Author Archives: stloui3

Questioning My Digital Literacy

Honestly, I don’t think that I’m particularly computer illiterate. I’m pretty confident in my ability to understand how something works and I’ve worked programming jobs before. But creating a multimodal platform is a first for me, so here’s hoping it at least entertains. (But really, why can I only embed two tweets at a time? With an odd number of tweets, I’m doubling up on tweets so I have to make an extra tweet if I don’t want to double up. This should be more streamlined.)

The Questioning Learning podcast had a number of topics that I needed to cut out of my twitter essay – it was just too dense for me to go into it with any real depth. For instance, there was a section in which Collier and Friend discussed the Rhetoric of Opportunity in contrast with a Rhetoric of Brokenness. The topic is fascinating, especially as the concept of Deficit Thinking came up, which was recently discussed in another course, the Global Issues course, last week. Since I had done some reading on it due to this course, I had thought that I had a decent background to talk about the topic, but found that my thoughts were too complex and wordy for Twitter. C’est la vie, or however you say it.

Instead, I chose to summarize with my own thoughts dispersed throughout. I think I managed to get to most of the important things that were discussed, though perhaps some of my image choices were a bit too tongue-in-cheek. But hey, it’s Twitter. There’s no way you go through an essay on Twitter without a few memes right?

By the way, as a bit of post-script, I’d also like to mention that standardization, while being so heavily opposed in a number of pedagogical styles and philosophies, especially in Critical Digital Pedagogy, does have its place in education. You really can’t do away with it. People want to know if the person they hire/accept will function if they let that person in. Standardization reduces the risk of failure, as evaluations will at least show that someone knows a certain bare minimum. So, there is value in it, particularly in a society that has to deal with issues of supply and demand in education and job applications. These institutions need ways to tell who they should be accepting into their programs.

There’s more too, but you know, if this wall of text continues, people will start looking for a TL;DR, and I ain’t doing one of those.