Journal 3: Re, Re, Re, Remix!
Firstly, I know that technology moves quickly, and creating a textbook that is 100% up to date that addresses the use of the latest tech would be impossible. However, reading the first few paragraphs of chapter one and encountering a sentence about “Myspace” as one of the digital technologies being used definitely threw me for a loop. I had to think back to the technology we had during my original college days (1998-2002), the amount it changed even in those short four years, and how I used it in ways that would be considered “remixing.”
While some of the technologies mentioned in the reading are still around, they may not be utilized as much or in the same way as how the author described them. I have a Mac and use Imovie to create my youtube videos, but I now use images and video clips that I have stored in Google Drive rather than flickr or myspace.
From the book, one of the things I appreciated about the author’s concept of play vs. work with technology was that, Lankshear & Knobel (2013), “we suggest that through multimodal play…-educators are better able to make pedagogical connections with adolescents’ evolving literacies.” (p. 24). Allowing students the time to “play” with technology develops their digital literacy, but also gives us an insight into them as individuals as well. Lankshear & Knobel (2013), “...the profound act of teachers and students knowing each other through multimodal play in order to teach and learn together.” (p. 35).
The second chapter on “remixing” I found to be a little confusing to follow, I think because the author didn’t provide one solid definition of remixing but rather provided examples and several different ways of defining it. The definition/explanation that I found the most helpful was, Lankshear & Knobel (2013), “Digital tools create new possibilities for getting access to information, for producing, sharing, and reusing.” (p. 44).
This idea of “remixing” doesn’t just apply to literacy, but also how it affects our cultures, or our perceived ideas of culture as well as prejudices we might have. Case #2 that the author talked about, where the two schools from different socioeconomic areas of a city worked together using various technologies to discover and share information about themselves and how they lived/when to school is an excellent example of this. I thought that the various ways the students used the different types of technologies and how their project developed organically because of this remixing of digital/print was really interesting.
References:
Lankshear, C., Knobel, M. (2013). A new literacies reader. Peter Lang.
Hi, Amanda!
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the same thing about the "MySpace" reference! I've been out of high school for 6 years and I personally wasn't ever a part of the MySpace era ... I was just starting high school when this book was published (2013) and we had our Instagrams, Facebooks, Twitters, and Snapchats. Definitely not exactly the most up-to-date text for these concerns!
When I first went to college I took a word processor, and the colleges computer lab only had like ten ginormous computers in it! Oh, how times have changed! ;)
DeleteDear Amanda:
DeleteI read an interesting article regarding MySpace that I wanted to share with you. This will really take you back in time.
In 2007, it overthrew Google as the most visited website in the U.S. (Thellwall, 2018). The median user age was 21 and females tended to use these sites to establish friendships while males tended to use them for dating. More females were users than males. Social networking was a phenomenon that was not well understood at that time. It is not enough to gain a lot of users but you have to get inactive users to become active again. Friendster was actually the first social networking site which was established in 2003, and allowed individuals to register with each other as friends (Thellwall, 2018; Seki & Nakamura, 2017).
The use of these accounts allows friendships to foster as you can communicate and share more with people than you did before. However, it does have drawbacks. I know from speaking with my teenage children that they are sometimes dropped or unfollowed as friends on their now Facebook accounts. This often results in hard feelings.
Reference
Seki, K., & Nakamura, M. (2017). The mechanism of collapse of the Friendster network: What can we learn from the core structure of Friendster?. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 7, 10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-017-0429-2.
Thellwall, M. (2018). Social networks, gender, and friending: An analysis of MySpace member profiles. Journal of the American society for Information Science and Technology, 59(8), 1321-1330.
Hey Amanda! I love the connection you made to remixing and it making an impact on cultural exposure, but I loved even more that you pointed out the idea of teachers make more of a connection with their students through technology and multimodal play. I definitely zoomed in on the fact that tech in the classroom helps the students relate more to the learning and it also helps the teachers get to know them through the pedagogical methods on an individualized level. Even with our blogging in this course, we each have our own personal voice shining through our posts about graduate content. It works!
ReplyDelete