What I’ve learned so far….

One of the most important thing that I learned so far is about open learning. This course offers me a way to see and to learn literacy in a non-traditional way. This course allowed no limits for learning nor gives me a set of requirements. I think this makes me learn a lot more because I can take in whatever is important to my life without someone forcing it on to me. I learned that literacy is in everything. Just like everything has physics in it and everything has rhetoric in it, etc. So in nutshell, everything is in everything.

The class also brought me a lot of memories from my childhood and also opened the doors for people who can’t read and write in English or even speak it. I say this because some people just assume that people who don’t understand English are not literate. This course proves that nobody is illiterate even if it’s not in English. This brings me to an experience that I once had. In my college connection class in 2013, we were discussing about voting rights and I remember mentioning to a few people around my table that ballots should be offered in multiple languages so those who can’t understand English can have a chance to participate in the voting process. A girl sitting near me stated that if people cannot read and write in English they should not be able to vote because they won’t understand. I was really shock at what she had said because just because some people cannot read and write in English, it does not mean that they are stupid. Societal issues still matters to them if it was provided for them in a way where they can understand it. This leads me to the sad truth about access. Not everyone can get access to the same thing so we, those who understand the importance of access, should make small changes for these less fortunate people at a chance of having their voices heard.

Another thing that we learned in the course which I thought was interesting was about sponsorship by Deborah Brandt. The part that my group and I focused on was appropriation with the two case studies about Carol White and Sarah Steele. I just thought that was really interesting because everyone does re-appropriation. We take someone else’s idea and use it for our own good. Then this brings the question among the classroom. Is everything a remix? I really like the guy in the class’s idea that everything is a remix but no one has put it the way you have so it is an original.

I had a lot of fun interviewing my friend for our literacy narratives. I enjoyed because I can relate to her since I came from a home where English wasn’t my first language. It was hard growing up because my parents could not teach me how to read in English when we all can’t read in English. It must have been so difficult for them knowing the fact that they cannot help their children with the English language. Even then, my mom would always tell me the story of how she was help my brothers with their math homework (because math is universal) until she couldn’t understand it anymore. This is an example of literacy as mathematics.

There’s so much that I still have to say but I  know whoever is reading this is probably tired of reading it by now so I’ll stop writing but I do want to mention one thing about technology. We look down on digital technology because we think they are taking over the world but we don’t realize that everything created is technology just in different forms.