Once again, the embedding eludes me
Hello everyone,
This is my makeshift presentation
I’m sorry this is so late and so long. I have been trying to get this right for two days now and it is always way too long.
It’s 10 minutes long, so it probably too long to show in class, but I thought I would post it anyway. In the event that there is no time for it to be played in class, I will probably present on wednesday.
I hope you like it!
After a lot of thinking and a whole day away from internet connection HERE is my (very late) digital literacy narrative. I’m hoping that what I lack in punctuality I will make up for in honesty and quite cute pictures of my dog.
I found this assignment extremely complicated to write. Reading, writing and internet are the three most important things in my life, and in many ways each of these things have saved my life in their own little way.
When I first wrote my timeline it was almost all about books. Three pages of a love letter to novels and fiction. Fiction is my greatest love, and reading is my greatest passion, but in the end my timeline barely mentions my love of books. As you’ll see if you read my timeline, I share a lot of my life online, and sometimes I feel as if my passion for novels is the one thing I can keep private. It’s completely unconnected from the internet or anything to do with ‘digital literacy’ and as I tried to trim down my excessively wordy first draft of my timeline I decided to put my love of The Great Gatsby and Nancy Mitford aside for now. The box in my head titled Twitter is very far from the box titled Fitzgerald. And I think as our world gets increasingly digitalized and put online it’s important to keep some things offline, on your bedside table with a mug of tea and a nice new pair of pajamas.
So then what is in a timeline that’s supposed to be about reading and writing but doesn’t actually contain anything about reading? Well, quite a lot actually. From the age of 14-19 I had a pretty complicated time (if you scour the internet enough you can find out why), and as my real life grew smaller and smaller my online life grew bigger and bigger. As you’ll see in my slightly over-emotional timeline posts, I really love the internet, and I really love writing, and I’ve managed to find a way of combining the two to create a small corner of the internet that I’m pretty proud to put my name on.
I found the process of making this timeline quite a complicated one. I liked the website Tiki-Toki without loving it. My experience on Wordpress definitely translated to Tiki-Toki and I found it very easy to operate but I felt it definitely had some faults. One of the things I liked least was how small the boxes for typing the entries were. Having such a small box meant I didn’t focus so much on what I was writing and I noticed after the first few entries that my writing was becoming sloppy and tired, more like writing a tweet than writing a journal entry or a blog post. I ended up writing all my posts on Pages and then copying them across as I found it easier to organise my thoughts this way.
I also found it hard to gather all my thoughts on the internet together. My online world has become pretty big and as I googled myself I found entire little pockets of things that I’d written or made and completely forgotten about.
I’m quite used to writing online and writing blog posts and I chose to write this assignment in the same voice I would use elsewhere online. So it’s quite personal and it’s quite relaxed in tone, and while this may not be as professional I feel it’s definitely more honest and more true to the narrative of my life that’s already online.
There’s obviously a lot that’s not included on this timeline. But hopefully what I have included can give you an insight into my history of reading and writing online. I didn’t even get started on my writing offline but I’m pretty sure you’re all better off without seeing pages from my 13 year old self’s diary.
I hope you enjoy what I wrote, and I hope it makes sense.
The entire process of creating this timeline gave me a new depth in perspective and understanding of my development as a writer thus far. It’s crazy to see where I started, struggling to write my own name to now writing articles for one of the largest online music publications on the web. Not only did this activity give me a feeling of extreme accomplishment, but it also gave me the insight that I still have a ways to go in my development and journey as a writer. Who knows where I will be as a writer in 19 years, I hope it’s as much improvement as I have experienced in the past 19 years of my life. With that said, let me elaborate on what has occurred in the past 19 years and what it has meant in my development not only as a writer, but as a person as well.
I have always held reading and writing as things that were extremely important and comforting to me; I think that I held both these activities to such a high degree of importance because they helped me escape reality. Now when I was younger I was a lot different than most kids in my town. I didn’t really enjoy sports and had more of a craving for the creative, and what I mean by that is that I was a very imaginative child. Knowing that, its no surprise that later on in life I would come to love and appreciate comics and music so much because both are attributed with imagination and creativity. Music in particular, developed into a huge influence later on in my life. In eighth grade I analyzed and rewrote a rap, which was the first instance where I combined my love of rap music with writing. Reminiscing on these memories, which are staples in my development as a writer, has rekindled the fondness I have for these events, which have played such a huge part in the development of the person I am today. From writing that initial paragraph in second grade to the writing of my first analytical essay when I was a freshman to my first blog post ever as a Junior, mark the key events in my evolution as a writer. It’s funny to think that the first paragraph I ever wrote was a description of myself and my interests as a person and now if someone were to ask me to describe myself I would say that writing is a huge part of who I am and practically defines me.
The major take away from this timeline for me is that in order to insure a better future for yourself, one must have a complete and thorough understanding of the events that made you the person you are today. Now that I have taken time to deconstruct the significant writing and reading events of the past, I now have a better understanding of my roots and the attributes I have utilized in the past that have allowed me to accomplish and overcome these challenges. Overall, I have sincerely enjoyed creating this timeline and remembering the events that led to me becoming a writer. If your interested in seeing what makes me who I am, check out my timeline by clicking here: TIMELINE.
