and computers never truly mixed. The only time in my English classes that I used a computer were to type essays. Yet 90% of the knowledge I obtain during a daily basis comes from digital sources. Paper news sources have lost their edge, and as a result have transformed into a digital concentration. Also, our current pop culture generation almost never uses letters to communicate with each other. Nowadays, we use social networking, text messaging, and can organize our lives within the blink of an eye. Why is it then that high schools don’t evolve to this? What do school boards have against technology? Studies have shown that technology correlates to more intelligent and more interactive students. The article “The Future of Literacy” is about a study of 4 people of different age groups and their interactions between written and unwritten literacy as they grew up. What is found is that all four test subjects reacted better and developed quicker when introduced to the computer versus paper literature. This gives clear supporting evidence to my point that the computer and online information can help create better readers and writers. However, the study is limited in the educational abilities and the diversity of the students with regards to literacy. All four students were raised with a profound appreciation for the book and were taught the importance of reading and writing. Why not include students that were not raised to appreciate reading, or students who are not as powerful with a pencil? What is the author trying to hide? Personally I think including a more diverse group of students would not only give even more profound evidence, but would also grab the attention of more different people. Not just the avid reader.

If the computer was truly inferior to the letter, the newspaper, and the essay, then it would not have become the center of information for the majority of the first world population. Even though there are critics that say we have become too dependent on technology, I believe this is because we can do so much more and accomplish tasks in so little time. Or as Dennis Baron says, “the computer will be put to communication uses we cannot now even begin to imagine.” How true is this statement? Look at how far we have advanced in just the past decade! Nobody could have imagined such power in the palm of our hands. Is in undoubtedly true that the computer is the key to the future, so why are schools not equipping students with the abilities to develop themselves and prepare them for the unknown of the future? This needs to change today, just like technology changes on a day-to-day basis. Why is it so important? Well according to a video titled “Shift Happens”, the top 10 in demand jobs in 2010 did not even exist in 2004. This is how important the change from paper to computer needs to happen, or else we might have a generation of underdeveloped workers.

Literacy in My life and the Modern Age

Max Ruditsky

WRT 105

Unit 1 Assignment 

 

Literacy in My life and the Modern Age

 

Literacy is all around us, it surrounds us and impacts nearly everything we do. Literacy is constantly evolving as the mediums, requirements, technology, and audience changes. The concept of literacy today is completely different from what it was 50 years ago. Perviously, I believed that literacy was rather one dimensional, and was merely a part of reading and writing, but it is so much more than that. I have learned that literacy can be found in all facets of my life, from texting to musical lyrics and even video games.  Not only are these literacy artifacts present in my life, but they have helped shape who I am and how I perceive literacy in the world around me.

While literacy encompasses a wide variety of styles and mediums of delivery they all revolve around the written word. Therefore in my opinion writing in all forms is the most important facet of literacy and has had the largest impact on my life as a whole. Writing has been present in my life ever since I learned the English alphabet. It has been a personal obstacle of mine for as long as I can remember. When it comes to school work, writing of any of any kind always gives me the most trouble.  Although I struggle with writing I still would consider myself a writer. I consider a writer to be anyone who gives a sincere attempt at writing and bettering your writing skills with each new attempt. Im not entirely sure why, but whenever I sit down and try to write I am easily distracted and have trouble formulating an initial idea and direction. It could be how my generations’ use and understanding of literacy has changed so drastically in the past few decades.

When speaking about literacy in the modern age one has to really be careful. Now and days there are hundreds of screens that we see everyday, whether it be a phone, ipod, ipad, TV or a computer odds are you do not go a single day without looking at a screen.Since there are so many new ways to be exposed to literacy the people growing up in this generation have so much more information thrown at them as stated by Devoss, “Young people no longer have the luxury of relaying solely on the information provided by their elders to equip them for a changing world”(Devoss 416). It seems there is an ever increasing generational gap in terms of literacy. When I was a kid I was not exposed to all this technology, but I still had more ways of being exposed to different kinds of literacy than my parents, such as TV and the computer. I can not imagine how a child born in 2013 will be able to comprehend the vastness that is technology. The current generation might feel as though “the computer revolution came long ago, and has left its mark on the way we do things with words”(Baron 423). This flashpoint from Barons Article gave me a real sense for just how the computer itself completely revolutionized literacy. While my parents may see the true significance in computers, I have grown up with this technology, and honestly I think my generation as a whole takes it for granted. 

People born in my generation and the ones after me most likely take technology for granted, but that may be the only thing about literacy that they do take for granted. In the NPR interview with the RZA of the Wu Tang Clan, one got a real look at how someone who came from nothing became one of the most influential rap artists of his time.He was drinking, smoking and experimenting with women as early as the age of 9. He claimed to skip school often, but he still did well because he used the books to teach himself the material. Clearly, the RZA’s education was not traditional and neither was his childhood, but he still managed to be extremely successful. His story really makes me step back and appreciate my own education and childhood. I have grown up with opportunity all around me, but I still feel self taught in a certain sense. It may not be the same type of self teachings as the RZA, but I still feel that I have gotten to were I am not only on the teachings of others. I struggled to teach myself grammar after the school system failed me. I was in an experimental stage in my school were they did not really teach grammar and instead focused on reading. While this is only one example. When it comes to my understanding and use of technology and literacy, I also feel as though I learned through my own personal experiences and not through a textbook. 

