Final Reflection For Digital Literacies

Class is almost over - final project and demonstration due tomorrow.

My final project, Summer at Grace, is almost completed in Windows Movie Maker. Tomorrow night I will present it in a Prezi which I am also working on. Composing this piece has been a dreadful headache ... and a pleasure. I can state the same about the past six weeks of Digital Literacies.

Using my Dell Inspirion 5150, purchased in 2005, I have taxed its capacity to the limit. Unlike my laptop computer, however, my capacity to use and create in digital medias increases daily, expanding the borders of my knowledge, limited only by my will and persistence -- and ability to manage panic with a dreadful longing to run and hide.

The readings delineated the issues and the visual media pieces challenged the limits of what I, a lover of print media, conceived as "writing" and composition. Beginning with the issue of net neutrality, I gradually moved through Porter and why technology matters to writers (man and machine becoming one, a cyborg) to Hocks' keys to unlocking visual rhetoric. Lionel Kearns' made me ill and I protested aloud that I couldn't read online. Then along came Wysocki's "Monitoring Order" -- a hybrid of print and visual. Her compositions are transparent for me, enough like print conventions that I can relax and explore. Finally the "LoFi manifesto" and "Don't Click It" and I am hooked.

During the past 6 weeks I have created a blog of my own and a personal wiki page on our class wiki and posted to all with increasing satisfaction. I have learned to insert pictures, embed links and videos. I plan to use this knowledge to promote and support a blog or wiki on our Grace Church website with the idea to build community. Perhaps more importantly I am pondering ways to introduce these to our TBI clients at ICD in our Computer Lab.

I have also set up an IGoogle page, a gmail email account and a Twitter account. I have a Prezi account and find it a relief that it is web based and I can access its presentation abilities anywhere there is a computer and internet access. I have used YouTube and know how to upload a video to YouTube. And I also had a lot of fun creating a WORDLE.

I began this class comparing my digital knowledge and abilities to a dinosaur, outdated, clumsy and doomed to extinction. I confessed the hope of becoming a dragonfly with the ability to flit and flirt around digital medias. After six weeks the metaphor has certainly changed. I see myself now as a worker ant, stoically pressing on, against all obstaces (computer crashes, limited computer memory and my own response of increasing panic which of course subverts learning. Raising the affective barrier, psychologists would say.

In the final process of completing my project, "Summer at Grace" I made a startling discovery -- I am now a writer, a composer in visual media. I am telling/writing/conveying a story via photographs, video, music, voice and text and I experience the same joy as when I write as the story unfolds,takes shape and moves beyond. Yes, I still adhere closely to print conventions. My project is linear but I make no apologies, rather I celebrate how far I have come.

Clicking, the authors of "Don't Click It" say, gives us a sense of control and immediate gratification. Click and we are there. Like a light swith, they say. So they took the click away and wonder, "if we change the way we interface, does it change our behavior."

And I think, if I change the way I interface with media, both print and digital, will my attitude change, my willingness to move beyond the canon of print and the embrace the possibilities and authenicity of multiple medias. Could I become a cyborg? Whoa! From dinosaur to cyborg!