In our world digital literacy is becoming increasingly prevalent and I have found that getting left behind is a constant concern of mine. When I face a new technology I get anxious and frustrated but I force myself to learn the process because I know that it will only become more and more important as I move forward professionally. The sponsorship I notice the most during these times of frustration are things like friends who have already gone through the learning process and can be leaned on for support or Google. I am stubborn and refuse to ask for help for as long as possible so Google is always the first place I go with a digital question. Luckily for me Google generally delivers the solution as well as a short cut or two so I appear more knowledgeable than I really am. I think most of us can appreciate that!

Digital sponsors resemble print based sponsors in that the necessity for the knowledge is encouraged by peers or the work place or both. I don’t believe the sponsors themselves are changing rather than the process in which they are approached or presented has developed in a new way. This can be related back to the idea that literacy not only builds up but spreads out, causing the change in sponsorship to really be a progression that is keeping up with the material deemed necessary to our world now.

The most recent “new literacy” that I experienced was one where I was the sponsor rather than the sponsored. My dad finally broke his old flip phone and we talked him into joining the rest of the world and getting an iPhone, he wasn’t happy about it and I knew it was because he didn’t want to re-learn everything on the device. He drug his feet all the way into the store and then chose the largest and most updated version because the salesman convinced him it was the “most user friendly.” After the man behind the counter got the phone activated and put a case on it he handed the phone to Dad. He instantly started poking at the screen and grew progressively more irritated as it remained black. Finally, when I could tell he was fed up, he asked the man “How the hell do you make this damn thing work?” The guy giggled in response and said, “Well, first off you’re holding it upside down.” As soon as we left the store Dad said, “That guy was laughing at me.” I knew he wasn’t actually angry at the man but I could also see his frustration and a little bit of apprehension since he had just had it confirmed that he didn’t know what the heck to do with the expensive little phone. After we got back to my house I spent the next hour working with him on the basic functions the iPhone offers and connected his email. My old man now uses the phone like it’s second nature and even feels comfortable using it for important business documents, transactions, and scheduling. Dad had the drive to learn the new literacy and I acted as a ready and willing sponsor. I feel confident that he could now teach someone else how to use this digital literacy because Dad’s literacy not only built upon his previous knowledge, but now it also has the opportunity to spread out and teach someone else.

I chose to do my interview with my father because he grew up in a rural portion of Illinois with 7 siblings. I believe his input and experience with different literacy practices could expand our data of ages 50+

1. Try to think of your earliest memories of writing and reading.  What do you remember of reading and writing before you began school?  Who helped you with it and what was that like?

Don’t remember reading and writing before school….I’m old.

2. What kinds of writing did you see your parents, siblings, and other family members doing as you were growing up?  What did they read, where, and when?

Father was a draftsman and wrote technical narratives with the work. No real memory of family members reading.

3. What stories did your parents tell you about their own efforts to learn to read and write?  What kinds of values did they place on reading and writing?

My father was an initially self educated man. He put value into  self education personal drive and entrepeurnialsm No real memories of parents putting emphasis on reading and writing. Teachers were the biggest driving force, especially while in Catholic School.

4. How did reading and writing change as you entered elementary school?  What did you do with it?

About 7th grade reading became a favorite pastime and I willingly read many books on my own. Westerns, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemmingway and William Faulkner were some of my favorites.

5. What are you asked to do with reading and writing at this point in your lives?

Job related, technical studies.

Writing

6. When you were growing up, how much school reading and school writing was done with computers?  What kinds of things did you do?  What values did your teachers place on computer literacy?

No computers were used at that time.

7. In the next ten years, what will reading and writing become?  What skills and understandings about online literacy will people need to have?  Why?

Writing has not changed for 1000 years, only the method of placing it on paper has changed.

Copy and Pasting is golden! Online research is so readily available in a much shorter time than the old style of research. If you can’t write in the first place the computer don’t mean nothin!

The sentence I chose to pull out of the Hamilton article can be found on page 18 of the PDF and states, “Analyzing such pictures (photos from the public arena) systematically demands that we operationalize the underlying concepts and pin them down to specific instances. This causes some difficulties especially with the idea of literacy events which implies active participation and interaction between people.”

I found this section interesting because when I think of literacy it cannot be pinned down because of the sheer volume of forms that it may present itself in. One symbol could mean one hundred different things to one hundred different people and I don’t feel that it is possible to give that symbol one accepted meaning in a specific instance. Within every photo that we have looked at there have been multiple ways literacy is being practiced. For example, in the photos of street art there is the common passerby who sees a brightly colored wall, then there is the street kid who sees the underlying struggle and message for action, there’s the business man who sees his building destroyed, and then there is the artist who sees a piece of himself transferred onto a large and very public canvas, to name just a few. Examining a photo of the street art and trying to give the type of literacy that it represents a name and a definition does not do it justice and instead only hinders the impact it has on its viewers since no two interpretations will be exactly the same.

Sticking with this theme of people interacting with an object, the photo I chose to bring into class depicts a small grouping of students sitting at the library computers studying (or at least pretending to). I snuck around behind them to get a better take on what they were actually doing and found that one was referencing an article, another was watching a video, and the last was doing math online. If I was to look at this photo without knowing this information I would assume whatever they were doing would include writing/typing some form of prose since that is what I primarily use my computer for. For me computers are automatically associated with language so it came as a surprise when I saw this person doing MATH homework online. However, when I brought this up to my Math Major friend she laughed and said that this practice is becoming more and more common in math and science based classes. Her knowledge and assumptions of my photo were entirely different from mine, which only convinced me further that attempting to put the interpretation of a literacy event in a nice and tidy box is nearly impossible. Our perceptions of the world around us are messy and I just can’t believe that the literacy practices around us can be put into defined categories or “pinned down” as Hamilton puts it.

Whew, one week down and on to the first blog post of the semester! I get the feeling this class is going to really force us to think about things in a new context and I can’t wait for that! I am an English Studies Major with a Minor in Sustainability (graduating in December, YAY!) and I grew up in a very, very rural town in Northern California called Alturas. I tried the city life after high school when I moved to Sac and then eventually found my way to Redding which has proven to be a good mix of both worlds for me. I am getting married in May and cannot wait for the planning to be over and the celebration to begin!

I tend to be very driven and through this class I have begun to really question why I do certain things and how I could have formed these traits. I had never really been asked to think about my literacy practices and now that I am they are both interesting and a little scary. It is amazing to think that so many of my own traits and practices have been learned from my peers and relatives and that I am also affecting them in such a profound manner. For example, books have always been an important part of my life and as I began looking at the reasoning behind this fact I realized that my dad and his love of reading heavily affected my own opinion of books because of the close relationship we have. On the other hand, my sister and my mother were closer when my sister was very young and she did not like to read. My mother never really read by choice but treated reading for pleasure as more of a nuisance, as did my sister until she and I grew close later on in life. My love of reading and constant talk of books eventually coaxed my sister into seeing the value of the practice and she in turn convinced our mother to try reading for personal pleasure. The four of us are all voracious readers now and we all enjoy talking about the different books we have discovered.

Szwed’s argument that literacy can be affected by nostalgia, experience, and context really resonated with me because of this past experience with my own family. Each individual is impacted heavily in their thinking, knowledge, drive, and understanding by those who surround them and when an individual’s literacy is really considered it encompasses and affects all of these characteristics within each person. Literacy is embedded within our daily lives and affects nearly everything we do as well as the things that those around us do/think. Kind of a crazy thought!