Blogs

This week I wanted to focus my blog post on the value of education.  I am currently taking an economics class at Haverford entitled Microfinance.  The first segment of the course is on poverty and this past week we have been focusing on education.  I think most people in the developed world would argue that education has value but what about the people on the other side of the world whose children have been in school through fifth grade but still cannot read a simple paragraph?  Literacy is a difficult tool to develop but some progress should be made in five years.  The majority of families around the world are educating their children but how much are they actually getting in return? How can families below the poverty line in developing countries measure this value?  How do parents decide whether or not they should send one of their 4 children to school for 15 years, or send all of their children to school but only through basic primary education?  In this class we have been looking at how literacy is defined and its cultural value.

I was having a conversation with one of my friends who is currently taking an ASL (American Sign Language) class at UPenn.  She was telling me about a talk she has to go to and our discussion really got me thinking about some of the themes in this class.  

First, she introduced me to the word "co-equality" which according to Webster's online dictionary means "the state of being equal."  However when she was referring to it in relation to her ASL class it was a bit more specific to context.  This is something we've been talking about a lot in expanding our definitions of literacy; the idea that one can be literate (or equal) in one context does not mean they are literate (or equal) in all contexts and situations.  My friend pointed out to me that the deaf community is one of the few disability communities which is expected to almost completely assimlate into "normal" society.  I say community because the deaf community has their own language and in many ways culture (whereas most other disabilities do not) but it is widely ignored by the hearing community as a whole.  I'm not trying to make a statment about whether this is good or bad, it is simply reality.  It is relevant to this class because as we're thinking about different kinds of literacies and different contexts, I think it is a really good example of how language goes beyond the ability to read and write.  

If anyone is interested in going to the talk at UPenn, here is a link to the description and such:http://bit.ly/wdFcoi

This post was written on an iPad. I tried to correct all typos, but some of them might still remain... My fingers aren't quite as sure about here they go without physical keys.

I'm pretty sure I referenced this article for Alice's Ed Tech class, but it's a good one, so I'm going to pull it out again: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/two-step-tech-integration-elementary-mary-beth-hertz 

I've been thinking a lot about how we're using tech in this class, both with iPads and with twitter. I've seen quite a few comments on twitter especially, but also here on Serendip, that the tech is in some ways lowering the depth of connection we have with each other as we engage with the material. That has looked like playing with the iPads instead of listening to the entire iPad introduction, as well as occasionally forced conversations or overwhelming conversations on twitter. I can write this blog post on my iPad, but I can't yet use it seamlessly when I'm interacting with someone. At this point, I really don't know enough about the iPad for it to work quite as well for me as my computer. I've been using it in as many different situations as possible--passing it around to sign up for snacks for my a cappella group, bringing it along any time I might want to use Internet, and trying to push past some of the initial slowness of learning the tech. To be fair, I have an iPhone, so I'm already familiar with multitouch gestures and the way I-devices work.

I really didn't want to feel unoriginal or predictable and write this blogpost on the presence, not use, of technology in our lives, but for some reason ever since getting the iPad, I've been particularly sensitive to this topic. I was trying to write on something else, but that just wasn't happening I suppose.

It first started in class on Thursday, when I realized no one was paying attention to the iPad introduction, save for a few people. Most were preoccupied by the iPad, and even during subsequent discussion, the preoccupation with the iPad maintained.

About five or so hours after class I was in a training for my placement. The trainers asked us to take down a web address. I immediately texted the link to my friend for both of us, and the girl behind me took a picture of the slide with her camera. Two of the trainers commented, one remarking that she had expected us to take out pen and paper, and the other about our almost unorthodox use of technology for something so simple.

I had been struggling on not writing about technology up until I was watching the superbowl a few hours ago. Two of the first few commercials (I don't recall what they were for, but I know one was for a car), including Twitter hashtags at the end of their commercial.

All these things got me thinking, not about our use of technology, but rather it's presence in our lives, and whether it's taking over. I thought about the baby who expected the book to work like an iPad, and the cat who was playing a mouse chase game on the iPad.

For my fourth class this semester, an independent study with an anthropology professor revolving around the topics covered in the 360, I have explored in the last week a series of pieces of literature delving into the differences and paradoxes between oral-based cultures versus those that have developed systems of writing. Specifically, my studies started by looking at Jack Goody's theory on the "technology of writing" in which he essentially argues that societies that have developed a system of writing have created a new tool or "technology" which has enabled them to be cognitively more advanced. The argument has been widely critiqued and problematized and I think the literature in general raises some critically important, provoking ideas.

