What is the Purpose of Archiving?

This post is just a note to myself for something I want to reflect upon (an aside)....
Book conservation or content conservation? Or both?  Our text, when speaking of the lack of storage space for the copious amount of printed material that our modern society produces, mentions a book by Nicholson Baker: Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001) .  I've always been a Nicholson Baker fan, but wasn't aware of this one.  **Note to self to read.

Here is a response to his book from Richard Cox. (Richard J. Cox is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in library science and an M.A. in history. The author of numerous articles, technical reports, and books, he was named a fellow of the Society of American Archivists in 1989.)

Children's Squiggles

Here's a link to an informative article from the Learning Disabilities Association of America about the importance of "squiggles" in early writing awareness.

Taken from the above article:

The Texas Center for Reading and Language Arts provides the following Stages of Writing Development:

• Drawing
• Scribbling
  
  • During the scribbling stage, children learn to distinguish writing from drawing
  • Children try to reproduce letters and words through scribbles.
  
  
• Producing letter-like forms.
• Writing letter sequences or strings
• Spelling phonetically
• Spelling conventionally

And here :) is a picture of my 3 year old daughter Mindel's writing:

She wrote this in her communication notebook from her new preschool.  I was looking in it (looking for a message from her teacher– there was none, lol) while stopped at a traffic light.  I turned around and said to her and her brother "Look at the nice writing Mindel did!"   My son, who is five, said, "What does it say?"  I responded, "I'm not sure.  I don't know what she was writing."  My daughter quickly chimed in, "I was writing Alef-beis."  (Alef-beis is the Hebrew alphabet.)

My curiosity was piqued, so I then asked, "Mindel, did you write from this way to that way (indicating left to right) or that way to this way (indicating right to left).  She motioned and said the former, left to right (as in English).  Unlike English, Hebrew and Yiddish are both written from right to left.  The language of instruction in her classroom is Yiddish, but she began learning the Hebrew letters in her nursery school last year.  All of the books I read to her at home are, incidentally, in English.  Clearly she is in the scribbling stage where she can distinguish writing from drawing, but cannot yet produce letter-like forms.

What is Web 2.0?

Last week, in preparation for our blogging assignment, one of our assigned readings was chapter six of Exploring Web 2.0: Second Generation Interactive Tools– Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis, Networking, Virtual Worlds, and More by Ann Bell.

Here is Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend Technologies Management, explaining what Web 2.0 is:

Putting it into my own words, Web 2.0 is not a change to the World Wide Web infrastructure, but refers instead to interactive applications that make for a more rich, web experience.

The chapter contained several resources for instructors wanting to use blogs, wikis, etc. for educational purposes such as EduBlogger, Edublogs, ClassBlogMeister, and Gaggle Blogs.  

Two sample classroom blogs were: Green Stream Blog, and The Secret Life of Bees.

Our Preliminary Definitions of "Literacy"

On 9/2 each class member recorded a preliminary definition for literacy (mine was #10) as follows:

1. Literacy is the ability to read and fully comprehend the material.

2. The act of reading and comprehending words in a given language to gain knowledge to be able to communicate in a given language and comprehend what is being said.

3. Learned ability to manipulate a system of symbols to make or derive meaning that others can understand. 

4. It is the ability to read, to write and to use language as an effective tool of communication.

5. In a classroom context, literacy is the ability to read and write and use tools available to access language and learn.  In a broader context, literacy is the ability to effectively interact with one's environment to assess information, gain knowledge, and communicate using the various media available (the written page, computer software, etc.). 

6. Literacy means an ability to read and write at a basic level that allows a person to participate in our society, hold a job, shop, have a bank account, read documents, and complete forms, etc. 

7. Literacy: a thorough understanding and usage of a specific technical pedagogy, i.e., educational literacy, computer literacy, technical literacy.

8. Literacy has many facets, from illiterate (the inability to read Latin or Greek) to advanced literacy, the ability to comprehend and formulate complex ideas through reading and writing. There are those who, not unlike Dan Goleman, speak of multiple literacies (e.g., computer literacy, data literacy, etc.).  Literacy, at its most basic, means the ability to function in a complex society on a satisfactory level with reading and writing. 

9. The act or ability to comprehend in reading, writing and spoken language. 

10. Literacy -- being an effective reader and writer; being able to understand & use language & visuals in a savvy, educated way. 

11. Literacy is knowing how to read and write on the most basic level -- but there are all kinds of literacies -- visual, digital, technological, etc.  Literacy is thinking about thinking. 

12. Literacy is an ability to read, write, and understand the meaning of individual words and the context  in which they are used to comprehend the phrase on an intellectual level to be able to discuss them and exchange ideas. 

13. The ability to read and write correctly in a particular language with full comprehension of what is being communicated. 

14. The ability to access any body of written work that one refers to for various uses, i.e., instructional, informative, or recreational purposes. 

15. Literacy is the ability to read and write in order to function in society. There are multiple types of literacy as well as various levels of literacy. 

16. Literacy is more than being able to Read, it's about understanding what one reads and internalizing knowledge, and conveying one's understanding (clearly communicating insight and ideas). 

17. The ability to interpret symbols accurately. 

18. Literacy was thought as merely the ability to read and write. But it involves many other things like comprehension, forming personal and communal identities, and making sense of the world and how it functions. 

19. I define literacy as the ability to read and write.

Purposes of the Blogging Assignment

Taken from our course syllabus, there are multiple purposes for this assignment:

1. Develop my own digital literacy expertise
   
2. Create an online record of my course writing and of links to reports, blogs, websites, journals, and books that I deem valuable for my continued study of language and literacy
3. Demonstrate for course credit that I have developed the ability to create and develop a blog on blogger.com
4. Have easy and quick access to all of my course writing for ENGL B6400: Theories & Models of Literacy
5. Program Assessment: course blogs will be included in program assessment for the MA in Language & Literacy program (CCNY professors & administrators will/might have access to my blog)
6. Create an "individualized portrait of (my) own learning" in this course