Ashley Zizich

Senior Seminar

Response 5

September 12, 2017

            The Chapter in The Uses of Digital Literacy about the Uses of YouTube was interesting and pointed out a lot of things I had not thought about. Tracing the process by which an individual creative talent leads to economic enterprise and employment to understand creativity blew my mind. I had never thought of something as YouTube as a vessel for measuring the process of how children and adults learn. I use my children as an example sometimes, but it is easier for me to see the advanced uses of technology through them. I feel sometimes I am at a disadvantage because the courses I took in high school that centered around technology was merely how to type on a computer. When I first started Junior College, we were expected to turn papers in that had been typed on a Microsoft program, using a format, but that was the extent of my computer use. My children have such an advantage. While I still don’t know the uses of many programs, and how to navigate a lot of programs, they will not have to worry about this. When I think about projects I did in school, I remember, as we talked in class, going to the library and looking through a card catalogue to find books I needed to find my research. I rarely had the internet at my fingertips, and when I did, it was not easy for me to navigate because it wasn’t such a known entity. Today, when my kids want to know about something, I find myself saying “I don’t know the answer, I’ll google it.” There is a type of beauty in the aspect that if I don’t know the answer to something, I can find it so quickly.

            Another aspect of my children learning in a different way than I did, is the learning programs that are available through school. We all see commercials about ABC Mouse, and being a parent, I told myself I will be the person to teach my children how to read, not some computer program. When they got into school, they were both sent home with usernames and passwords to several learning websites that they go on in the classroom to help them enhance their learning. Learning now is like an instant gratification. In helping my children navigate some of these programs at home, I have learned that if they click on the wrong answer, they are corrected right away and posed the same question in a different manner so they can learn how to get it right. While I was in school, if I got an answer wrong, I would have to wait for the teacher to grade my paper and correct it, and then for me to look over my mistakes. YouTube being a learning platform doesn’t seem so foreign to me now.