Patricia A. Holley
Blog: Week 7/23/07
Read 500


TECHNOLOGY…Reflects the Way We Think


Several years ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I was advised to take a basic computer course, because I was considering teaching as a career. I did not get the connection, at that time. Now I am being asked to consider technology’s impact on literacy, and it finally dawned on me just how the internet, combined with a word processing program is more reflective of the way we think and write then just pen and paper or a typewriter. What brought this home to me was watching the video, which featured a hand writing the statement “technology is linear” then correcting the sentence to read “technology is unilinear.” What I found interesting about this statement is that the word “unilinear” does not even appear in my Random House College Dictionary, which was published in 2000. Nor does is appear in my computer word bank. It keeps appearing as a misspelled word, underlined in red. However, the prefix “uni” has the meaning of “one”, and linear refers to “line”. Perhaps, in relationship to technology and literacy, this means that technology reflects the way we actually think, how we actual contemplate, in that we do not necessarily think in one direction at a time, but that our synapses branch out in all directions, simultaneously, until we come to one solid thought, supported by a plethora of information. Technology now helps us to do this visually in that we can now insert graphs, pictures, links, as well as other supportive resources into our body of work – by way of the internet.
The video helped me to visualize what the article Toward a Theory of New Literacies Emerging From the Internet and Other Information and Communication Technologies was saying. As a literacy teacher I have the responsibility to instruct my students on how to use technology to do research. After topic materials are located, students will also need to know how to apply critical thinking in evaluating the material found. They will also need instruction on how to synthesis the information – just as they would be instructed for the traditional paper text research materials available. This new literacy (media literacy) is international in scope. The ability to shift through materials, ask questions, locate information, evaluate information, synthesize information, solve problems, and communicate it to others are skills needed in an international job market. Not only is there more information available to students, as a result of technology, but as the article brought out technology has now “[made] possible a panoply of media forms within a single message, thus increasing the importance of understand how each may be used by an author to shape a reader’s interpretation.”
As with printed or audio information we must teach that plagiarism also applies to information attained through new technologies. Perhaps this means that we will have to introduce how to cite online databases much earlier then we ever thought. But on the other hand, technologies have relieved us as teachers from being the only source of knowledge on any given topic. With the unlimited range of information in cyber space our students can roam around the planet look for information on topics that interest them.
Students will have their imaginations stimulated by the new multiliteracy technologies. I have already observed in my Resource Pull–out classes that the use of the internet encourages learning because it is visually engaging and fun to use. I have also seen how it helps improve social skills as the children share knowledge and skills on editing and downloading information into their body of work. I look forward to using it, creatively, this coming year.