Digital Texts in and Out of School

Introduction: "Students are required to shift from a world replete with multimodal text, remixing and mashing, and fluid novice– expert relations, to a relatively unidimensional formalized context centred upon only one form of static text and structured by particular adult– child authority and knowledge hierarchies."

It took me several times of rereading this sentence until I fully grasped what it was talking about. It speaks of the shift from learning outside the classroom that is filled with new technologies to the way most school system present their education in the form of textbooks and other more outdated ways. This is not always because the teacher feels more comfortable with that style, but they might not have the funds to facilitate that type of learning. The interactions are also completely different; in the classroom there is a certain hierarchy that is maintained, while the outside learning place can have roles reversed. I remember one time I was looking up how to reformat a hard drive and the educator in the video was a boy around the age 8. At that age he knew more about computers than I did and I appreciated that he would post a video to help others through the process.

Chapter 1: "For Jacob, motivation to produce a movie about skateboarding comes partly from the fact that it is a subject with high status in his peer culture and that it is familiar to him as a consumer (he said he had watched ‘millions’ of skateboarding videos)."

Expertise of the learner is a large portion of education. If the student is interested in the subject and has experience with it they are much more likely to readily participate in the assignments. Concepts from every discipline can be taught with a degree of freedom in subject. The challenge is correlating the two, but that is a process the student needs to participate in that will ultimately lead them to a critical thinking activity about the concept and the subject they chose.

Chapter 2: "Literacy is not just about decoding marks on a page; it is also about performing social acts of meaning, where meanings and practices vary according to context (Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Street, 1997)."

This sheds new light on how I see literacy. I have not thought about it in this way, but this makes sense. Literacy varies when applied to different things, it does not remain constant through it's application. Not sure there is much more I can say about this quote, except that it makes you wonder.

Chapter 3: "From a critical digital literacy perspective, the creation of a profile page is clearly socially motivated behaviour, where the power relations that exist around the text are explored, unpicked and possibly transformed."

In a profile page it more about framing for the editor because this frame is their way of giving the viewer perspective. Though everyone has different perspectives on things, it is the job of the editor to guide your way of thinking. In a way it is like selling a product, just the product is the editor.

Explain the readings are changing or reinforcing the ways you think about technology in your classroom. What are the barriers/challenges to integrating technology in the ways the reading are promoting? How do you see the literacies practices identified in the readings as promoting the kinds of academic literacy practices we want young people to develop through schooling?

I think the largest struggle, especially where we are, is access to the technology to integrate it. Funds are low and overall wealth of the state are sub-par. This leads to the better and more successful technology integrations out of reach. The literacy practices seem to be promising with the correct integration. As we move forward with education we see a lot more third party opportunities for students to help with the integration. Colleges and government offices are helping public schools enhance their capabilities at a reasonable cost.