When someone asks what is Literacy? It is not something that stays constant or concrete. The definition is always changing as the world changes with it. When scientists develop holograms I am sure it will change again. Every generations perception and use of literacy will be different from the last. Since I was born the use of Literacy has changed with the advancements in technology, and the new trends in media, audience and expectations. My personal connections to literacy have effected who I am and how I perceive literacy and the world around me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Baron, Dennis. “From pencils to pixels: The stages of Literacy Technologies.” Passions, pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 15-33. Print

 

 

DeVoss, Danielle, Gail E. Hawisher, Charles Jackson, Joseph Johansen, Brittney Moraski, and Cynthia L. Selfe. “The Future of Literacy.” Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States. Ed. Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. 183-210. Print. 

 

“Rapper, Producer, Composer: The RZA.” Interview by Terry Gross. NPR Music. NPR, 07 Mar. 2005. Web. 24 Sept. 2013. <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php? storyId=4525189>.

Josh Hess Literacy in the 21st Century

            The world around us is constantly changing. It doesn’t wait for anybody, and without realizing this, someone can get caught up in the past and never be able to catch back up. Technology is definitely one of those things that will leave someone in the dust if they do not keep current. There are so many forms of literacy when it comes to these new technologies that simply knowing how to read won’t get someone very far. Technology is defining and reinventing literacy here in the 21^st Century. Refusing to embrace technology as it revolutionizes the world can leave both young and old behind to the point where it’ll be very hard to recover.

            Literacy can be found in a wide variety of mediums: social media, music, and even everyday reading. With the growth of the Internet and the advancement of online and electronic media, the fate of literacy is changing before our eyes. Expanding industries like the Ipad and other e-readers like the Kindle are revolutionizing the literacy market and making literacy more appealing to everyone. Students and teachers join together to “become jointly responsible for a process in which we all grow” (DeVoss). The four students from two generations mentioned in the Devoss article all shared similarities. Not only did they have a solid interest in literacy and technology, but also they went above and beyond to excel in this area. They all found interests and were able to learn more about technology as a result. In this case, students can use their knowledge of the Internet and resources around the Internet in the classroom.

            Today, millions of high school and college kids use Reddit, an online resource for just about any piece of information. I have perused this site a few times, and even from browsing the first few pages, I learn something new that I know school would not have taught me. But just reading the front page of a site like Reddit doesn’t do much to improve technological literacy. The improvements come when someone delves deeper as a way to find something specific, and then comes up with something completely unrelated but still interesting to the person, similar to the people in the Devoss article. From there, the student can bring his or her outside knowledge into class and show the teacher what they did from an extracurricular standpoint with online literacy.

            On the flip side, the teacher needs to keep the student involved in traditional literacy and can do this while still incorporating technology. Ipads, e-readers, and online texts are the new wave of advanced literacy. More schools are investing in e-readers like Kindles and Ipads to save money and keep up with the latest technology. Teachers can thus employ new technology for reading books that would normally be read in a soft or hard cover book. Because the students wouldn’t feel as pressured by an e-reader, they might be more willing to do the reading. Completing the assigned reading would lead to two possibilities that are not mutually exclusive of each other. The student would feel more accomplished and expanded their view of an author or of the world at large. The student might also discover something new about the technology from their teacher that they would not have known without doing the reading in an actual book. The push and pull between students and teachers on all levels, not just in the classroom, is imperative to progress one’s literacy.

            It isn’t simply the classic forms of literacy that are being revolutionized by technology. Everything from music to how we communicate is changing due to technology. The ways people talk to each other now depends on so many factors: where the person lives, the purpose for the conversation, what the relationship is between the two parties, and so many more. People use the telephone, cell phones, texting, instant messaging, video chatting, sky- writing, and virtually anything to get their message across. This doesn’t come easy, however. It takes practice and observing the people around you to know exactly what to say and how to say it.

            When I first got a cellphone, I didn’t know what “BRB”, “G2G”, “TTYL”, or “HMU” meant, so I asked around and saw how my friends were using them in order to enhance my own knowledge with the current forms of literacy. It’s impossible to get around Facebook without knowing how to interpret the literacy being used on the site. Facebook is the number one type of social media that I use, so it was necessary to learn how to properly read and communicate on Facebook. I needed to continue my “Self dedication and self practice on the side” (RZA) to keep current with the literacy. The RZA learned how to combine multiple areas of his life and music to be successful in the hip-hop game, so I needed to do something similar to stay current with my friends. Staying current with literacy seemed to be a social necessity. I was “checking myself before wrecking myself” as the saying goes, in order to “perfect what [I] need[ed] to perfect” (RZA).

