Week 15: Ode to New Media & New Literacy

Throughout the graduate course of New Media & New Literacy, I was routinely given challenging assignments where I had to really dissect, analyze, and evaluate concepts that were either complex or confusing.  For example, I sadly failed to understand Green's chart and approach to literacy.  I must have researched him and his diagram for hours and yet found nothing helpful.  What I would have loved was some examples to illustrate Green's diagram and help explain his views. Another challenging, but certainly fulfilling assignment was reading some of the book Reading Images, which opened my mind to symbols, and the hidden meaning behind images that we don't always notice in real life.  The reverberations of those messages have already found their way into my classroom and my Subjectivity vs. Objectivity assignments, where students have to state if a topic (for example a picture of an apple or the painting of a woman by Picasso) is subjective or objective.  Thanks to Kress and Leeuwen, the picture of an apple is no longer as objective as I once thought… 

Standouts in this course will definitely help me in future projects and in my own reflections.  For example, finding the 'hidden meanings' of a commercial not only took me down memory lane, but illustrated for me - a 44 year old man - just how damaging a certain commercial was for me as a 16 year old boy.  As a history teacher, it has made me more aware of - and skeptical of - first-person historical accounts as being completely 'unbiased.'  Another course standout was Henry Jenkins. I was intrigued by Participatory Cultures, which I felt he defined as an online, democratic society all geared towards helping each other.  He, more than anyone else we reviewed in this course, was exciting, engaging, and gave real-world examples to help illustrate his message, which made Me want to join in His, Participatory Culture, and also allowed me to feel more confident about my blogging. A taxing yet interesting assignment was when we all had to pick an article about technology, share our thoughts, and read everyone else's articles.  I loved the video post on Sugata Mitra, A School in the Clouds, because it made me critically analyze how my students learn in my class. The last two assignments from this course I felt were standouts were blogging - which allowed me to be an individual in a community, just like I would be in any real class - and our final video post, where we had to create a video clip about a topic of our choice; I'd never created an iMovie before, so it was awesome to experience that I could happily share with my students. 

Not surprisingly, there were other readings and assignments in this course I would have preferred to live without: books like Literacies by Knobel & Lankshear, or videos like Networks, Power, and Democracy, because I don't think either one offered me anything new or relevant in the concept of new media and new literacies.  Luckily however, the most frustrating assignment - making my 'Literacy Guide' turned out quite well, and I'll probably use it for my next year's 6th grade class, as a way to hold my students more accountable for class issues I feel are so very important, like adaptability, teamwork and the ethics of research.  And so, although my New Media & New Literacy graduate class could be quite challenging, overall it was an insightful experience, and it helped me further hone my graduate school project - probably something along the lines of student engagement, which came from the many readings, videos and discussions on the rise of technology in schools.