My Final Blog - About Blogging

It’s been an interesting journey blogging in this class. While hesitant to attempt the venture at first, I’ve come to appreciate its value as a reflective tool. Just as scholars continually argue, writing forces one to create structured and articulate thoughts, and blogging has allowed me to tap into this learning resource in order to formulate sometimes intricate and sometimes purely reactionary ideas about the assigned readings for this class. Although it didn’t seem that we utilized the tool to its greatest potential (that is, we didn’t feed off each other’s writings), knowing that someone somewhere just might read my blog forced me to really try to make my ideas coherent. Perhaps I changed someone’s ideas with my blogs. I like to think I did, at least.

At times it was difficult for me to stream together articulate ideas about the readings we did for class, but at other times it came as easy to me as simply talking about what I’d read. In either case, blogging forced me to reflect on what I’d read in a coherent fashion, which then triggered more in-depth and critical thinking about the topics. Furthermore, as I was forced to reflect upon the readings before joining the class discussion about them, my blogs helped me bring different ideas to the table, ideas that I’d already been stewing over in front of my computer monitor.

Perhaps the most poignant idea I have benefited from reading and discussing in this class has been about the evolution of literacy technologies. From Ong’s argument that writing transforms human consciousness through Goody’s ideas about lists serving as advanced organizational tools, to Baron’s thought-invoking essay on the stages of literacy technologies “From Pencils to Pixels” and on through Charney’s postulation about the psychological effects of hypertext on reading and writing processes, I learned that although the majority might shy away from and be wary about emerging literacy technologies, we eventually adopt and adapt them to our literacy developments. In fact, it could be argued that different literary genres arise from these advancements. The blog, for instance, is becoming more and more esteemed as a valid means for academic discourse and collaboration. I’ve read a book comprised entirely of e-mails this semester, and last year I wrote a creative piece using the electronic messaging system as my genre. Indeed, Ong, Goody, Baron, and Charney have allowed me to be a bit less cynical toward technology, and their ideas, in conjunction with blogging in this class have shifted my attitude to embrace technology as the next step toward greater, more intricate and more sophisticated literacy skills in mine and future generations.

While I’m still not completely sold on blogging, at least I can now say I have experience doing it. It’s inevitable that I will come in contact with the exercise again, as blogging has become a worldwide phenomenon, a web of sometimes fleeting and sometimes revolutionary ideas that can influence any one at any place at any time. Blogging was useful for this course, so I hope I can learn to utilize its worth in other aspects of my life.

9b: Liberation Literacy

Freire’s article reminds me of a quote I once came across by Edward Sapir. He says, “Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably related, are, in a sense, one and the same.” In this sense, language is more than a mere technology as Ong suggests. It would seem, according to Freire, Sapir and others in their school of thought, that language is a crucial organizational tool for our development and progression toward understanding and conceptualizing our human condition. Language helps us cope with and convey to others the chaotic world which we inhabit. Without language, humans would not be – well, human. For all human situations around the world, and as deep into our history as we have been able to explore, language has been and continues to be the driving force of human society. The evolution of language has expanded our dictionaries into massive volumes and our libraries into sprawling estates as we try to define our very core existence and essence in words. For some people, language can be a frustrating labyrinth through which they struggle to reach a point. For others, language is like the air, flowing in and out as easily as a breath. To capture the vast phenomena of life in a capsule as limiting as language is a frustratingly fascinating struggle with which we will continue to toil. To marginalize man from language is to marginalize him from humanity altogether. It is to expel him from his species and shackle him in the cuffs of animalistic primitivism. Because, as Freire states, “language is impossible without thought, and language and thought are impossible without the world to which they refer” (7), language is experienced as the medium through which the world and man affect each other. Without the knowledge of language, and without the language to cultivate knowledge, illiterates are subjugated by those who possess language. Although teachers are not Hitler or the Catholic Church, manipulation through the “’digestive’ concept of knowledge so common in current educational practice” (3) reinforces power imbalance and marginalization of students. To liberate the objects of such practice is to allow learners to take possession of language (and thus their world). Freire brilliantly outlines why and how adult literacy processes should recognize and implement more effective uses of this Inception concept of literacy.

