ETEC540: Text Techologies

Through the different readings, discussions and assignments, I feel that I have a developed a greater understanding literacy, evolution of literacy practices, and the influence that technology has had on literacy. As a result I have a deeper awareness of the importance of digital literacy and mulitleracies.  I would have enjoyed perhaps more visual content in the course. I appreciated the opportunities for collaborative assignments and enjoyed working together with classmates in their completion. I really posting to the course Weblog  and participating in the Rip Mix Feed activity. The latter was a practical opportunity to not only explore some Web 2.0 tools myself, but to view the artifacts that colleagues created and their reflections on them. I have some new tools to now add to my ever-growing list of web tools to explore.

This is my final term in MET. I will be submitting my ePortfolio for 590 at the end of this week, which is both exciting and bittersweet. Time has really flown! Perhaps I will see some of you in May at graduation!

It has been wonderful to learn from and with all of you! I wish you all a wonderful break and holiday season, and best of lock in your remaining courses!

~Lauren

Though I enjoyed reading and extracting meaning from the various assigned readings in this class, I have found myself wishing for more oral and visual content. This is certainly not directed only at this class, but my overall experience in MET leaves me wondering why these courses don’t evolve as our projects do…
We are asked to create, impress and process using multiple kinds of media to demonstrate our collective digestion of knowledge, yet our course content is rooted in the past. I want to be engaged with course content as much as I am with the work of my peers…
Onwards and upwards. I learned so much over the course of this semester from the discussions both written in the forums, the Skype conversations with Marc and Kimberly, working with my final project team and finding my own meaning within the texts. I am inspired and have already begun adjusting my course material. I just had my ELL students create stories on Kerpoof and my Drama students draw storyboards on Pixton.
I am seeking a happy medium between literacy and orality where perhaps more can thrive, but what’s really important to me is the use of visual literacy.

In reading this past week’s reading and the glut of information we are receiving, especially text based information, made me think.  What are the affordances that this has brought to our online courses?   There is a lot more reading than in face to face classes (that I remember taking).  We did the class readings, then we did our written work.  There is so much more reading presented to us, that it is impossible to read it all.  We have all of our own work, on top of that of our teammates and peers.  I have compressed this blog from this semester into 2 minutes and 40 seconds.  This doesn’t include the discussion groups, comments on social book or outside websites that we linked to.  Here it is:

TimeWarp_1

I also entered all of this text into wordle. As a class, our writing was dominated by technology, literacy, orality and writing.  Below is a word cloud of all of the blog entries that we made in this class.

Unlike Bolter, I don’t think we are in the late age of print.  We are in the “early age of print”.  We have been confined to inks and paper, stuck within a frame in the physical world.  Outside of means of production (the printing press), the technical evolution has been slow – and the paradigm has stayed the same.  We are now moving from the horse and buggy to the automobile.  We are just starting to see the potential of text once it is unbound, digitally manipulated, stored, shared and massively networked.

This digital explosion has expanded our understanding of literacy beyond just reading and writing.  We spent a fair amount of time talking about the transition of Oral to written culture and the introduction of the image in the 19th century.  Dan’s look at the poster (The Modern Poster is Born) showed the begining of an aesthetic that combines text and images that continues in web design today.  The poster’s rich with imagery invited a less literate populace to participate in a more visual form of communication.  Posters are still used in education today where scientists present concepts in visual, brief and understandable forms.  Radio and television brought forth a new age of orality, where we could choose when the affordance of text was best suited and where the audio/visual was.

The graphic novel, which Colleen’s YouTube video explored also allowed for visual literacy to dominate and bring film and television “grammar” to the printed page.  The reduction of cost to access the printed word has evolved from popular culture of comic books and penny newspapers,  to a complex online world where the cultural walls between high culture and low culture have vanished. (Bolter, chapter 10) This combined with low cost electronic devices has brought literacy to more people than ever before. “However it is important to note that before the invention of the printing press, literacy was a privilege for only the upper class. The Church controlled not only what was read, but who was allowed to read it.” (mbourdon)

Now with digital technology, the students can become the authors and not just consumers.  In Yuki, Christina and Collen’s Graphic Novels in the Classroom  they explore various techniques that students can create their own graphic novels with ZooBurst, Go!Animate and Pixton.  They tie this to the curriculum, but are also turning students from consumers to creators. The digital revolution lessens the role of the publisher and allows everyone to participate in our social dialogue, through many different means.

The  flipped classroom is possible because of the affordances of the internet.  Why recreate the same information over and over again in the classroom if it is easily accessible on the internet.  Flipped learning enables Production Group Work where students can form an understanding in a team environment.  This helps students work towards solving real world problems which are usually done in teams.

As a final thought, it would be good to balance the readings in the class of a critique of these post modern times with a counterweight of techniques for dealing with our current status.  It is one thing to look at the changes critically, but we are all in the midst of coping with this revolution.  Balancing readings that suggest how we can cope and adjust to this new reality would be useful.

I wish everyone a very happy holiday season, and hope to see you in January!

MarcA

I have found this course to be both challengning and interesting. I think that at this time in our technological development as a society, this course is incredibly relevant.

Some major learnings from my research, course readings and projects or postings from other students (I have made comments in the brackets to demonstrate how I felt that this learning was acquired or shown):

• There are a variety of tools that can support online learning and literacy skills. Some of these are new, but many of them are just reworked ways of communicating (demonstrated through our  Rip.Mix.Feed activity and readings/posts).
• There have always been changes in literacy when new technologies are introduced, many people will fear and question these changes, but we may not know the impacts of them until after they have changed us (demonstrated through our research projects posted on the Weblog and through our readings).
• Certain technologies will necessarily promote certain types of literacy (demonstrated through our various projects and readings, particularly Ong).
• Image and text have always shared a place with respect to literacy, recent history has given authority to text, but this may be shifting (demonstrated through our readings and the choices of representation for our projects).

In the spirit of collaboration, I’d be interested to see if others would add anything to this list? What things did you learn? What stands out the most? What parts of the course were the most meaningful to you?

Cheers,

Rebecca

By عراقي1 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

This didn’t work as a “reply,” so I have added it here instead.

Here is the blog posting:

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept13/2013/11/24/graphic-novels-a-professional-development-workshop/#comment-1651

Here is my response: