More details to come, but as the next iteration of your technology narrative I’ll ask you to produce a complex self-portrait representing your uses of technology.

750 – 1000 words. Due: 2/2.

The technological literacy narrative is designed to ask you, over a period of several sessions, to describe your early relationship with technology (particularly in regards to writing), to explain your current relationship with various technologies, and to reflect how these relationships have evolved over time. The narratives will encourage reflection on your past, present, and future relationship with technology.

Phase 1: The past

Pre-writing

Please do some freewriting in response to the following questions. Please try to write for at least five minutes in response to each question. Use as much detail as possible—try to imagine all the details but don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or structure yet:

• Please write about when, where, and how you first came to interact with computers, and how you first learned to use computers.
• How did you feel about computers when you were growing up? Did you like them? Why or why not? What did you use computers for (Games? Email? Writing?)?
• What are your experiences with social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)? What do you remember about your first experiences with such sites? If you haven’t used social networking sites, why not?
• Do you text on a cell phone or blackberry-type device? If so, what do you remember about your first experience with texting? If you don’t text, why not?

Prompt

Now that you’ve gotten a good start brainstorming I’d like you to expand on those questions through your writing, working to fashion a narrative detailing your past history with technology. Use the questions as a starting place but feel free to elaborate on issues or questions that are salient to your individual history. Later in the term I will ask you to look at your current relationships with various technologies, and finally I’ll ask you to look to the future, and I will ask you to remix the pieces in some other ways.

Details

Publish your narrative as a page on your class subdomain (make certain to add it to the menu, so we can all find it).

As with everything you publish for me this semester, you need more than just words for your narrative — you must have at least one image, video, or audio file with your narrative. You’ll need to provide a caption and give credit to the creator of the image (even if it’s your own).

Once you have published your narrative, you’ll need to publish a post about the narrative that links to the page. That post should serve two fundamental functions: it will provide a compelling preview of your narrative that summarizes the controlling idea of your narrative in a sentence or two that encourages readers to read what you have written and it will reflect on what you have learned in the process of writing your technology literacy narrative.

Some questions to consider in your reflection:

• What was your writing process for this narrative like? Were the strategies, skills, and procedures you used effective for this assignment?
• What did you learn about yourself by the end of writing your narrative?
• This piece of writing is probably a fairly traditional narrative, but did you find yourself using new media strategies gained from reading Pullman and others so far? If so, how and how did those strategies affect your composition?