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.