7a: Tapping into Knowledge to Cultivate Relationships with Literature

I think it’s easy to say that adolescent boys prefer to be disconnected, disinterested, and stubborn. However, Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm drill a revealing peephole through the walls that boys seem to build up around themselves in “Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys.” In fact, Smith and Wilhelm reveal that boys tend to be greatly connected, interested and eager to learn, they just tend to do it in ways that are not preferred by or customary to adults and females.

Each chapter is ended with a brief bio on each of the participants of Smith and Wilhelm’s study. These little character sketches are vital supplements to the report because they allow the reader to get to know the students involved as individuals and not just abstract subjects in a study. Getting to know the individuals helps Smith and Wilhelm drive their points home and emphasizes the bottom-line conclusion of their book: in order to instill an appreciation for reading and writing in male students, teachers need to “tap the funds of knowledge that students have at home” (200). And the only way to tap those “funds of knowledge” is for a teacher to get to know each student’s values, interests and strengths. Some of the boys had intense dedication to their hobbies outside of school but displayed complete disinterest in school activities. They aimed high and achieved their goals in skateboarding, movie-making, rapping, political campaigning, music composition, and a host of various impressive activities, and yet many of them failed to perform adequately on school assignments.

An interesting conclusion Smith and Wilhelm make is that teachers need to find ways of connecting students to the characters in their assigned reading. Because the boys repeatedly emphasized the importance of relationships (“the importance of the social [42]), and because a vast majority of the students displayed great engagement with the characters of stories assigned in an exercise, Smith and Wilhelm tentatively conclude that teachers should cultivate concern for characters in order to encourage “positive reading experiences” (175) for boys. One way to achieve this is to use a “frontloading activity” (176) before assigning readings to students. The example Smith and Wilhelm present is one that a teacher used for “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Students were given cards upon which were written various priorities (friends, intelligence, new car, etc.) and were asked to rank their priorities. Then students were told to accumulate as many priority cards as they could from other students in the class, bartering and persuading where need be. Finally, they were told to write which trades they would never make in real life and which ones they absolutely would make in real life. This activity made students realize that made trades every day and so when they read the assignment, “they regarded [Tom Walker] as a fellow human being who faced some of the same issues they faced” (176). This is a great suggestion that illustrates the effectiveness of “tapping into the funds of knowledge that students have.”

On "The 'Oprahfication' of Literacy"

In Mark Hall’s “The ‘Oprahfication’ of Literacy,” we are once again reminded of the phenomenon that literacy is power/empowerment. Hall’s illustration of the occurrence, however, takes it a bit further. He states that it was not merely the literacy itself that made Oprah so powerful. Rather, the healing properties of reading emotionally charged novels about empowerment and the overcoming of obstacles helped Oprah (and has helped others) overcome her own hardships. How, then, is reading different than merely watching a movie of the same theme? Well, a reader takes more ownership in a piece of literature than he or she does in a movie because the reader has to be actively engaged in order to interpret and apply the presented information into action. A movie does the interpreting and presents the visual illustration (psychological transformation of description). Through the work of actors, “real” people are created. Readers of novels (and some non-fiction) identify with and create the characters as extensions of their own personalities because the reader is forced to fill gaps with what he or she is capable of imagining the character doing. First person narration takes this activity even further by forcing the reader to identify his or herself as the storyteller. When a reader of Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle readers to herself, “At first, every time I repeated this story to myself, underneath my pillow or inside the refuge of the locked bathroom, it filled me with the same rage, helplessness and sense of betrayal I’d felt at the time,” she reads it as though they were her own words. The “I” is read as the reader’s “I” and so she takes on every emotion and every characteristic of that “I”. The reader feels the rage, helplessness and sense of betrayal. The reader becomes the character in the novel, and so the character’s triumphs are the reader’s. The reader feels empowerment, feels as though she has overcome great obstacles, and so feels she has accomplished and so can accomplish again. The emotions felt during reading are real and so are capable of transforming a reader’s mood and attitude which can thus transform their lives.

