Coming into DTC this year, I already knew that technology has started to play a really big role in how we receive and process our literacy, but I didn’t know just how big it has started to become. My first year of high school I went to a public school, where the school curriculum was just like any other public school. Once I moved to Yakima and started attending private school however, all the students in this school were assigned their own personal iPad to use on a daily basis for classes. This completely changed the way I learned and processed literacy simply because of the way I was able to read it. Relating this back to “Composition in a New Key” by Kathleen Yancey, Yancey writes about how our interpretation of literacy is changing/has changed because of digital media. “Writing IS words on paper, composed on the page with a pen or pencil by students who write words on paper, yes – but who also compose words and images and create audio files on blogs in word processors.” Yancey has good points here when she discuses this, because this is what literacy is becoming. No longer is it just considered words on a paper, but it also applies to other forms of multimedia literacy such as videos, pictures, gifs, etc. Considering this article was written in 2004, it has served it’s purpose because it has shown how literacy has even changed since then. While both good and bad things have come out of this new style of literacy, an example of something good is content curation. In that past, content curation has always been present, it just hasn’t been as easily accomplished as it can be now. According to Margot Bloomstein in “Breaking Down the Steps to Content Curation,” gathering multiple opinions from many people on a topic has never been easier. As a content curator, their job is to organize information and combine it in a way that is easier for the reader to process. This shift in literacy to me is a good thing. I’ve never been a big fan of reading physical text, and while sometimes it’s a good way to gather information, 95% of the time that same source is somewhere online, most likely in an easier format to process than just straight text. Whether its a video, picture, text, or a combination of all three, there’s many new ways to process literacy.
Citation: Gif made by myself on GifSoup.com
Copyright 1999-2017, Stephen Hillenburg, Spongebob Squarepants.
