Post 10

I can’t remember a time in my life when technology didn’t play some sort of role. From my very first Barbie computer game when I was four to the Kindle I got last Christmas, technology has altered literacy drastically since Baron wrote “From Pencils to Pixels.” Technology based learning has infiltrated education from preschools to universities. Many students today would struggle to write a paper without any electronic aid to lean on. Since word processing programs like Microsoft Word, handwritten documents have become a thing of the past and I believe that this is just the beginning. Learning today is highly focused on visual aids in place of textbooks. Power Point presentations are used in the majority of classrooms in place of blackboards. These changes have definitely changed my literacy. When I write papers online search engines like Google are used frequently in addition to an online thesaurus. Also, other people’s opinions and pieces of work are at our fingertips 24/7 through online articles, blogs, and social media outlets. Reading these have a major effect on my own writing style simply because it is like an ongoing conversation that I am constantly learning from.

Alphabet writing is becoming a thing of the past. With the use of the internet people can now make visual arguments with digital video and pictures in order to get their point across. Whether it be a photo album uploaded on Facebook, a TwitPic, a smiley face sent in a text message, or a photo embedded into a blog, composing my feelings and ideas is way beyond writing them out. Not only are there other ways to express my thoughts but the amount of people it can reach through the internet is huge. There is absolutely no denying the fact that technology has changed literacy in the past 12 years and I believe it will continue to change the way in which we become literate in years to come.