5b: A Thought of One's Own

Helen Damon-Moore and Carl F Kaestle bring up important points about “gendered” literature. Interestingly, as I read along in their article, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own suddenly pervaded my reading experience. The reason her book was brought to mind and why I couldn’t get the idea of her writing out of my reading of this article is because she discusses in great detail the need for distinctly female literature, which is the topic upon which Moore’s and Kaestle’s article is based. Woolf urges not for literature that is necessarily targeted toward women for publication purposes or commercial success, but she declares the need for women to create a world of their own through reading and writing. She brings up the notion in her extended essay of 1929 that the world of literature had always been a male-dominated culture. Women were not considered “literates” in the academic sense of the term, and she was concerned with the development of that sense of urgency and importance that men’s literature had established in its maturity. Clearly women were already established as writers by the time Woolf writes her essay. Sarah Stickney Ellis wrote in 1839 about the Characteristics of the Women of England and just as Moore and Kaestle point out, Puritan women held a vital role in the education of their children. However, in both cases the way that women wrote and the topics upon which they wrote were dictated by the patriarchal constraints of their time. Ellis’s work was a guidebook for the middle-class domestic angels of the industrial revolution, and the Puritan women’s literacies were molded by their domestic duties. Woolf’s concern in 1929 was that women should create works that are written with a woman’s voice. Rather than drawing upon the formulas which were dictated by men’s literature, Woolf urges women to build their own literary history. She says what women lack is a mother up to whom we can look for inspiration. Certainly it would seem she could pull from the great romance writer Jane Austin or from the gothic Bronte sisters or Mary Shelley, but she declares that while Austin’s work reinforces gender segregation and sex- roles, the Brontes and Shelley write works which could hardly be distinguished from that of male authors. She declares that women’s writing lacks proper lineage. She urges the development of what sounds and feels female (not feminine).

Now, Moore and Kaestle seem to possess a similar view of women’s magazines. They seem to be embittered to the fact that women’s magazines were not only edited by mostly male capitalists, but that they (perhaps) inadvertently reinforced sex-roles and gender segregation through the consumer culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Women’s magazines were created by men and the men who created them decided what women ought to read and in turn depicted how a properly nineteenth- and twentieth-century woman should look and behave, in what they should be interested, and what conversations they should have. This is not to say, however, that the consumers of these magazines did not have a huge role in the phenomenon. Indeed, by purchasing the magazines and purchasing the products that were advertised in and endorsed by the publications the female consumers were supporting the industry and the consequential “sexism” in which it partook (and still does in many ways). All this said, however, I think there is a definite positive message to be taken from the article, and that’s the fact that it was the female readership that drove the success of these publications. Taking into account the general illiteracy of the female population right before the emergence of the first magazines, this fact is quite incredible. It just goes to show how unstoppable a force we can be when we’re taught how to read and write. And indeed the sought-after content of the magazines (and the need for the information within them in some cases) must have encouraged the development of literacy skills in the female population. However, the airy content, the non-intellectual and non-thought-provoking subject matters of these women’s magazines (especially as compared to the male business magazines with investment advice and political discussions and intellectual conversations) do not seem to help the issue with which Virginia Woolf and Moore and Kaestle are concerned: they do not establish a thoughtful female literary community.

5a. Intertexuality, Hypertext, and Intercultural Inquiry: The Ultimate Conversation

Davida Charney’s article on “The Effect of Hypertext on Processes of Reading and Writing” and Linda Flower’s chapter on “Intercultural Inquiry and the Transformation of Service,” while at first seem to be about completely different topics, are actually interconnected in a very precise manner. Intercultural inquiry allows “readers” of their surroundings to actively seek information from any person they choose. Nobody is sitting with them and showing them the map by which they need to sequentially follow a mode for inquiry. In this sense, learning through life is much like a hypertext: we are free to navigate through it at our leisure, using the resources about us in any way we see fit in order to reach a destination of our choosing.

When we are faced with a situation with which we’ve never dealt, it is easy to project what we know upon the circumstances in front of us. Different prejudices and past experiences may cause us to put up shields or to assume a situation that appears to resemble a past experience will turn out the same way in which we are familiar. But what Flower seems to be saying in this chapter is that we cannot allow our past experiences or assumptions to interfere with learning about others, and about learning new ways of dealing with others. When we project our fears (namely, the fear of the “other,” the unknown, and through the stereotypes we have heard about), we hinder expansion and ability to grow through the attainment of knew knowledge. Ideally, when we engage in a community service activity, we will learn as much as the people which we are “servicing.” In other words, it’s not so much a server/receiver relationship as it is an exchange of knowledge and translation of unfamiliar circumstances.

