Sierra

Devoss: The Future of Literacy Response 3

Devoss’s article, The Future of Literacy, investigates the lives of four people that launched themselves into the futures of literacy by interacting and experimenting with technology and computers when it was just an early invention. Joseph learned and developed visual literacy skills, Danielle honed her coding and-web design skills, Brittney worked on online language studies, and Charles worked through becoming literate in the field of gaming—all through self-sponsorship. The four people were self-sponsoring their own literacy in a world that was reluctant to jump into the new digital age. It wasn’t realized until some time later that being literate in these different subjects was necessary for the world to move forward. The 21st century is branded by the drastic differences it has in relation to the years before. As we move forward, literacy changes and develops in order to adapt to what the future has brought us.

Upon making advances in technology, the world has to keep up by updating the way that it understands those things: the literacies of the world have to be improved upon. Becoming literate in just reading and writing was once something that made you an intellectual and valuable member of society. Now, being able to read and write is only a fundamental step in getting ahead in the world. The way learning was approached in the past will no longer efficiently prepare people for success now that the world has adopted these new literacies. The future of literacy is not so much a part of the future anymore. It is in the here and now that it is important to understand how the world has changed and adapt it to the way we learn. We live in a more digitally complex world that will continue to grow around new advancements and innovative ideas. Just as the four people in the article did, it is now our responsibility to take advantage of these advancements and allow our minds to explore.

Literacy Log Rhetorical Analysis 3

In my lit log, one of the most frequent things that I wrote about was looking at the clock. I was constantly checking the time—even when I had nowhere specific to be. It seems as though our lives are attached to and run by the clock. We are constantly living our lives according to the time, which also makes me think of life as rhetorical; life is the rhetorical situation of all situations. All situations are encircled by the concept of life. The rhetors of this gigantically complex situation are all of the things, peoples, or ideas that influence anything we do. Things, as rhetors, convince and promote ideas not in the sense that they can speak, but in the sense that they generate ideas in people through their existence. The people that surround us influence the way we act and the principles that we each, individually inherit and live by. We, as people, are the audience of life and what life has to offer. We are the ones being convinced to go through life and live it as the rhetors have suggested or influenced in us. The exigence of life is, at its simplest definition, to live and survive.

Palfrey and Gasser, Born Digital Response 2

Palfrey and Gasser’s article discusses the digital gap between digital natives and digital immigrants. These “immigrants” that grew up without technology are having to deal with or even raise a generation of natives that are nearly entirely dependent upon the digital way of life. I feel that even those that dislike the new digital way of life are finding it necessary to upgrade the way they used to do things. There are teachers, schools, and school corporations applying technology to the way they approach teaching increasingly each year. These digital natives are being “natively” introduced to the digital world through the immigrants that are having to adapt to it. The natives have to adapt to technology as well, it’s just that it’s not as complicated or bewildering to them because they’ve seen it in action from an earlier age; the concept of digital technology isn’t as mystifying to them.

Though they live in the same environment surrounded by technology, it’s sort of like digital immigrants speak an entirely different language than digital natives. Immigrants have been tossed (maybe unwillingly) into this new digital world where all the natives speak in the language of digital technology.  But as they say, immersion is the best way to learn a new language. Immigrants are immersed in the digital age every day whether it be at work or home. Digital technology has changed the way we communicate and live our lives.

Many older generations are angry at how digital natives live and the deficiencies they claim that “kids nowadays” have. I don’t think it’s that they’re angry with technology, they’re more upset over the fact that people are abandoning everything that they had become comfortable with in their lives growing up. People are no longer living the only way that the older generations know how to live. I think that the abandonment of tradition or ways of doing things is upsetting to people that are more comfortable with the way they lived when they were younger. Maps are going out of date given GPS, people find no need to visit libraries to find information given the ingeniousness of search engines, and there are many other advancements through technology that have diminished people’s knowledge of how life was before the digital age. For many people, I believe that tomorrow, if technology was wiped off of the face of the earth, humanity would not know how to survive it.  

