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This week in class we finished up the last of things that needed to be built. Rogers main task this week was to fix the glitches we had from when our classmates tested our game. We used their responses to try and make our game more entertaining and compatible. 

Some of the responses we got really helped us. Bryan suggested that we change our mode so that it could not longer be daylight. The daylight was making our monsters go away and that took away from the purpose of our game.

Tomoka and I built a house that the cart would take you to after because our responses said that it was unclear when the game was actually over. Inside the house we put a sign that shows the player that they have completed the tasks. 

This week we had a stronger purpose of building. After last week, we knew what had to be done and how to do it the ways we imagined. We were more familiar with the building flow and split up the tasks between our group. 

Along with Tomoka's help, I built the arenas size proportionate to the level of difficulty. We had to clear a large area of land in order to build our larger arenas. After clearing the land, Tomoka and I built the remaining four arenas. We started to build by making a perimeter of stone 5 bricks high. Along the inside, we strategically placed the bleachers so that the player of our game would be unable to climb out of the arena on the stairs. We then finished the building of the arena by alternating the colors of bleachers, and building a stairway entrance on the outside. 

As Tomoka and I built, Rogers task was a very important one. He was placing railroads that connected each area to the next one. This is important because it ensures that the player will go the the next appropriate level. As Roger did this he had to ensure that the redstone was capable of activating the railroad to be responsive during the game.

After graduating high school, my grandma’s gift to her granddaughters is their laptop for college. Since I had always had a dell at home, I had assumed that I would stick to dell to avoid any confusion and I would be comfortable using it. My cousin, who also is my age, decided she was going to get a MacBook. After weeks and weeks of deciding what to do, I still couldn’t make my decision. I talked with family member and friends who I knew were familiar with MacBook’s and I wanted to see what they though I should do. While doing so, I created conversation, and interchangeable rhetor and audience, and sometimes debtate, or discourse.

After making my decision to get the MacBook, I needed help because I had never owned one and only knew they basics about them. It was a week before college and I was afraid I wasn’t going to learn in time to know how to use it on the first day of classes. I was for sure illiterate of the MacBook Pro. I’m not saying I was completely lost, because once I learned, it has become easier for me to navigate into new things, but before, I was lost.

Watching television is something I really like to do to relax and unwind, but not too often do I get to sit down and do that. I am such a busy body and always find other things I can do instead and then I regret not using that time to just sit and relax. On my lit log, this was one of the least mentioned things, but it involves a great depth of literacy, of course.

Depending what television show you’re watching can differ many things when rhetorically analyzing it. For instance, depending how many actors and actresses there are changes the amount of rheotrs there could be. Depending which show can also influence the amount of discourse, exigence, and constraints involved.

While watching the television, I am the audience because I just sit back and watch what is going on, but inside my head, I’m also analyzing what’s happening or about to happen, and I sometimes come up with different things I think the actors should do.

With television, it is important that the rhetors do their job in an appropriate manner to ensure they will have audiences that want to watch their shows. Each show isn’t going to attract everyone, because we all have different personalities. But it is important that their show or movie is fitting to the title and description. They also have to be situational to what is going on, because if they just do random things out of the blue, then the audience will be displaced and not sure what is really going on.

In response to our reading from The Future of Literacy, you can for sure twist and pull different things from it that makes it a rhetorical situation. In the beginning, the rhetor isn’t really stated, so we assume what is being said is just important for the understanding of the articles. Through the reading, the rhetor changes, when the different authors tell their own short passage about literacy. The whole time I was reading this, I was considered the audience. The only time the rhetor may have changed was if I had a question and I asked myself what the author was trying to say.

In this beginning, they stated to pay attention to authorship, which they describe as who is speaking, what it is they’re talking about, and how it may describe their personality. I found this similarly describing what rhetoric means. The then proceeded to talk more in depth about literacy itself.  They communicated about how technology changes our prospect of literacy and how it really is a much broader topic than we would think.

One of my most frequent posts on my literary log I was reading and writing on my phone. Each morning when I wake up I look at my phone and check if I have any missed messages.  Each day I send numerous messages to different friends and family members asking them questions or just having simple conversation.

Often times me and whoever I am having a conversation with interchange the role of being the audience or the rhetor depending on who’s talking or who’s listening. Usually each conversation would contain ethos, pathos, and logos, and most of the time kairos.

An example of the ethos would be that the person had credibility for what was said while we were talking. Pathos would be the emotion behind what we were saying to eachother. Logos would be the logical reasoning and purpose to what we have to say. Kairos is the specific time or critical opportunity to say something to that other person while having conversation.

Throughout high school I participated in many extracurricular sports but track and field was by far my most favorite. It may sound crazy that the punishment for every other sport is my favorite sport, but running is something I really enjoy doing. I started running track in 6th grade and continued on until my senior year of high school and ran the same races all 7 years.

I credit my middle school coaches my sponsors of literacy because they taught me how to run and how to run the hurdles. My coaches were the rhetors and I was always their audience. This was because they were always showing and telling me different things and I always listened and responded with my actions to show them I understood.

Many times when learning new things good and bad constraints can get in your ways and they can either boost or break your actions. Different constraints I ran into were falling when going over the hurdle, or the good constraint of having the speed between each hurdle. Each constraint I dealt with was fitting and situational to the time and place.

Being part of a team also means there will be frequent communication between me and the coaches and my teammates. I think communication is important to make sure that everyone on the team is on the same track and knows what’s going on with who so they can work together and help each other.

In response to John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s book Born Digital, I can tell you many different ways that I relate to being a digital native. After reading this article, I noticed how technologically developed our world and people are becoming and how easily people are adapting to that new way of life. I notice that the purpose of writing this article is for awareness of the situation and also to prove the positive and negative constraints within the situation.

