This is just a Test

Hey this is just testing!

Final Thoughts – A Reflection on This Semester

As many of my fellow colleagues have – I would like to say thank you to everyone for a wonderful, informative, explorative, and entertaining semester. Thank you Professor for sharing your thoughts and incite to this amazing world of New Media and New Literacies.

With that said - what a journey this has been!

New media is constantly being developed and as in all things this leads to the need for new literacies. New literacy is the building block to the 21^st century learner. As learners explore and utilize the new media, a culture begins to emerge that requires participation and collaboration. Learning is no longer a linear track but has morphed into a multi-facet one.

Through this course I have been able to experience something that I have not experienced in sometime, I had to learn new media and I was behind in technology. In my career I deal with technology every day and I use technology to teach others. I found that I have not even scratched the surface of the new media that is available to use and enrich the learning environments. WOW!!!

I am now on a journey to explore where this new literacy and understanding of new media can take me. I had some anxiety to record my voice to create a presentation online for YouTube – but I did it! I enjoyed this experience so much I purchased a professional microphone and I have started to record my lectures to allow my students to play them back for review.

I am proud to say that I am not a true native to the technology but I am immersed into a whole new world that I can be a participant like never before!

Interview of Adolescent

I set out to learn about the social media usage of an adolescent. What I learned was far beyond what I imagined!

I interviewed my nephew who is 16 years old and an advent user of social media. I know him as an out spoken teen that seems centered around himself and friends. He is a typical teenage boy.

I went into the interview with a set of questions that I thought would delve into areas that I felt were relevant to this assignment, but I found myself shocked and awestruck by the answers and started asking more in depth questions.

I first began to inquire about the personal aspect of being connected 24/7 -

• Being a teenager in the information age, how do you think that you fit in? What types of Social Media do you participate in? Do you feel that participating is expected or would you not fit in if you didn’t participate?
• Do you prefer texting to talking over the phone?
• Do you use different media types such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube? How do you feel when you are connected? How do you feel when you are not able to get online?
• Do you share differently online than you do in person? Do you post things that you may not want your parents to see or know? Do you feel more powerful when you can post online?

It was interesting to find that he felt that he fits in because he uses the social media and that if you do not participate you will be an outsider. He prefers to text if he does not need an immediate response or doesn't need to have an in depth conversation but was comfortable doing both texting and talking on the phone. He uses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram frequently. He also reads many blogs and has blogged some.

He shared that his online presence is monitored by his parents, but, that doesn't matter because he respects himself and others to not post inappropriate things.

Then I changed a little bit to focus on the learning environment –

• Are you allowed to use your phone during the school day? Does the school have use policies for texting and surfing while at school? Do you think that it is a right to use your phones during school?
• Do your teachers incorporate different technologies or media in the lessons? Is using social media encouraged?
• Do you think that you can learn from the use of social media or is it just for entertainment and socializing with friends?
• Do you learn about the dangers and responsibilities of using social media at school? How do you learn what is acceptable to do online and what is not?
• Would you like to see more use of social media in the classroom to learn?

From here I started to learn more about his take on the global environment of social media –

• Do you think that social media enables you to learn about other cultures and societies?
• Do you feel that by contributing on social media sites you can shape the opinion of others about you and your community?
• Do you feel that you have a greater responsibility to others through online connections?

This is when everything got interesting, after asking about the global environment. He explained to me that there is a responsibility to others online. I asked him to elaborate on this. He stated, “Do you remember the earthquake in Haiti or the tsunami of Japan? How about the recent typhoon? We all tweeted and face booked together to share our thoughts, our feelings, our call to action for assistance. We all wanted to help anyway we can. This is what being online all is about. It isn’t as simple as look at me and what I can do. It is about what we as a community can do for others.” I asked him do describe what he calls his community and further was surprised by his answer. He started by asking me what my community was, and went to explain that his community was “everyone I can touch online and that can touch me, this is my community. Who can I share with and is willing to share with me”. I asked him what is being shared. He stated, “Emotions, trust, feelings, information, knowledge, smiles, and most of all the future of us!” He went further to say, “being online and using the social media takes billions of individual voices and combines it into one loud collaborative roar that can shake every bit of the world”. All I kept finding myself saying is “WOW!”

Online it seems, is not about a me generation and see what I can do. Being online is about a sense of being a part of something far greater, it is about belonging to the largest and greatest community ever – the human race!

