I don’t think anyone had a real idea of what literacy studies were before we started this class. I remember thinking, well, it fits into my schedule, but how are we going to talk about reading and writing for a whole semester? Whatever the teacher has a good ratemyprofessor score. Even though I am not going to be a teacher per se, I am really glad I took this course. Now I not only can I sound really smart quoting Brandt, Street, Szwed, and other authors we’ve read, but a lot of what I’ve learned has forced me to take a step back and reexamine the way I view and judge other people based on their literacy practices.

I really can’t believe how closely identity is tied to literacy. What you read, what you write, what you post on what platform, in essence, what you do every day, really affects how other people see you. Through social media, you have complete control of how you want others to see you (online anyways). Szwed forced me to take a step back and look at my own judgments I make about other people’s literacy. I have always been so offended when people have looked down on my “weird” sic-fi fantasy novels, or my obsession with comparing items endlessly to find exactly what I want while online shopping, or the accounts I follow on Instagram, but suddenly I realized I was doing the same thing to other people!

I also really like the idea Street quoted from Dewey: you can’t use what you learn in school in the real world, and you can’t use what you learn in the real world in school. The education system is not geared towards the multimodal learning recent generations have created for themselves.

The group that presented on video games really spurred my interest in picking up gaming again. I used to be a big computer gamer back in middle school, but I never made the transition to console games. My younger sister was always playing Mario Kart on our PS2 but I was never that excited by it (probably because I never won). Usually the guys I hung out with were always playing Call of Duty, Halo, or Grand Theft Auto, none of which appealed to me. The past few years I’ve heard about different video games that peaked my interest, but never delved deeper because I didn’t want one more screen to be hooked on. I thought already watch too many hours of Netflix and Youtube, not to mention all of the apps on my phone. However, now I understand that you are using your brain much more playing an interactive video game than passively watching tv or movies. This seems like common sense and sounds dumb now that I’m actually writing it out, but at the time it felt like a massive realization to me! Instead of adding to my laziness maybe video games can help alleviate some of it! I just picked up Skyrim and Beyond: Two Souls, so I’m excited to start playing and see where it takes me.

What I got from the presentation on hip-hop and literacy was that hip-hop shouldn’t be looked down upon as lesser art because there can be just as much meaning in a hip-hop song as there is in a classic poem. I am really not a fan of hip-hop in general, and it’s probably because I don’t identify with the lyrical content. Going through and analyzing Affirmative Action by Nas, I didn’t get most of the references or even the main ideas in the song. But I like songs from other artists and genres that are about drugs or crime, so why do I like those songs but not this one? I still don’t have an answer, but getting to a larger meaning beyond the themes I associate with hip-hop, like materialism, big egos, and drug use, definitely helps me see more merit in this particular song, and gives me more incentive to check out other hip-hop artists.

Was I the only one who had to Google MOOC? In “Tales of a MOOC Dropout,” Cindy Londeore shares her personal experience taking two different MOOC’s. The classes had similar structures, entailing weekly video lectures and accompanying homework assignments. Londeore ended up dropping out of her first class on Semantic Web technologies, because she was frequently unable to answer the homework questions. The homework was timed, which made it difficult to go back and review when she didn’t understand a question. The quizzes did not give any feedback, and did not show which questions were incorrect. Londeore also stated that she felt the course description was misleading, and the class actually required much more foundational knowledge than what was written.

The second class, called Model Thinking, allowed Londerore to be much more successful. While it had the same structure as the first class, it had a few key differences. The lectures had built-in questions that provided feedback if you chose the wrong answer. The quizzes were not timed, and allowed up to three attempts and also provided feedback on why answers were incorrect. The modularity of the class took the pressure off, because if she didn’t do well on one section it would not impact her ability to understand the next unit.

Apparently some students complained on the discussion boards about the ease of cheating in the Model Thinking class (it gives you the correct answers and you get three attempts). Londerore responds by saying who cares? You aren’t taking this class for college credit, and why would someone cheat their way through a voluntary MOOC? The feedback in the Model Thinking MOOC was interesting enough for Londerore to actually finish the course because it facilitated learning. I found a quote from the New London Group’s A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, “The new efficiency requires new systems of getting people motivated that might be the basis for a democratic pluralism in the workplace and beyond” (67). For these MOOC, motivation is a huge factor in whether or not someone completes the class. Apparently 90% of people drop out of MOOC, but by the end of the course, the drop-out rate is the same of that of an in-person class, and only 10% of students who reach the final assignment do not complete the course. As TNLG discusses in their article, traditional pedagogies need to be challenged; in fact, there should not be such a thing as “traditional” pedagogies because our learning material and environment is constantly evolving. I assume MOOC will become more and more widespread due to impacted classrooms and the rising cost of college, and I have already seen examples of professors who follow the model Londeore approves of.

 

I found it really interesting when Street cited Dewey’s idea that you can’t use anything at home in school, nor can you apply anything you use in school in everyday life. I didn’t think I would ever hear prestigious researchers say something like that (something I have thought throughout most of my schooling). Most of the assignments I handed in throughout the course of my education have only been completed to make a grade, not to pursue some higher echelon of learning. I’m not sure if my fellow English majors would agree, but I personally don’t have much use for identifying fallacies or a first person plural narrative in my daily life. That being said, I think that my generation of students are more actively applying their home lives to their studies using technology. Taking notes on a laptop, making digital projects/presentations, using online flashcards, watching Ted Talks, searching keywords in online articles or databases, etc. The question is, how can educators (or policy makers) supply curriculum that align with the learning styles/experiences that students bring to the classroom? This seems to be the guiding theme of our class, and I’m glad that I’m not going to be a teacher because bridging the gap between home and school in a class full of 35+ students is not an easy task.

Wesch’s video complements my train of thought nicely by exemplifying the new ways students are finding and learning information. Classrooms focus on text almost exclusively, but words are no longer just words. It seems like now more than ever, we are taught things in school that don’t sync up with the tasks we actually preform in life. I recall being forced to draw a mnemonic device for every single vocab word even if it didn’t help us or we didn’t need it to remember. The malleable definition of literacy is currently undergoing a huge change in our culture. Literacy is far from autonomous, and it would seem to me that most American schools have a long way to go to catch up.

 

Interview with my Dad, Greg Grant, 64 years old

G: Reading was something I was never good at. I never read for pleasure. My father tried to make me read in the summertime and I hated it. I just couldn’t concentrate. I would have to read the same line 3 times before it would stick…

A: Why did going into the service make you start reading?

G: Well, it was an easy way to escape from your circumstances. I was in Vietnam on a Navy ship that was shipping bombs off to kill people. You don’t get more than 4 hours of sleep, and you’re basically constantly in danger. You’re sleeping in bunk beds three guys high, with little alleyways in between, so theres people around you all the time.

A: What did you read?

G: Mainly Zayne Grey, Louis Lamour, paperback Westerns.

A: Westerns?

G: Yeah they were really easy to get. Guys just traded them around.