Literacy Log Rhetorical Analysis 2

Brandt: Sponsors of Literacy Response 1

Brandt describes a literacy sponsor as someone or something that supports, enforces, or even suppresses literacy. That means that literacy sponsors aren’t only the people that teach and enforce literacy; they are also those that hinder it. I feel that many people automatically think of literacy sponsors as being supportive of literacy, but in many cases it is the opposite. A very obvious example of literacy sponsors that withhold literacy is government officials, or the like, that prevent women and girls in certain countries from attending school or obtaining jobs. Those literacy sponsors inhibit the flow of literacy by limiting it within the population. There are also some religions and ways of life that withhold or discourage many different literacies ranging from technological literacies to subjects such as witchcraft or voodoo. Literacy sponsors in those cases suppress, withhold, or prevent those literacies from being spread.

A more close to home example of this type of literacy sponsor for me is one of the more cruel literacy sponsors that I’ve had—my brother. My illiterate abilities in playing video games can be semi attributed to him. Any time I’d get bored, I’d go to the living room and see my brother playing some random game and ask to play. He’d reluctantly agree, allow me to play, then yell at me the entire time. He never contributed to my knowledge of playing the video games and in many ways discouraged me knowing anything at all in the sense that he didn’t actually want me to know how to play…sort of. Any time after he had been playing someone who would repeatedly beat him at the game, he’d say, “Hey, Sierra, come play with me. I feel like winning.” He (as Brandt describes the literacy sponsor as gaining an advantage from supporting or suppressing literacy) gained the advantage of always winning by discouraging my literacy in video games. It may not be that important of a literacy, but it is a literacy nonetheless that has been hindered by the discouragement of my brother. As a result, I have come to avoid video games at all costs and as a consequence, Minecraft, though not very difficult, is taking quite some time to get used to.

Literacy Sponsor 3

A literary sponsor from my life that I’d like to recognize is a teacher that I had once upon a time in middle school. Her name and appearance are indeed lost to me but the skill she taught me will forever be with me. This specific teacher taught me how to type. I didn’t particularly enjoy this class, but it gave me a literacy that I now am very dependent upon. For the sake of not referring to my teacher as “this specific teacher,” I am going to call her Mrs. Qwerty. Mrs. Qwerty approached typing in a most annoying way and created a class that was stress-inducing and irritating. Being a very reluctant digital native, I didn’t enjoy technology very much as a kid and I definitely didn’t see the point of learning how to type. Mrs. Qwerty would have us type at the computer going through a typing program but always introduced the letters we would be practicing that day at the beginning of class. She would come up with weird ways to make us remember which finger typed which letters. For one specific lesson, she would walk around the room spraying a French vanilla scented spray shouting, “French vanilla! First finger: ‘f’ to ‘v’!” When she wasn’t overly ambitious with aerosol sprays, she would walk around the room as we took our “typing tests” catching those students who would cheat by looking under the box that was placed over the keyboard that prevented us from seeing the letters as we typed. As irritating as that box was, it was actually a very fundamental thing that forced me early on to type without relying on looking at the letters—something that increased speed in my typing. Mrs. Qwerty’s tough-love method of teaching was the strongest influence on my literacy in typing.

