Hello!
I guess I’ll start off by saying sorry for the delay in this post.
When I first saw this class being offered, I assumed from the title alone that this class would be about the ways in which human minds have begun to change due to the introduction of new forms of reading and different ways of taking in information. Probably due to my Education major, I expected to have conversations about the ways in which reading in different formats can change our comprehension, which of course connects back to education and the implementation of text in a classroom (especially ELA!). Upon realizing that my assumption was not entirely correct, and that we would be focusing on different aspects of not only regular but digital literacy and how we can use it to better understand and interpret texts, I was in equal parts fascinated, excited, and terrified.
I have never been very literate when it comes to technology, despite being part of the first generation to really grow up with it. I was in late middle school when I received an iPod Touch for Christmas, which was really my first exposure to this new era of technology. I suppose some of this is due to the fact that my parents seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake, as it appears after a quick engine search that the first iPod Touch was released when I was only seven years old. I definitely recall my parents having flip phones until the late 2000s, and I grew up playing games on a clunky old computer. All of this to say I always felt a couple years behind when it comes to digital literacy/understanding computers.
This is exactly why I found the subject material of this class to be so exciting and daunting at the same time. I couldn’t wait to develop some skills and knowledge of computers: how they work, why they work, why and how they were invented, etc.
When people ask me what classes I am taking this semester, I even find myself referring to this course as a “basic computers class” rather than an “English class,” while I of course, find both to be true.
I am especially excited to be familiarizing myself with terms such as “metareading” and “digital scholarly editing,” and seeing how these can be applied when looking at a text such as Walden. I am excited to be moving forward in this study, and I now understand why Walden is the perfect subject of study for this class, with several editions and constant edits being made by the original author.
This study, and I suppose then, this class as a whole, has changed the way I see text: it feels more fluid now, less concrete. I can understand that a “book” can be an amalgamation of ideas which span the stories of countless people. Text feels much more alive now, something which feels counterintuitive when considering the metacritical and hyperanalytical ways in which we are viewing it for the purposes of this class.
I am so looking forward to continuing these studies in the class and moving forward, and I cannot wait to see what else we can uncover together.
Thank you!