Disclaimer: No media was added because I didn’t know how to but will be fixed on the timeline. So, here is the timeline: http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/336102/Karens-Digital-Literacy/
When I started coming up with events for my digital literacy timeline, I couldn’t come up with anything. Then, I thought a little more and put down incidents that were not necessarily life-changing, but were quite meaningful in shaping who I am today. After having a concrete idea of what I would include in my timeline, I saw that there was a common theme between the stages of my digital literacy. This theme pertained to my values, my global perspective and my most central interests. Essentially, these points represent me very well and I would have never thought that my use of writing, reading and technology would define me as much as it does.
Learning how to read and write around the age of five is a milestone that most people go through. However, I became literate in Spanish because I moved to Barcelona before I learned how to read and write. Already, my first written word was in a language that was not my mother tongue, as I am from Brazil and spoke Portuguese. This brings up an event that happens just a few years ago, in sophomore year of high school, when I read my first book in Portuguese. It was extremely ironic that I could read and write properly in English and Spanish but took much longer to do that in my first language.
The following steps, that still relate to the idea that I am a global citizen, is the fact that I started learning new languages such as Dutch and French. Therefore, I was exposed to new vocabulary through books and it made my literacy more holistic. What is interesting is that I don’t remember how to speak in those languages as much as I am proficient at reading and understanding them. It is odd but learning it in class and not practicing it in conversation has made me frame my knowledge of the languages through texts. Moreover, studying Mandarin through tutoring while I lived in China was a whole new experience with my literacy because I delved into learning characters and it changed my prior perception of writing. The characters require a certain sequence to be written and are basically drawings.
Then I started exploring my religion/ethnicity by going to Sunday school to learn Hebrew and then went on to study for my Bar Mitzvah. Through that, I was able to start reading Hebrew but still don’t understand what I am reading, even though I somewhat understand the language.
Moving around and travelling brought me to buy an Amazon Kindle and then I could read as many books as I wanted without having to carry them around wherever I travelled, which proved inconvenient for long trips.
Later I moved back to Brazil, after eleven years abroad. This was a huge shock for me because I didn’t fully grasp my own culture. Then, protests started happening against the government all around Brazil. I only watched CNN and BBC, as my news sources, and felt that there wasn’t enough international coverage on the protests and so I got a Twitter account only to tweet about wanting more attention to be given to what was going on in Brazil. I was successful, as the next day I was emailed that CNN acknowledged my concern and was going to focus more on the protests. This moment of political advocacy led me to start writing about social justice issues on my school’s magazine The Talon, specifically about women’s rights. This ran along with participating in Model United Nations, and there I developed an ability to write resolutions and make them compelling. I wasn’t just more political by using my literacy; I was using it creatively as well. I began to explore my more artistically literate side when I started writing scripts on Celtx for film class, but they were still quite politically driven.
Finally, my literacy has led me to the final stage of my life, in which I am in now. I got here by writing my college applications. Now that I am at NYU, I have subscribed to the New York Times online and home delivery, but I feel like I will just have the online version because paper takes up too much space and kills trees. To have some mental health, I have also started journaling to connect with my thoughts for only a few minutes and also record my time here.
Overall, my literacy demonstrates my background and has evolved to take me to where I am today.
http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline/latest/embed/index.html?source=0AjMJdJLFwuecdHJPQkxEeXVwUmZ4V1FPclE4UlFXb1E&font=Bevan-PotanoSans&maptype=toner&lang=en&height=650
My digital history dates back to my earliest waking memories. It might have been video games that flipped a switch in my brain and triggered my consciousness. My mother brought home a computer from her work and set up a game from 1993 called Myst. I spent as much time as I possibly could playing Myst. I loved it. Looking back, I didn’t interact with it in any ways that the game considered meaningful, but those interactions were still deeply powerful to me. Exploring a desolate cryptic island opened my eyes to what could be done in digital media.
My next milestone was another simple program my parents installed in that computer, Kid Pix. For those unaware, Kid Pix was a very basic image editing program that was based on simple tools, primarily stamps. It was accessible and user friendly; It allowed kids to create things. While they rarely amounted to much more than refrigerator art, it was still creation.
The next few pieces of my timeline involve writing. Writing has always been an important means of communication and expression for me, and it all started with self-expression about games. Almost all of my important moments of writing and digital interaction are in some way traceable to games.
In high school, I started writing for fun. Mostly in a blog that no longer exists, but also largely on Twitter. Twitter became a very large part of my professional networking, and I quickly built a digital rolodex. Once I started speedrunning and playing competitive fighting games, Twitter became even more important in staying connected with distant friends.
In late 2013, I started doing a little PR in independent games for friends who were showing their work off at festivals and conventions. It’s unclear exactly where this history is leading, in terms of a future career in writing or in PR or one of a number of other options, but the influence of games on my life has been dramatic and it seems unlikely that is going to change.
Not only has digital media become my passion, but it also frames my interactions with other people, both professionally and personally. Twitter has forced me to make my writing public and encouraged brevity. I have spent my whole life trying to find my voice in my writing, and Twitter has perhaps done more than any other singular writing tool to help me develop it.
Each of us learned to read and write using a variety of tools which have transformed the way we interact with the world. Using tiki-toki as your platform (advanced users may try TimelineJS), create a timeline that showcases your digital literacy journey. To do this:
Remember:
Post the draft by Friday, September 19th (by 11:59pm), and comment on at least 3 of your classmates projects by Sunday night. You will present the finished projects on Monday the 22nd.