Deconstructing an Advertisement

Greetings fellow classmates:

This module we have been learning about deconstructing an advertisement. This was a very interesting topic for me as I have not really ever stopped to think about the psychology behind an advertisement or the meanings of all the parts of an advertisement. This journey made me stop and think beyond the apparent message and realize the subtle ones as well!

I learned that there were 4 Steps of deconstructing an advertisement from the Media Education Foundation. The first step is to Make Observations. Here I looked at and evaluated the aesthetics of the advertisement. I started to explore the meaning behind the way light and colors are used. Also, I tried to determine why they chose the person they did for the advertisement. After this I attempted to determine the complete purpose of the advertisement. I first looked to determine if it was attempting to sell, inform, teach, or inspire. I looked to see what the initial product was. I then determined if I felt the advertisement met its purpose. The third step was a difficult one for me as it was looking beyond the actual upfront content and tried to think about what assumptions were being made by the advertisers. The fourth step was even more difficult as I was asked to consider possible consequences of the message. What does this mean, Consequences? I really had to stop and think about this. I never thought about the social impact or nonimpact of an advertisement. Then I saw that advertisement from Home Depot and it hit me- WOW!!! There are consequences about the images, words, even the layout of an advertisement. It is about how it affects you and everyone around you!

This was truly an amazing journey for me to view media in a new way!

Reflection - Week 6

In reflection of this module’s reading and video content, I found an overall theme emerging of the perceived effect of technology on the democratic process and what citizenship is in our society today. As described by Saskia Sassen in the video Networks, Power, and Democracy openness and accessibility of a technology does not mean equality or as she states “Democracy” for everyone using the technology. She did a comparison between the financial and electronic activists with regards to the balance or democracy distribution of power throughout the networks (Social Media and other technologies). She found that the same dynamic exists between the entities that have control and the rest of the population. She discussed that 20% holds most of the power. This was very interesting to me as I listened to the rest of this talk. I started to think about what she was calling the social logic of this situation and started to consider that even though the technology is designed to allow access for everyone; does new literacy come into play? In other words, is there an imbalance to the democracy due to the lack of literacy? I also began to think about what I read from Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age.

In Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age by W. Lance Bennet it was discussed how the idea of being a citizen is changing. It was stated in the opening sentence, “Democracy is not a sure thing” along the same lines a s discussed by Sassen. While reading this document I kept thinking about the movie Starship Troopers (One of my favorites) in that to be a citizen you had to become a Trooper. The comparison came to me because it brought out that to be a citizen you must participate in some way to contribute to the advancement of society. Bennet has brought to light that the political concerns of modern youth (aged 18 -25) seem to have shifted to focus on “lifestyle concerns that seem outside the realm of government”. (PG 2) Bennet went on to discuss “Two Paradigms of Youth Engagement, one of disengaged and one of engaged.

The key issues that I am taking away from the readings and video are that there is a great discussion as to the role that technologies are playing in the idea of democracy or that we are all equal and able to contribute the same. As a second issue we need to question, “Does contributing mean participating as a citizen?”

Changes in Literacy

What Counts as Literacy?

Literacy used to be seen as simply being able to read and write. Being able to comprehend what you had read and being able to engage with others about what you had read was the standard of being literate. The media in which our form of communication has transitioned from pen and paper, otherwise known as hardcopy, to online media such as blogs like you are reading now, newsgroups, chat rooms, online journals, and other publications. As new medias become social norm so does the necessity for new literacy.

How literacy changes in response to the new media landscape

The use of technology in industry has become an accepted use of practice and therefore today's students need to learn to become literate in computers, online reading, and technology itself. They need to obtain these skills, such as credibility of online material, how to perform searches, and how to practice safety on the Internet.

What value should be applied to the new forms of communication that emerge?

It is my opinion that we should apply full value to the efforts of transitioning to considering a new way of communication or media to a technology that is only a current fad. There needs to be socialized standard use or common practice of using a certain technology for us to actually place a value to it. What do you all think?

Furthering My Learning - Texts and New Media

A look at the Quote…

Having been asked to respond to the following quote: "The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9). Throughout the readings of chapters 1, 5, and 10 in Literacies Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, it is discussed what Functional Literacy is and the social constraints of only being functional is. It is further discussed what "New Literacies" are. I will discuss what I do with different texts, how I process them, and how I use them to further my own learning.