Learning about text technologies and how they have changed has been both informative and engaging. We remember historical people, icons and events because their words and works were preserved for us by means of different text technologies. I enjoyed studying the historical record of texts and how when we think about text we have to include a myriad of different forms: cave paintings, tattoos, stone tablets, clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, manuscript books, musical scores, maps, printed books, engravings, newspapers, photographs, films, DVDs, computers. Every kind of text is produced by a special technology, but all those technologies share a simple purpose: they were designed to supplement the fragile human mind by providing a more durable and permanent memory system. The changing space of text technologies preserved memories and knowledge that is essentially the foundation of all human culture.
We live in an interesting time where the continual change of technology happens at such a rapid rate we often find it difficult to keep up. Technology has always been changing but it often took more than one generation to notice in the past. Today Technology changes perhaps dozens of times in a generation and it is mind-blowing to think of what the future of text may look like.
I enjoyed discussing and sharing with other students in this course. The commentaries, research projects, and final projects were diverse and each brought a unique perspective to a particular area of interest.
I made a short Animoto video to send off the course with I tried to embed it but it didn’t seem to work. http://animoto.com/play/q4BuNAYgEHuBJoAb3A5DcA
I wish everyone the best and hope that you all enjoy the Holidays 🙂
Thanks for sharing your video! It’s amazing that so many representations of ‘text’ and multi-literacies can be included in a short video. Animoto is one of the web 2.0 tools that I haven’t explored yet – but would like to – and it seems that it has a lot of possibilities for use in the classroom.
Cheers,
~Chenoa