Literacy Log Rhetorical Analysis 1

Since starting school here at Purdue, a lot of my schedule has been booked with classes. I’ve never thought of class as a rhetorical situation, but through English 106 I’ve learned that nearly everything is a rhetorical situation. With school comes the demand, or exigence, of being successful and passing any course we choose to take. I’ve noticed that biology lecture is a great example that clearly lays out the constituents of the situation. Dr. Bos, the professor and rhetor of the situation, begins class as soon as the clock strikes 12:30. He begins with announcements then moves on to the bulk of the class which is the material. Now, he isn’t just winging it and spending 50 minutes getting sidetracked and talking about life as many of my teachers in high school sometimes did. He has a set, planned out, and constricted amount of information that he has to get out to his students in his allotted 50 minutes. He has the constraint of planning out a lesson that isn’t too short nor too long—it has to completely take up the time allotted or else he’ll have students leaving in the middle of his lecture or kids reporting his lack of teaching. As the rhetor, he is giving us information and convincing us to take it in. His whole purpose is to present biology to us in a way that will allow us to, hopefully, pass the exams. The audience has constraints as well. We’re sitting in a huge lecture hall taking notes off of these slides from a power point that just keep moving and sliding on as he gives explanations and detailed information adding to whatever is on the screen. It makes it difficult to absorb and/or record the five tons of information that is being thrown at us. Our constraints consist of (but are not limited to) being able to hear, see, understand, and keep up. All of the people in the room create a low humdrum that hinders the ability for some to concentrate. The talking, eating, late arrivers, early leavers, and keyboards typing is all a distraction to what should be the main focus of the situation: the lesson. We are not a random audience, we are a specific one. We chose the course and chose to be a part of the situation. Therefore, as an audience in this situation, our responsibility is to listen to and give success to the rhetor and his purpose for oratory rhetoric. It is a very compact and straightforward rhetorical situation. The audience and rhetor are both limited to the space of the room at the given time of the lecture and are constrained with the urgency to absorb (in the case of the audience) or present (in the case of the rhetor) information.

Literacy Sponsors #2

One of the most interesting forms of literacy, to me, is musical literacy. With reading and writing, you learn to identify words, then you learn to say the words, and soon enough you are literate in a language. In music, it’s very much the same thing. You learn to identify notes by where they are placed on staves, the length of the notes by their appearance, and different markings that tell you how they should be played. Then, after incorporating that ability with an instrument, you become musically literate. I find it really fascinating the similarities between the two literacies: reading/writing and musical literacy. Learning to read and write makes you literate, but being able to read and write in one language doesn’t make you literate in all languages. In that same sense, learning to play the cello does not make you literate in playing the trumpet. Learning to play different instruments and learning to read in different clefs is exactly like becoming literate in a new language. It’s quite remarkable how comparable the two literacies are.

I absolutely love the world of musical literacy because it’s something that is appreciated more once you study it. I remember when I was younger thinking about how boring classical or instrumental music was. I’ve realized how hard it is for many people to identify with music that doesn’t include lyrics. Ordinarily, when people who haven’t studied music or played instruments listen to, say a symphony, they hear it as a whole; they hear it as just one entire block-composition of music. That’s the way it was for me before studying music and taking theory classes. But as I learned to play an instrument and as I performed in musical ensembles, what used to run through my brain as a big clump of music became filtered and I began listening to symphonies with the ability to hear each individual musical part come together to be that “clump” of music I used to only hear. That’s why I’ve included the video. It shows how the “clump” runs through and is dissected in my mind. It’s as close a comparison I can find as to what I see when I listen to music.

Growing up, we’ve all had literacy sponsors; whether it be teachers, parents, or mentors—someone or a group of people have contributed to our abilities to read and write. But as the definition of literacy becomes more and more broad, the definition of literacy sponsors does as well. I’ve had some amazing teachers throughout my education who have all contributed to my literacy, but one of the main influences of literacy for me have been all of the authors that have penned the numerous books that I’ve read. My teachers, as sponsors, provided me with the simple tools needed for literacy, but the authors and the books that I have read put those tools to use and built my literary abilities into what they are today.

Literacy isn’t only the ability to read and write, but the ability to understand what it is that you are reading and writing. If you take a person who has never written or read anything in their life and you draw the letter “A” and ask them to do the same, they can copy the shape and the lines but still have no knowledge of what they’ve actually done. For a better example, take Shakespeare. Any technically literate person can sit down, pull out Shakespeare and read the words lain in front of them, but it takes a specific type of literacy to be able to piece together and understand Shakespeare’s genre of writing. That’s how literacy worked out for me in the beginning. It was fairly easy for me to learn to say and sound out words and identify or memorize the shapes of letters, but it wasn’t until I actually picked up books and began reading constantly that my literacy abilities became real. Each and every author offers up different writings that give way to different interpretations, but nearly each and every author already has a set interpretation that they intend to make known to their audience. Reading different books often helped me to “decipher,” in a sense, different authors’ purpose in writing what they did. Only through the practice of reading was I able to pick up on and learn this method of literacy that resulted in my abilities to understand what I was reading at a more in-depth level.