Pencils to Pixels
was my favorite and most influential reading for this week. I really like
reading about things in a historical context and this reading did not
disappoint. While reading this, I was really struck with how at first,
technology was only for the elite. Just like writing! Writing and literature
were once reserved specifically for the elite because they had the most access
to it. I liked how the author moved through writing as a technological
advancement. He literally went from pencils to pixels. This Baron text was
really cool to me and actually made me nerd out a little bit when I realized
just how intrigued I was by it.
The Michael Wesch video and blog were totally fascinating to
me. I love when people use visual anthropology in an influential way. While
this video was fascinating, it kind of made me sad because I could really
relate to many things that the students held up on their pieces of paper,
especially the one about buying a hundred dollar textbook and never opening it
once. In my opinion, technology can be good or it can be bad. Technology is
good in the way that it can connect us to the world and information that people
could have never even imagined 10 years ago. However, it can be bad because it
can consume our time. However, I don’t think technology should be eliminated,
especially in schools. In college, we each as students are responsible for
controlling our actions. If we choose to spend an entire class period on Facebook
instead of listening to a professor’s lecture, that’s our own choice. It takes
responsibility to be able to use technology wisely, and frankly, not many
people have sense of responsibility.
I have to say it; most of these texts for this week were
entirely over my head. I never have had the “technology brain” like my sister
does. With this material, I am really really trying to understand it. It’s just
a struggle. The ITexts concept is really what threw me for a loop. How is this
any different than just standard email communication? I will be watching blogs
for someone to hopefully clear up some of my confusion on this text. :)
Molly, I completely agree with you on the Michael Wesch videos. I feel like sometimes while in class I am not learning anything but just spending money. Also to your question about ITexts, I think you are grasping it or I am confused as well. But I think ITexts are just standard email communication. I think they are just trying to state that research should go into using IT more in our education system.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think Savannah is on this one, with regard to your ITexts question, Molly. Back at the turn of the millenium when the piece was being written (only slightly more than a decade ago!), electronic modes of writing looked a lot different. It was the early days of "Web 2.0," which meant websites wouldn't be static read-only texts but instead something that webusers would collaboratively create. Wikipedia didn't exist; Facebook didn't exist; blogs barely existed; google didn't exist as we know it (their search was starting to get okay but no gmail); Youtube didn't exist. PDF's as we know them were only about 5 years old. Most of what we associate with the web just wasn't around, or was just barely around, when ITexts was written. So you need to picture a bunch of writing researchers looking at the electronic textuality of the day -- e-mail, mostly static webpages that were hand-coded, bulletin boards and e-mail listservs, and the gradual transfer of print resources to the web. Hell, "webzine" was a current term (now largely defunct).
ReplyDeleteSo these researchers see what the 90s gave us and can tell we're sitting on the cusp of a serious reworking of the web to the "user-generated content" that defines Web 2.0. They need a way to bundle all this up -- to talk about electronic writing of all sorts, as opposed to the predominantly paper-only writing that preceded the web.
Today, what they called an IText, I would call any text produced in an electronic, networked environment. Or, maybe, any text you have to access electronically (via a computer or a device). I'm always intrigued by what they could see, when they wrote this article, and what they couldn't. They seem to have done a pretty amazing job of telling the future, given how limited their vision was.