A12.4: Participation Memo

Ashley Pence

November 9, 2007

Aims & Objectives:

This week I set out to accomplish several goals that were intended to help myself as well as my classmates.  The goals that would help me were to attend class and obtain information about Movie Maker which we will be using to complete our final project.  I also set the goal to reserach socio-emotional literacy and compile a mini research paper about it.  The goals that I wanted to accomplish that would help my classmates were to review their I-Search papers and comment on them.  I was able to accomplish all of these goals which have prepared me for continuing my research and completing my project.

Declarative Knowledge:

This week began by learning about how to operate Movie Maker as well as how to obtain photos and music that are free to the public.  By viewing Mrs. McComas’ movies I gained ideas of how I want to do my project.  I also learned more about a branch of digital literacy which was socio-emotional literacy.  By completing the peer reviews of my fellow students papers I gained a better understanding of what to expect when I receive my feedback.

Procedural Knowledge:

By attending class this week we gained a lot of information on how our final project will be presented.  We already knew that we would be using Movie Maker, but this week we got to see how it works.  We watched two movies and for the first one we picked good and bad things about the movie.  By doing this I realized that everyone has different taste and some may like certain pictures you use and others may not.  The same goes for the music you use.  I did not like the music that the producer of this movie used however it fit well with the storyline and there were others in the class that liked the music.  The same went for the pictures.  Some people liked the choice of pictures while others did not see the point in particular pictures that were used.  Mrs. McComas informed us that our movie is to be 3-5 minutes long and approximately 300 words used.  I quickly realized that this may be a hard task for me.  We must develop a script by condensing our introduction, summary and answer to be not much longer than the 300 word limit.  To obtain pictures that are not All Rights Reserved Mrs. McComas informed us of Flickr, a website where you can browse pictures and find pictures that are creative commons or public domain.  We also learned about how to save everything that we compile for our project.  It is a very good idea to save everything you find, music, audio and photos in one place like a jump drive.  We also learned the downside to Movie Maker which is the fact that it only lets you have one track throughout the whole movie.  This problem can be solved by using a program called Audacity.

This week I did further research into socio-emotional literacy and realized that it is something that I have never considered before, but use this type of literacy everyday.  I learned that it is the highest and most complex level of literacy because you must have obtained the other branches of literacy to be successful in socio-emotional literacy.  By having this literacy skill you can save yourself as well as many others from incorrect information and even dangerous people who lurk in chat rooms.

By completing my peer reviews for my fellow classmates I realized that there is more to reviewing a paper than correct spelling errors.  Those errors should be caught by the author themselves however other errors such as content may not always be caught by them.  By doing this peer review we not only commented on content, but we also were able to bless certain perspectives of the persons paper.  This provided encouragement to that person to let them know that there are good parts to their paper and sometimes can even outweigh the bad parts.

Conditional Knowledge:

This weeks assignments taught me skills that are helping me complete my project as well as useful information for future projects.  Projects like the one that I will be completing are interesting to me and by gaining a better understanding of them I will be more willing to use them in the future.  I have attempted to use Movie Maker before, but gave up because I became frustrated with it.  Now that I have to use it I can learn and maybe not be so afraid for future uses that could help me in my professional career.

A12.1:Socio-Emotional Literacy

Ashley Pence

November 8, 2007

The branch of literacy that deals with socio-emotional characteristics is one that I find to be the most interesting.  Who would have ever thought that in order to gain information you have to know how to handle other people’s misinformation or trickery?  At the same time you are required to share helpful information appropriately with others in digital spaces.  Eshet-Alkali (2004; 2005) describes socio-emotional literacy as the highest level and most complex skill to obtain of the 5 branches of literacy.  This branch requires us to be extremely cautious of the information we use as well as being mature about the information we share.  Another reason for being so complex is that we must have a good control over the other branches of literacy to acquire success with socio-emotional literacy.

Socio-emotional literacy requires the digital user to be comfortable with what they contribute to cyberspace.  Eshet-Alkali (2004; 2005) tell me that I must be willing to share my knowledge with other people.  This knowledge could range anywhere from how I interpret data, my individual thoughts on certain subjects and collaborating with others to share knowledge. 

 In the study performed by Eshet-Alkalai and Amichai-Hamburger (2004) all of the branches of literacy were tested to obtain information on what age groups perform better in certain branches of literacy.  Each of the branches of literacy had one group performing better than the other however for socio-emotional literacy there was not a clear determining score that showed one group out performing the other.

The fact that there are skills such as socio-emotional literacy does not surprise me.  What does surprise me is that someone has identified it.  I feel like everyone is aware of the fact that we must be careful and mature about what we view and share in cyberspace, but it never crossed my mind that someone could be good or bad at it.  When I log into things such as this blog and express my opinions or knowledge about something I am always careful to only include what I feel is appropriate.  Throughout this class we have also learned ways in which to have proper “netiquette” that will allow us to monitor what should and should not be included in things that are being seen by the public eye.  However I am also aware of the fact that there are times when people may have not been taught such “netiquette” skills and publish very inappropriate things.  This relates to me because I am viewing those innapropriate things, but not on purpose.  This leads to the importance of teaching these skills to our students to help them become appropriate not only when publishing but also when viewing or interacting.   This literacy has to do with protecting oneself from the dangers of the digital, highly- connected world. (2007)  We have all heard the news that tells us about pedophiles who lurk in chat rooms waiting for their next victims.  If there were a way to educate children as well as adults of the dangers of cyberspace we could perhaps decrease the occurrence of such horrific events.  

Resources:

Aphek, E. (2007). Digital, highly connected children: Implications for education. Retrieved November 8, 2007, from http://www.phil-inst.hu/mobil/2005/Aphek.pdf

Aviram, A., Gurion, B., & Eshet-Alkalai, Y. (2006). Towards a theory of digital literacy: Three scenarios for the next steps. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning. Retrieved November 8, 2007 from the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Eshet-Alkalai & Amichai-Hamburger (2004, August). Experiments with digital literacy. Cyber Psychology, 7(4), 425-434.