Chapter 1
- What are your main insights and ideas from the given L&K chapter?
- I enjoyed reading about Freire’s work and his idea of “reading the word and the world”. I have long thought that attending college was more about learning about the world rather than about the chosen subject matter. It just seems that people who attend college are often more mature and ready to face the world than those who do not. Reading is much the same way. When you attend college you have to learn to read in a different way and learn to read much more advanced material. This makes you more ready to take on the world as Freire alluded to. This idea was further enhanced on p. 19 when the authors site Gee. Gee “defines being literate as having control, or fluent mastery, of language uses within what he calls secondary Discourses. Gee defines Discourses as ‘ways of being in the world’, which integrate words, acts, gestures, attitudes, beliefs, purposes, clothes, bodily movements and positions, and so on.
- I was interested in the section about “New literacies” because that’s what the title of the book is. The authors state “these new and changing social practices involve new and changing ways of producing, distributing, exchanging, and receiving texts by electronic means. These include the production and exchange of multimodal forms of texts that can arrive via digital code as sound, text, images, video, animations, and any combination of these.” I definitely think that literacy is changing. Students have been known to use “text speak” in formal writing because that is what they are used to. Students are also used to taking in a lot of information in a very short amount of time due to the abundance of videos and images in their everyday life. Reading text seems slow and clunky now compared to watching a video.
- What unique terminology, jargon, buzzwords, and other concepts appear in this reading that required your careful attention and definition? What are your interpretations of these words and concepts?
- The first word that I stopped and thought about was psycholinguistics. I actually stopped and typed the word into google to get a better idea of what the authors were talking about. Google told me that psycholinguistics is the psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. I have thought about how people acquire languages because I have children. I taught both of my children at young ages how to sign simple things so that they could “speak” to me at a younger age. My one year old is currently in a phase where she wants things but doesn’t know how to voice them so it comes across as a screeching sound. She hasn’t learned yet how to do the producing of the language. I have also read that people who grow up in different cultures who speak different languages physically change their mouths and tongues to be able to speak those languages. That’s why someone who is a native speaker of one language will always have a sort of accent if they speak another language. I have not thought about how psychology plays into language though so I am looking forward to what they have to say about this.
- What additional scholarship, popular media, teaching resources, or other media are related to your developing understanding of both (digital) storytelling and this chapter?
- After reading this chapter, I still wasn’t quite sure what digital storytelling was. I consulted the magical google ball and found this website http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/index.cfm. Here I found a plethora of information on what it is, its uses, and some examples of digital stories. This is a great website to consult!
- After reading this chapter, I still wasn’t quite sure what digital storytelling was. I consulted the magical google ball and found this website http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/index.cfm. Here I found a plethora of information on what it is, its uses, and some examples of digital stories. This is a great website to consult!