As far as human sponsor go, I would argue that, where sponsors of print-based literacy are often older, sponsors of digital literacy are usually peers.  Although this is in the process of changing, with parents teaching their kids to use tablets and reading to them with e-reader, I think it currently remains true.  We can see this in Keri Franklin’s blog where she looks to a peer for support when entering the world of Twitter.

My personal example may not be quite so recently but, as we’ve learned, literacy is an ongoing process.  I started watching YouTube videos forever ago, just like everybody else, funny cat videos, music videos, clips from TV, etc.  However, in late 2010/early 2011 I started getting more involved in online communities.  I started watching certain people with regularity, at first by just clicking on the related videos that would appear one the side.  Eventually I found out what a channel was and, being a chronology enthusiast, proceeded to watch the first videos on the channels I liked up through the most recent.  The process of finding channels alone, along with discovering what they are and how they function, took months.

After consuming content for two years and genuinely feeling like I was a part of some sort of community, I still hadn’t made a channel of my own and therefore had no direct contact with anyone.  It wasn’t until my desire to be able to interact and express my opinions and learn from conversations with others overpowered my discomfort of feeling illiterate that I finally made a channel.  I made my channel in November of 2012, when the idea of having a channel was becoming more comparable to the idea of having an account on website.  This introduced an entirely new level of illiteracy.  Just when I had figured out how to navigate the site and where I fit into it, everything was different.  I could “like” videos, “favorite” them, comment on them, but I had no idea how to do this in a way that was socially acceptable and, more importantly, productive.

Just like the first time I entered the world of YouTube, I figured it out with time.  I was driven by the content I watched, content that made me think about the world differently, made want to talk about the importance of voting, the crisis in Syria, books, YouTube itself, science, history and so on and so forth.  (It was also a great place to argue about all things Harry Potter).  So gradually I learned what made a good comment.  I learned how to reply to people and what conversations were worth joining.

I think the social aspect of many types of digital literacy makes them more challenging to tackle than many print-based forms.  When learning to navigate a newspaper or read a textbook making a mistake is a personal experience that you can learn from and move on trauma-free.  Social digital literacies, however, often entail an audience and can lead to embarrassment, an experience Keri Franklin described in her blog.

There were no sponsors my process of understanding YouTube specifically, which I find to be fairly common in the realm of digital literacy.  However, I did have parents who split the cost of my laptop with me in high school and a mom who was always interested in the things I was learning online and this indirect sponsorship was equally helpful.

An excerpt about digital literacy and being a realtor with my grandma:

“I was in real estate when I got my first computer and it cost me 35 hundred dollars.  I can’t remember what year that was, like 1990, something like that.  And it was important for my job, to have that.”

“Did you have to teach yourself how to use it?”

“I took a class at Chico State that was not helpful.  The teacher would tell you to do something and if you didn’t catch up she would come and correct it.  She wouldn’t tell you how to do it.  So she wasn’t a very good teacher.  And that’s the only- And the rest of it I just learned myself.”

“How did you use it in your job?”

“Oh gosh…I didn’t use it for writing contracts.  I used it for the listings, putting the listings through to multiple listing.  That kind of thing.  Now you write your contracts on it and everything.  Everything is done with the computer now.  But in my time with real estate it was more people to people and realtors worked with realtors.  Today realtors don’t even talk to each other; they just email each other, which I find very distracting.”

While reading Hamilton, I struggled with the purpose of the photos being useful when studying literacy practices.  I wasn’t sure if Hamilton wants to use photographs as a means of capturing one specific moment of a literacy practice to then use to gain a better understanding of literacy events or if it was more important to focus on photography itself and how already taken photographs can be used to study our culture’s understanding of literacy.

Although this study categorizes already taken photos from other sources it seems to be using them to study a specific moment in a literacy event or an example of a literacy practice.  However, if this is their sole purpose I’m not sure what would be the benefit of using other people’s pictures opposed to taking their own.  Hamilton says, “It is only some visual traces of literacy practices that are captured in still photographs – observable, but frozen moments of a dynamic process.  Even aspects of literacy practices that seem clearly visible in events are in fact defined only in relation to cultural knowledge that the viewer brings.  It might therefore be more precise to say that all elements of practices are inferred from the images, but some with more direct visual cues than others.”  According to this quote it would seem that photos, capturing only a moment of a visual trace of a more dynamic process, would not be a particularly helpful way to study literacy unless the study included the photo taking process and what it has to say about literacy.

I wasn’t exactly sure why Hamilton chose this process, this particular manner of demonstrating and analyzing literacy practices, instead of observing them in person or recording them.  However, it was interesting to try it out myself.