I will summarize here a few of the contentions I found most stimulating. The first is the presence of logic and the potential way writing enables various ideas and works from different authors and different times to be consolidated in a way that is more logical and thus helpful than what can be done via oral tradition only. A second contention is that of audience. Whereas oral tradition requires, at least seemingly, an audience, written works can be written and transmitted without knowledge of a specific audience. I find this idea particularly interesting because it feeds directly into a third point about variability. Written works are stagnant to a certain extent, copyright and authorial presentation are limited to the page, lacking change with time, speaker or audience.

I left last Thursday class a little shaken.  Our conversation and the Breaking Project reading made me think about things I didn’t really want to think about.

Some background:

I want to use this blog to reflect on some of the thoughts I have had about defining literacy.  In class we worked in groups or pairs and expanded our idea of literacy.  My group came up with the following as our working definition of literacy: the ability to manipulate secondary discourses in order to give you agency.  Each of these words carries a lot of weight and purpose for me and to the overall definition.  I particularly like the idea of “manipulation” here because I think language can be, and often is, manipulative.  Being literate can mean different things in different contexts.  This idea was also something I have been thinking about and elaborating on in the last few weeks. We typically understand being literate as simply reading and writing and associate it with books and alphabet letters, but with this definition, the more elaborate interdisciplinary nature of literacy is acknowledged. Being literate in math or in science, or being literate in facebook or twitter, are now all accepted statements, and logical under this definition of literacy. On the twitter, the idea of being literate in music was brought up.  This to me, was particularly interesting because it broached the idea that being literate is not only about seeing something on a page and understanding it, but also about feeling and transmitting feeling.  Does this definition account for that? I wonder what the boundaries of this definition are. Is this definition sufficient? Or are we still treading around it?

Since our introduction to the iPad on Thursday, I have been thinking about how using one would alter situations where they had previously not been used. As an expansion of the reading that listed pros and cons of iPads , I have been trying to critically think about what impact it could have on my experiences and the experiences of others. The first instance that I had been thinking about was how a iPad could fit into the kindergarten classroom where I teach. Every morning I teach a small group lesson that focuses on reading comprehension, writing letters, and making connections through a poem/nursery rhyme. The nursery rhyme is on a board and we often use white boards to practice writing words or letters as well as coloring pictures that connect to the rhyme. I can see how iPads could have a place in this type of situation; instead of erasing a whiteboard after each word or struggling to make sure every student can see the text of the poem, each child could have their own iPad. This way, they could practice writing words, coloring, or playing games on their own comfort level and a lot of time could be saved. Despite this, the introduction of iPads into this situation seems stressful. Relying on the iPad eliminates much of the work and experiences of learning. The idea of learning to write by using a stylus on the iPad or even using the touch screen to form words is not the same type of experience that our and other generations learned to write through.

I unfortunately was not able to make it to last Tuesday’s rich discussion but would like to share my thoughts on Cassie Kosarek’s work. I thought that she created an interesting space on her “English thesis wanderings” blog where she presents her thesis preparation and which will culminate into her final thesis. It seems as if the burden behind thesis work and preparation is slightly lightened by the blog; it seems to be a more enjoyable journey into her final thesis presentation. Not all blog posts are cut from the English-thesis-proposal expectations or so I believe, but Cassie’s one post “So, Margaret Price and Judith Butler Walk into a Bar”, which is a virtual dialogue between the two theorists, was an original way to have her thesis work become a creative experiment.

I thought that this interestingly tied to what Kathleen Fitzpatrick describes to be the “remix” culture that is created from digital networks. Scholarly remixing allow for works to come together and form new interrelationships.

“Today, in the current system of print-based scholarship, this work takes the form of reviews, essays, articles, editions; tomorrow, as new mechanisms allow, these texts might be multimodal remixes, mashing up theories and texts to produce compelling new ideas.”-Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence, from originality to remix

There was a curious write-up of a curious book in the New York Times Book Review today: The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice. The reviewer reports that Liz "was a pathbreaker for social progress and women’s rights — albeit ... an unwitting one." Her stepdaughter said that, while she could detect a “thread of feminism” in some of the movies, she “doubted Taylor had been conscious of it.”

So this is a puzzling thought for me, and I'd be interested in hearing what you all think of it: can feminism be "accidental"? Or do you see it (definitionally, or in actuality) as a conscious, deliberate choice?