Process memo

Jasmine Smith

October 12, 2012

MWF 8am

The most logical place for me to begin my timeline was when I was a newborn. From there I went through each stage of literacy from then to now. I was able to recount so much information that I found my timeline overflowing. My timeline revealed my back and forth struggle with becoming literate. I would have a breakthrough one minute and encounter problems with reading the next. This pattern was prevalent throughout my whole timeline. The theme throughout my timeline was definitely my focus on becoming literate through reading and writing. Books played a major role in helping me become literate, I didn’t really learn through music or other activities. My timeline was all over the place and too long to be a narrative. I decided to focus on my experience with becoming literate through school. It wasn’t that hard to focus on school because most of my experiences were linked to school anyway. The experience of creating a timeline told me that I am a fighter. No matter what obstacle was thrown at me, with the love and support of my parents I was able to get past it.

I narrowed down an area of focus for my written narrative by just focusing on every defining moment I had in school that was related to literacy. It was hard to focus my thoughts, because I found myself wanting to focus on every moment and detail in my life that had to do with reading and writing. I organized my narrative chronologically; I basically just followed my timeline and added details to the events. I elaborated on events listed on my timeline so I could have a full narrative. My peer review session really helped me, they told me to focus on one theme instead of multiple ones. She gave my paper more structure and told me to elaborate more on certain things instead of being so vague. Once I made those few changes, my paper began to come to life. At this point, I saw exactly how I wanted my animoto video to go. Making the video turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

Creating the animoto video was really hard, because a limited amount of characters were available to describe your story of how you became literate. My peer editor picked out fifteen sentences, but I found that they were all much to long to display on my video. I tried to cut a lot of the sentences, but I found that the sentences lost their significance when I deleted words. This began to frustrate me, because my story was turning into a video full of words that meant absolutely nothing. I finally realized how to reduce the size of a sentence and keep all of its meaning, but some of the sentences simply would not work. I found myself using other sentences in my narrative that fit better with telling my story through video. I used pictures in my video to compliment the sentences in the previous slide. It was a way to emphasize the message in the text slide. I used a lot of personal pictures, because what pictures can better describe me than me. The ones I used off of the Internet were just pictures of books to help the audience put a picture with a word. The song I picked for my background music was a song that said, “Don’t you know there has never been anyone like you and never will be again?”. This music spoke to me because throughout school I found it hard to just be me. I constantly looked for acceptance and ways to fit in. The song was all about being yourself and loving yourself through your flaws and everything. Loving yourself is so important especially when you are young and unsure of who exactly you are. You can just be you and that’s enough. Throughout becoming literate, I often found myself thinking I was stupid or not good enough because other people could read better than me, or write better than me. However, I now know that everyone is different and everyone moves at his or her own pace and that is okay. If it were one thing about my animoto video that I wish I could change, it would be adding more personal photos. I feel like that gives your video more of a warm feeling and makes it more relatable than a person’s with a lot of internet photos.

Subaru commercial

                                                                                            Jasmine Smith

                                                                                            October 10, 2012

                                                                                            WRT 150 MWF 8-9:07

I participated in Dominant-hegemonic reading when I watched the Subaru commercial. I received the dominant message in this video and was able to relate and agree with it. The commercial dealt with the ideology that a dog is man’s best friend. Every time the guy turned around in the car his dog was always there, wherever he went, the dog went. They replaced the dog in the scenario with the Subaru and said that the car is man’s best friend because it is always there for you. This commercial was meant to target people who like having a reliable companion such as a dog. When all else fells your dog will be there for you and now your Subaru. It could have also been meant to target animal lovers and stress how loyal the car is. If you looked closely you could see that the guy went from driving the car alone to having a family. This shows that the Subaru is the perfect car for the single young man or a family, it will last along time and you will grow older with the car, just like you grow older with a dog.

Education in the digital age

Dustin Anderson says, “ Simply put, we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist. We can’t keep ignoring the formidable cognitive skills they’re developing on their own. And above all, we must stop disparaging digital prowess just because some of us over 40 don’t happen to possess it. An institutional grudge match with the young can sabotage an entire culture.” Dustin is saying that instead of criticizing young people for being apart of the digital age, their skills should be embraced and praised. People over 40 often put down young people for blogging, sending emails and text instead of calling, and posting statuses on Facebook. They only put it down because they can’t catch on to the ever-changing world of technology, they are jealous and want to end the big technology craze. Schools need to stop teaching students the old fashioned way because that way is outdated and ineffective in preparing these students for the work place and the world in general. Students shouldn’t be limited to doing research in the library when there is an array of information on the Internet, and they shouldn’t be bound to writing letters when email and text are a much faster way to communicate. Schools would be more beneficial to students if they just give in to technology and teach them how to be successful in the new age.