The image I found this week was one of someone holding a nook with books and magazines downloaded on it as well as apps like Spotify, Words with Friends, and Angry Birds.

According to Hamilton’s basic elements of events and practices, the participant would be the faceless person holding the nook.  The artefact would be the nook itself along with the apps.  As far as activities and settings go, the image doesn’t specify, though we can presume the person holding the nook intends to or is using it.

This image says a lot of interesting things about our culture.  The nook was originally an easy way to purchase, carry and store books.  It made reading more accessible for many people.  As time went on, new functions were added.  Color made magazines more readable.  Apps were available for download.  Soon e-readers began competing with tablets.  This image shows how something designed for a very specific type of literacy grew and changed to encompass others.  The original nook required some amount of digital literacy; however, the amount necessary to operate one has increased exponentially.

More than just digital literacy, this nook opens up the question of video games and literacy.  It gives examples of games that comply with more conventional definitions of literacy such as Words with Friends, a game similar to scrabble, but also games that have literacy of their very own.  This image shows a progression of types of literacy but also, although maybe not intentionally, demonstrates how one does not necessarily take from the other.  Though the owner of the nook has games and magazines, they continue to download multiple books.  I found this to be an interesting representation of culture and our understanding of types of literacy, what they do to each other and what they do to us.

Literacy has been an important part of my life since it began.  So much of our culture revolves around reading that, although not everyone fits the known stereotype of a “reader,” we all do it avidly.

 

My parents read to me at bedtime before I started school and although I don’t have any memory of the actual experience, I can remember the books.  I can remember their plots and their pictures.  I can remember the characters and their feelings, even more than I can remember my own.

 

When I entered elementary school my dad began reading to me a series of wonderful chapter books called Hank the Cowdog.  In second grade I started to write my own “novel” and stories and read my own chapter books.   I’ve read incessantly throughout the following years.  In high school I started to reread Harry Potter out loud with my mom, which we only finished my freshman year of college.  And finally, after three years of fighting it, I decided on a second major in English because reading will inevitably be a part of my life and I might as well be decent at it.

 

However, reading is clearly much more complicated than we want it to be.  Although I’ve always been what some would call a “reader,” it didn’t always appear that way.  When I was in elementary school there was a reading test called the CBM, curriculum based measurement, during which a student was pulled aside and made to read aloud for a short timed session.  As an academically self-conscious kid who had never so much as raised a hand in class, this test was my worst nightmare (and still pretty much is).  I essentially failed the test and, despite my love of reading, I was placed in a pullout remedial reading class called Book Buddies that I endured once a week.

 

Clearly measuring literacy is hard.  This has been evident throughout my own life and seems to me to be what Szwed was saying.  He says, “…one must know what [language] means to its users and how it is used by them.”  Having a child read out loud while an adult stares at them with clock counting down does not demonstrate that child’s literacy.  Forcing a high school student to read and analyze something that has been labeled a classic does not necessarily demonstrate that student’s literacy.  There is an incredible number of factors that must be taken into account when discussing literacy.  As I read Szwed  I was increasingly interested in what he has to say about the vast types of literature, their context and applicability, and the role motivation plays with regards to literacy.

 

He stresses the point that, “assumptions are made in educational institutions about the literacy needs of individual students which seem not to be borne out by the students’ day-to-day lives.  And it is this relationship between school and the outside world that I think must be observed, studied, and highlighted.”  School is intended to prepare students for the “real world,” an incredibly absurd idea to begin with.  However, if schools don’t take into account what their “real world” looks like, or more importantly what it will potentially look like when students graduate, it is unable to do its job.  If schools desire to create literate students, they first need to understand how “real world” literacy looks, in all of its unconventionality.  Szwed makes this point throughout the reading but two specific quotes I enjoyed were when he states, “…nor can we make the easy assumption that certain media are responsibly for a reduction of use of another medium” and “the focus should be on the school and its relation to the community’s needs and wishes.”

 

Right now this idea seems to be most relevant in relation to the idea of digital literacy, at least to my generation.  I’ve been interested in digital literacy since social media became a part of my life, about five years ago.  I find this type of literacy fascinating.  The impact new media has on our ability to communicate, to build communities, to increase or reduce empathy, and how this definition of literacy compares to the more traditional one are ideas to which we should be paying more attention and I think Szwed recognizes this.  New media does not hinder the ability to interact with other mediums and it has become a vital part of our culture/community’s “needs and wishes.”  Of course quantifying this type of literacy, and others, in a way that makes it curriculum worthy is a challenge that will be difficult to tackle.