This is the kind of inquiry that Charney seems to be depicting when she discusses the literacy technology of hypertext. In developing the technology, designers try to achieve the same effect as intercultural inquiry, setting up complex works in an interconnected fashion through which a reader (a learner) will navigate as he sees fit. When I am working with a group of people, a discussion will lead me to inquire of somebody their own opinions or experiences and that conversation will thus lead to more inquiry and a rich experience of exchange will conjure up ideas that no one at that table could have anticipated from the beginning. Ideally, hypertext is designed to act in a similar fashion. One idea expressed in a work will lead to the citation (the conversation through which the text was generated to begin with), and the next text will lead to the conversation with which it was engaged and so on. And if the reader is actively engrossed in the intertwined, intermingled academic conversations, he will make his own unique connections and discover his own hypotheses and ideas. Hypertext, then, is an electronic exchange of ideas through time and space, a conversation that could possibly mimic the organic conversation of face-to-face exchanges, but in a way that no two people living in the same time period could accomplish. This is how hypertext could be valued. This is how we’ve come to value intercultural inquiry, and this is how our horizons are expanded to infinite possibilities.

4b: The Quill, Shakepearean Laptop

Dennis Baron’s piece, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology reminded me of just that: the now almost invisible literacy technologies that have emerged over time. I remember when I was a grade school student and learning how to form perfectly copied letters on blue and pink striped paper with a pencil. Because writing letters (and not sentences or even words) was more of an art form in those days, the pencil was used so that a young student could easily correct a squiggly cursive z or a backwards s. Once we graduated from handwriting class onto forming sentences, the pencil was still used, but the teacher held the eraser. By the time I hit the fourth grade and was expected to craft impeccable five-paragraph essays on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the pencil was taken away and the pen was the only tool one could use, for an advanced literate uses a pen, not a pencil. Banks always reject checks written in pencil, and forget receiving compensation from a settlement statement signed in anything other than black or blue ink. I’d forgotten the debates that have continually surrounded the use of the pencil as a literacy tool until I read Baron’s article.

He also reminded me of the controversy surrounding the typewriter or (more relevant) the word processor. My creative writing workshops have conjured up old superstitions about writing poetry on a computer. For many the idea of creating an artwork that is supposed to be a piece of their soul with a keyboard hooked up to machine is pure ludicrous! Writing with one’s own hand is the only way to get pure and honest results. Strikeouts and ink blots (and for users of the pencil, shadows of the original ideas left behind the new words), speak of a kind of organicism of the work. And yet, how many of these texts get published in their original formats? I’ve never seen it. Unless of course we’re looking at Shakespearean foils or Da Vinci blueprints or any Medieval or ancient piece of literature. But to think of these in their original contexts – well, then they were created using the latest technology! For Shakespeare the quill and ink on what was then mightily expensive paper was the Renaissance equivalent of our word processor. It seems absurd to believe incredible and honestly ingenious work cannot be achieved using the keyboard and the monitor. I suppose it’s just too bizarre for us to imagine the lone genius beside the river in the woods creating Eve of St. Agnes with a laptop. But then again, our kids probably won’t think the same way we do now.

The word processor seems to certainly be moving in the same direction as the pen, for professors tend to refuse to accept final term papers in any other form but typed text, and notes are more often taken on a laptop than in a notebook (hence, the notebook computer). I can’t imagine compiling a research paper without the Internet, the cut-and-paste feature, or the “undo” function. It must have taken my parents months to do what I can do in mere hours! It would be interesting to see how differently Baron would have written his piece if it had been written in 2010 instead of in 1999. We’ve come quite a ways since then. The iphone, ipad, ipod, Android, mp3, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blackberry, Xbox Live, Google, Dictionary.com, YouTube, Blackboard, and a google of other advancements are all in constant use and are all literacy tools we tend to take for granted in our age of information. As technologies are discovered and developed throughout our own lifetime and on into our grandchildren’s, who knows – perhaps the pencil and paper will be their marks in the sand.