I consider myself a digital native not only because I was born in the digital era, but because learning to use new devices and programs is easy for me to adapt to. What I hadn’t realized was that it’s becoming easier for young children to adapt. I thought it was crazy to see my mom and grandma texting and having Facebook accounts, but come this weekend, I found it even crazier that my one and a half year old cousin knows how to operate the iPhone and iPad.

While playing with my little cousin, Lynnie, I thought it would be okay to let her play with my cell phone to occupy her. Little did I know she was smart enough to just push the button, but she knew how to slide her finger across the touch screen to unlock it, how to slide through the app pages, and also, to choose the camera app and take a selfie of herself! I was amazed, to say the least. I honestly couldn’t believe she knew to do those things.

Something that I think I may be more literate to than others is baking. I know baking sounds simple, but the reason I feel more literate in baking is because my great grandma always baked with me when I was little. My grandma didn’t just teach me to read the recipe. She taught me to measure the right amount of ingredients, how to properly put them in the mixture in order, and taught me how to use the oven to bake our goodies. In this rhetorical situation, I am the audience and my grandma is the rhetor. She was the one who was always telling me what and how to do it and me as the audience always listened and responded with what I’ve learned.

After my great grandma passed away, I started baking more with my grandma, making recipes that she had left behind for us. As I got older, I learned more secrets to baking and found a stronger interest in baking. I was using what my grandmas, my mom, and the internet had taught me about baking and was beginning to do it on my own.  To bake, I was using family recipes, recipes from books, and going online and looking for new ones to try out. When I would find new recipes to try, I would communication with my mom and grandma and ask them to try it with me.

I think baking is fitting to my personality all because my grandma left a special place in my heart for it. I love to bake and one-day hope to share the same experiences I had with baking with my children and grandchildren. Not only is this an example of something that I am more literate in than others, but it also shows how each of the people I mentioned have played a role as a sponsor to helping me become literate in baking.

When I was in first grade I wasn’t a very strong reader and struggled with grasping the concept of reading. I began to hate reading because it was just so difficult and I was frustrated and thought I couldn’t do it. I was reading words that never made sense to me and I didn’t comprehend what I was reading. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Boken, placed me in a particular reading program to try and help me change directions with reading. The program was called “Reading Recovery” and I went once a week to practice reading and go over different tips on how to read. I started becoming better at reading and got ahold of it finally! Shortly after I was caught up with my classmates and was reading at the same level as them.

For as long as I live I will always consider Mrs. Boken one of my literacy sponsors. She is the one teacher I will remember who was concerned about my struggle and who helped me overcome it. Mrs. Boken never gave up on me and pushed me to become better. She helped me not only learn to read more effectively but she always taught me to be confident in myself. Without Mrs. Bokens help, I cannot say that I wouldn’t be literate today, but I can say that I wouldn’t have had a greater, more valuable experience with learning to read. Now that I am older, I appreciate her going the extra mile and put in her time and effort along with me to help someone with something so important. Mrs. Boken has most definitely impacted my life and taught me not only how to be literate, but she has encouraged me to use my abilities to help others who may have trouble or weak spots.

One of the most frequent posts on my literary log was of me deciding what I wanted to wear for the day. Every morning when I wake up I get ready and the last thing I do is get dressed. Like anyone else, before we choose what we wear, we ask ourselves how we want to dress. We ask ourselves if we want to dress warm or cool, comfy or nice, and usually what matches what. When we were little, this didn’t really matter to us because our moms and dads told us what to wear, but, as we’ve grown older, we’ve taught ourselves how to become literate in deciding what to wear.  We have learned from our parents how to choose what we want to wear and how to put it on. They taught us what matches what, how to tie our shoes, and that when it’s chilly outside to dress warm! But our parents aren’t the only ones who have brought about the literateness we have for clothing. Everyone and everything around us are literate in different ways to clothing. We see all the different styles people have on television, in magazines, and in class, and little did we know, they probably dress differently than we would all because they have a different take of literacy on what they wear.

It may be hard to believe but shopping is one of my favorite things to do! I love going to the mall and picking out new outfits and shoes, and coming to college has caused me to have shopping withdrawals! For the first couple weeks I was okay, but then I started going online to kind of ease the urge to want to shop. I really didn’t realize until this project that even going online and looking for clothing is a form of literacy. I just find it so crazy that styles of clothing and what we choose to wear can be interfered with how we read our minds and use our judgment of clothing items.

Now that we're all older, if we look back, we can remember ourselves as young children looking at picture books, trying to write our names with the pencil between our toes, and even deciding what we wanted to eat off of the McDonald's menu. But at such a young age, did we truly realize that what we were doing was reading and writing? And did it ever matter to us how or when we developed such useful abilities? I can admit that if someone asked me how I learned to read or write, I would probably respond by saying, “I just did” or “I taught myself.” But after reading Debora Brant’s Sponsors of Literacy, I realized that all my experiences I had with literacy weren’t progressed on my own and despite the struggles I may have had with literateness, I easily overcame them. I soon realized that I had family and friends who were teaching me new words or how to pronounce things, and in school we were learning how to read and write before I even knew how to color inside the lines. But even coloring inside the lines is literacy, because you have to read where is safe to color and where you need to stop. Throughout my childhood, I was provided with many sponsors who helped me learn to read and write, but it didn’t stop there. They preceded their support by providing me with new content, teaching me proper grammar and spelling. Up until today, I cannot deny that I have been blessed with family, friends, institutions, media, and technology that have educated me with my many views of literacy. Reading Sponsors of literacy has opened many doors in my mind to show me the value that is brought about in literacy, and why this skill is vital to everyday life.