Ello Interwebs 😀

So for week 3 I read the following:
1. Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge
2. The Age of the Essay

Network Literacy talks about the difference between print literacy and online literacy. The first example of print literacy talks about books and libraries (much like our previous symposium). They use the example of a student named: Penny, who goes in search of a book to use for her essay/research. Now to be fair, when I haven’t really used the library for research… ever. The only times I’ve ever used the library was for books that I wanted to read (e.g. Harry Potter), by the time I began needing to research the internet was already at hand. In fact, I don’t remember how it happened, but whenever I need to find out a fact the first thing I go to is Google and/or Wikipedia. It’s kinda scary how that its more of an automatic process and I don’t even realised how I got to this point.

So what’s the difference between print and online? Well, firstly, I don’t have to leave the bed to use the latter. But most importantly it is the way we can share, access and be constantly updated on this information. Whilst print literacy has a limit, e.g. sharing with others, updating, online literacy obliterates those obstacles. And we don’t just have “articles” we have blogs, social media, forums and even videos, on top of that, all this information is constantly being updated. And even better we can bring all that information together in an RSS feed, a program when can link together all the readings you are following, basically… It can’t get any easier. The only real issue is that the validity of the information you have is give or take so you must make sure to double, triple check the info.

The Age of the Essay is about the way we write essays and what is considered a “real essay”. I’m not going to talk to much about this because the whole reading fried my brain (just a little it was REALLY long), but not going to lie… I’ve completed 13 years of school and up until that point I still didn’t know what is defined as a “real essay”. To be honest I don’t really enjoy writing essay’s but the majority of the time we do that because your school asks you to do it and so then we follow this structure for the rest of our lives. Fortunately, as soon as I completed my english exam the first thing I threw away from my brain was this structure, I’ve always wondered: Why can’t essays just display our knowledge and understanding? Instead of marking it on fancy words and a solid structure, isn’t the most important part the actual information that we learned? In all honestly, I was taught that as long as you use “big” words, a good structure and present a idea (for example an point about the book you’re writing about) that is partially unique, then you’re guaranteed a high mark. As opposed to someone who presents a good idea and solid argument but average essay structure.

What a shit…

~Abrupt Ending~