Final Post

For your final week's worth of blog postings, I would like you to address the following questions. You can make them separate posts, or just one big one--your choice.

1. What has most surprised you when investigating the topic of digital literacy?

The thing that has most surprised me about digital literacy is how popular belonging to multiple online communities is. I was even surprised how familiar our whole class was with online gaming and virtual reality. I had no idea how diversified and frequently used these types of online communities were. The different levels of identity and how anonymity affects behavior in these online environments has surprised me with its complexity and opened a new world of possibilities.

2. What has been the most challenging part of this course (and by challenging, I don't mean that you didn't like it, I mean to ask what challenged your previously held notions or beliefs--what made you reconsider something you thought you understood previously.)

Probably the most challenging area has been admitting that I am not nearly as digitally literate as I thought I was. Even when I came up with ideas for our group and creative project, it was difficult for me to figure out how to translate these ideas into a digital media. I was exposed, through the class discussions, to a myriad of digital worlds that I was not familiar with and sometimes not able to join in conversation. This has probed me to enter digital environments that I was not comfortable with before and learned to explore these communities.

3. What has been your proudest accomplishment? What do you know now that you didn't know before? What can you do now that you couldn't before?

My proudest accomplishment has been my group project. Our film was about Middle Eastern women and blogs, and it was just a subject that I was so interested in, and I ended up loving the ideas we used to and how the film came out. I now feel like I have learned how to approach that topic and the dangers of trying to remediate someone else’s digital work. We were often scared that we were “Americanizing” these women’s words. I now have the ability to understand how a message changes when it is remediated—for example, I now think about how messages I receive on a daily basis through tv, radio, text books, etc. has been remediated and how that alters the message.

4. How will what you have learned here affect your life? (That's the real test of a class, isn't it?)

I now have this excitement for finding new digital communities. My digital “routine” has been pretty limited to facebook and CNN. I have now found myself branching in new directions whenever the class mentions something about a digital world I am unfamiliar with. I also have found myself, like I said in the previous question, almost obsessively analyzing how many times a message has been remediated when it reaches me in my everyday life.