            Many writers speculate what the future of literacy will be, how and with what methods it will be used, and how literacy developed to the place that it is today. The truth is that we will never be able to perfectly analyze or predict where literacy is going; it is too complex. Literacy is different in every community in every corner of the globe. It is only with our personal experiences can we begin to speculate how we think literacy will develop. I try to incorporate technology into every aspect of my life, and in doing so, I am expanding how I am able to perceive and read the literacy in the world around me. Zadie Smith explained the same thing by showing how authors and people can take on different personas, thus expanding how they can interact with the world on a wide scale and how they can use their different identities to enlarge literacy as a whole. Literacy is always changing with the world, it is our job to stay as current as possible.

Nicole Weisman

WRT 105

Unit 1 Assignment

Blogging about 21^st century literacies

 

            I come from Livingston, New Jersey.  A pretty affluent area in which education cannot be stressed enough.  Personally, I am a good student, but a little bit slower in my learning techniques.  You could say that when it came to literacy and writing, especially as I got older, it got harder and harder to gets my thoughts organized onto paper in which teachers and other students could understand, and to get my point clearly across without rambling on and on with details that didn’t matter so much.  I think that this decade has been huge on taking advantage of the technological advances that have come our way and in turn, that has been something that can either make writing easier or harder depending on a person’s preference.  For someone like me, the actual act of writing a paper and typing it on a computer in a program like Word is very beneficial.  This is because I am able to backspace and add as many times over without my paper looking like a bunch of scribble scrabble.  We are able to use a device to count of number of words, make the piece of writing look a certain way, and even change fonts to our liking.  On the other hand, there are people that would rather just write away on paper and look back and be able to see the mistakes they have crossed out or things that they have added to the paper.

 

            In my Writing 105 class, we have read multiple articles, blog posts, and opinions on literacies evolving in the 21^st century.  The three that I am going to be discussing are Zadie Smith’s article “Speaking in Tongues”, Denis Baron’s “From Pencils to Pixels”, and an interview with Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, or RZA, a member of the Wu-Tang-Clan.  Each of these pieces of writing gave opinions on totally different topics, but in the end, all seemed to intertwine when it came to the topic of technology and changing yourself to fit into a certain environment as other things are changing around you.

 

            I will start with what I found the most interesting article, “Speaking in Tongues”.  Zadie Smith brought up a point that I had never thought about and I had found extremely intriguing.  She says, “We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls”.  Smith brings up the topic of people basically adjusting their voice and their persona, to the environment that they are taking on in a new place to fit in.  She herself, was a British native coming from working class, big, colorful sea and her new area was a smaller, posher pond and almost univocal. She had adjusted herself to fit in and had soon lost sight of where she had come from and her tongue for where she was raised, went away for good. I had never been in a position where I felt that my whole persona had to change for an extended period of time so this was all new to me. Countless times she makes references to President Obama and the different tongues he uses in his speeches and talking to the public to relate to each person that his message is trying to reach. Smith thinks he doesn’t just speak for his people, he can speak them and he wasn’t simply avoiding a singularity he didn’t feel, he was also drawing us in with him.  Zadie Smith thinks it is not about getting a fake voice, it is all about addition.

 

            Then I listened to an interview with Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, or as he is known, RZA. He was one of the creators of the hip-hop group, The Wu-Tang-Clan. Diggs was known for his many nicknames and after hearing about each nickname I had come to the conclusion that this had directly tied into the story I had previously read by Zadie Smith.  Diggs had gone by so many names, but to name a few, RZA, Prince Rakeem and Bobby Digital.  He had gone in to say during the interview, that each nickname had represented a different chapter in his life and a time when his personality had been far different from the new nickname he had been called.  He would adapt his alter ego’s to match the music and attitude he was currently going by.  I was born Nicole but have always gone by Nikki because when I was a kid I was a huge tomboy and hated the name Nicole. I guess in some ways I related to Diggs. Towards the end of the interview he spoke about his nine year old son.  He said how wrapped up his son is in technology these days that he doesn’t experience practically any experiences he had been going through at the age of nine himself.  His son wasn’t related to drugs or alcohol and he wasn’t the least bit familiar with the opposite sex yet.  I’m guessing he meant this in a positive way consider nine is a very young age to be in contact with these things, even in neighborhoods that aren’t too great.

 

            Now for the last article that I am going to be speaking about, “From Pencils to Pixels” by Denis Baron.  Baron thought that the computer was simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies.  Of course though, he thought it was very important and a big step in the literacy world.  First came writing and Baron thought that writing itself was, in fact, a technology.  We all know that when new technologies come along, they begin to affect the older technologies, and that is exactly what the computer is doing.  He thinks that it is a stereotype that most writers are luddites, because he actually enjoys writing on the computer.  He thinks, “we have a way of getting so used to writing technologies that we come to think of them as natural rather than technological”.  This ties in with Diggs interview because he thinks that technology is becoming a bigger part of everyone’s lives and so does Baron.  Then there is Zadie Smith who thinks that people adapt to their environment and this is saying exactly that.  Baron thinks that, for the most part, people have a way of forming and molding to the environment that they are in.