Digital Literacy

The article we read talked about education institutions focusing on, and more readily pursuing means of, expanding students’ literacy skills through technology. The article talked about the need to instill in students the knowledge of how to locate information on the internet, and also interpret what significance the information actually holds in accordance to modern life and society.

The reality of the situation; however, is that schools have not implemented programs or curriculum designed to meet these needs in the public school system. Instead, they are slowly remediating into a Cro-Magnon system of trivial learning and an un-applicable curriculum.

One suggested resolution to promote media literacy in American public education systems, is to develop a new form of literacy involving critical thinking. This curriculum would focus on trying to make students "read, listen, see, and think," constructively with complex new modes of delivering information, new multisensory tactics for persuasion, and technology- based art forms. In other words, the "new" educational thought is to go back to the oldest form of learning, hands on.

Magazine Cover/ Digital Story

Digital Stories.

So interestingly enough, with the ever progressing use of social networks and the internet, a new media of literature has risen amongst the population. I am talking about digital stories. A digital story ican be a short narrarated film, a slide show depicting both images and text or several other variations of these means. These types of stories are beneficial because they use multiple types of literacy, not just simply relying on the viewer's reading capabilities as a means of conveying a point or message. So the question asked is this, "Can a digital story be just as effective as a 15 page paper?" My answer is yes. Someone once said "a picture is worth a thousand words." If that truly is the case, a 5 picture slide equals out to being a five thousand word paper, which is a pretty decent sized paper. So yes, I think that because people relate more closely to images than to written words, this is a general statement to be sure, they would gain just as much information froma didgital story than a research paper. If you would like to see my digital stori, click here.

Spelling in the Modern Age.

Spelling is hard. There are enormous amounts of rules that invariably change without reason. Who thought of silent letters anyways? Why is there an "H" in the word why? It's pretty dumb. However, in response to the article we read, we can not just simply change all the words in the English language, no matter how much easier it would seem to make life, so that they are always spelled just how they sound. First reason why, the "th" sound. We don't have a letter to make that sound, so this ensures that some rules must still apply to the new method of spelling. Second point, one of the main reason's we have so many stupid rules on what letters mean or do what is because if we didn't have those rules, there would literally be hundreds of words spelled exactly the same way. Take the word "theory" for example. Sound it out and spell it just how it sounds, you get "there." Theory is not even close to meaning the same thing as there. Speaking of "there," what would you have to do to try and seperate the 3 types of there? (there, their, they're) Yes, in speech it wouldn't matter, but the differences in spelling signify the differences in meaning. For the most part, spelling things the way they sound would be an advantage, but honestly, why bother? If texting and IMing really doesn't affect spelling, then this generation shouldn't have any more difficulties than the last. Why worry about it?

Shanosha

Graph of Survey

http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/default.aspx?ID=5df3a7d8dff74f608dd17691e11a669f

Digital Media Changing Language.

"Smrpg?"

That is a message a friend of mine sent to me the other day. Know what it means? Neither do I. I even Googled it hoping I could figure it out and reply without looking stupid. The only results I recieved said that "Smrpg" stood for "Super Mario RPG," which in context with the conversation we were having made absolutely no sense at all.

So Has digital media changed language?

Yes.

If you go back 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 3 years, or even 5 months ago, and used "Smrpg" in conversation, it would not have made sense to anyone, especially if they are talking about West Virginia football. You know what? It still doesn't make sense. But that is the age we live in. Abbreviations are fine, but we have gotten to the place now where we abbreviate entire sentences into single letters simply because, in our minds, it makes sense, but to anyone else, we are probably going to have to send another text explaining what the last text said. Quite frankly it's getting out of control and is becoming a nuisance.

Here is a link to a site explaining how teachers are now trying to implement a wider variety of methods to teach forms of literacy other than reading or writing, which is good, because no one can read or write anymore.

CYLOTFSITIGTESJFTG2BL8R,

Shanosha.

(Catch you later on the flip side. I think I'm going to eat some junk food then go to bed. Later.)

See how confusing that is??

Survey

Resume

So I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to talk about this week. In class, we read an article about using blogs as educational tools in the classroom. I thought that it made a few interesting points while talking about how blogs help to involve the students in learning, and reading, outside of the classroom.

We also were asked to create a resume using Google Docs. I'm assuming that we did not have to provide factual information seeing as how we were asked to publish it to a public blog site, so here is mine. Creative and sarcastic, enjoy.

Love all,

Shanosha