At first I didn’t expect to pick up new things in Writing for New Media course. For me, the use of new media is something that you come across and pick up in daily life instead of studying it in class, taught by a teacher. Given the fact that new media are becoming “newer” and “newer” every second, how could a course possibly cover it? The reason I applied for this class was simply hoping to improve my writing skills in English.
But then I realized, this course was to make informed a new kind of literacy that may have already been adopted yet not have been aware of: the new media literacy. In the context of new media literacy, as I mentioned before in my previous post, writing is no longer the act of using a pen to write sentences on the paper. It is a general term for creating content using new digital tools and share it with the whole Internet world. From the blog posts of my classmates, I learned that many people do not think that they know about new media, although actually for me, they are already using quite a lot of new media tools. Therefore, this course meets the need to make known the fact that everyone can get involved in the new media world.
Apart from that, I did learn some new media tools that I had never heard of before. The most impressive tool is Prezi. A few weeks ago I served as voluntary worker in a local primary school. I was there to teach Form 6 students interviewing skills which prepared them for the upcoming interviews for entering middle school. I made my presentation slides using Prezi...
...and found it easy to use and highly welcomed by the audience. For this, I must thank Johnna for introducing this amazing tool.
I was quite surprised when we were assigned the blogging project because in my viewpoint, blogging was no longer the newest Internet tools now. With twitter, tumblr, facebook and all those new media websites, we still had to write blogs? But the fact is…I had never create a blog for a general audience before despite the fact that blogging service had been there for years. So it is actually a brand new experience for me when I started to write my posts and asked my friends to comment on them. When I quoted the freedom video in my previous post, I asked the owner and creator of the video, Andrea Lopez-Portillo for permission and told her about my blogging assignment. She said she would love to see my blog so I gave her the URL. Since Andrea is a Mexican artist who used to work in London and now in Austria
There are two kinds of writing: you write for yourself, and you write for someone else. This blogging project made me try the latter one. To me, it works pretty well. Meanwhile, however, I am still wondering could it be NEWER? As I mentioned before, blogging is not new enough to me. Next time why don’t we switch from blogging to tumblr, twitter or even Facebook group?
Speaking of Facebook group, participants of the 2011 Salzburg Academy
Since then I fell in love with the Facebook group function. An excellent tool to arouse inspiring debate – I love debates.
What I also found out is that in new media age, one thing that matters is who you are following. Facebook, twitter, tumblr, weibo…all these are just platforms, through which you can explore various issues. We have to choose the right ones to follow, find the best ways to turn meaningless “message” into meaningful “information”.
Well, I guess that’s pretty much about it. Or should I say, that’s it about this blog. But the “writing for the new media” thing is not over – it will never be, because writing for new media is basically what I do everyday. To keep in touch with me, you are all welcome to find me on these websies: Facebook: duyunyi@hotmail.com; twitter: @dodoluvu
Ciao!
Ciao!
Appendix: Comments I made on my classmates’ blogs
No comments:
Post a Comment