Course Description
It is the premise of this course that to understand how new technologies may be modifying human experience it is necessary to situate them in an historical context. We will begin, then, by examining writing itself as the fundamental information and communication technology underpinning any literate culture. As Walter Ong observes, people in early literate cultures thought of writing “as an external, alien technology, as many people today think of the computer” (p. 81). Plato, for example, deliberated over its benefits and drawbacks in the Phaedrus just as we now deliberate over how the computer will change education, communications, and so on. [2] In considering Plato’s remarks, Ong observes that in terms of its influence on human culture, writing is the most radical of any communication technology.
Reflection
I took Text Technologies in my final semester along with ETEC 590 so my final reflection from that course remains current and is shown below. However to tie this experience along with previous courses, I wonder if taking this course earlier in the program would have influenced my approach to other assignments or if, because of the fact that this was one of the last courses I took in the program, I was able to create learning outcomes that displayed my growth over the past year. Through the reworking of the material I researched in ETEC 511 and the inclusion of the new material gleaned from the course readings in ETEC 540, I was able to re-examine the impact of digital technologies on cultural transmission.
I was once again reaffirmed in my attempt to develop a healthy social constructivist approach to curricular design that emphasized the importance of the adult moderators of the constructivist classroom and their role as transmitters of culture to the pre-adult population.
Artefact
Digital literacy also assumes visual literacy and entails the user have both the ability to comprehend what is represented and the ability to comprehend the internal logics and encoding schemes of that representation” (Dobson & Willinsky, 2009, p. 16).
- dynamic and evolving
- communal and social
- to have access to vast amounts of knowledge
- user as both consumers and (co)-creators of content and knowledge
- facilitate global interconnections and intercultural exchange
- assumes cultural access to the conventions of digital literacy – languages and visual conventions, traditionally Western, predominantly
Therefore, social media plays a pivotal role in enabling users to become digitally multi-literate. Most sites feature a combination of the above mentioned features on their sites and users have to know how to navigate through different forms of hypertext and images to fully appreciate the social media sites. Social software constitutes a fairly substantial answer to the question of how digital literacy differs from and extends the work of print literacy. It speaks to how people’s literacy combines the taking in and giving back of words (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009, p. 21).
Dobson, T. & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In Cambridge Handbook on Literacy. Cambridge, Retrieved from http://pkp.sfu.ca/files/Digital%20Literacy.pdf