Response to Introduction: Writing and Recording Knowledge

After reading Elizabeth Hill Boone's article, I learn a lot about the revolution of literacy. This makes me think about myself. I am good at listening, not only in the test, but also in daily life; not only in Chinese, but also in English. And I often set it as one of my skills. As Elizabeth said in the article, listening, speaking, reading and writing are from the same literacy, I prefer to call them "language literacy". While listening is the first step to acknowledge a language, if you cannot understand the text or what people said, you probably cannot do anything related to that language.

The listening what I am talking about is not something about whether you have a strong enough listening ability to hear others' voice, but a skill which you can understand, interpret and create even to communicate with others. That's lead us back to the definition of the literacy. I like to understand others feeling and what they are thinking and talking. Sometimes I really consider that listening is one of the best ways to get on well with friends.

Great thoughts and ideas are not all from talking, but absolutely from listening. When you understand something, maybe you do not have to say something or even write something about that, you can think by yourself in heart and then let others listen to your thoughts.

That is what I think about this article, we cannot put the different parts of the language apart, because they are indeed a whole, what we should do is to use them appropriately and help us to better survive in the world.

Literacy & Technology

I have just finished reading Dennis Baron's From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology. It is pretty a long text, so I just scanned the main paragraphs of each part. I do like the way author persuade the audience as well as those lovable pictures.

Let me talk about how the technology shape the literacy first. When human being stepped into the modern society, technology has been showing its unchangable position to us. People even the upper class used the quill pen and ink to write something down in 17th century, but now, we are using computers and the Internet to keep record of our writing materials. You do not even need to print your staff out, just by posting them on the Internet, people throughout the world will see them immediately. Technology makes literacy become more straightforward and convenient. It also formed some new kinds of literacy, such as blogging. We can record our thoughts as soon as they came out and we do not have to worry about whether the paper will go moldy or be destroyed by someone else, because they are completely stored in the drives of your computer or even the Internet.

While on the other hand, literacy is playing an important role in the improvement of the technology. People are getting smarter and they learn to synthesis different literacy and turn them into a better way that is called new technology. In this way, more and more technology come out to interpret or help to express the literacy. Meanwhile, literacy is also a part of the motivations in this process.

In all, literacy and technology are synergistic--they are working together to enrich each other and make the human world more vivid and colorful.