Worst/Best Jan 25th

Worst - Not sure that I had one, maybe having to leave a great dinner with great friends early...but I left for good reasons so it is hard to call that a bad thing

Best - My DSL working at long last and enjoying my DSL with the best friend

Maya, Selfe, and I

Chapter Six “The Role of Parents” was the chapter that seemed to fall the farthest from what was the presumed goal of being enlightening. The chapter opens strong, “You can sit with your child and prompt him to show you something…you’re getting close to the kid and gaining insight into ways of learning…is fosters the relationship between you and the kid (Everson qtd in Selfe 98).” On the following two pages Selfe continues on to give experts of computer magazines suggesting the parents can coach, support and act as positive role models for their kids, but it is with this introduction of the computer magazines that Selfe seems to loose track of the role and the power of a parent.  Selfe reduces this role to being a binary system of either the good, providing parent or the bad, non-providing parent.  Selfe claims that this is what the advertisements of the time did, which is no different than what any other advertisement does when selling products meant for kids, but then does it herself by reducing the parents role to that of the agents to the cause, meaning that the parent only seem to have played a role in this situation by providing the needed funding.  In reality the parents role went (and goes) far beyond funding, as was suggested at the opening of the chapter and then somehow moved past far to quickly. 

 For another look at this Chapter see Josh's blog here, he also talks about the idea that this good/bad parent marketing is not new or exclusive to this industry. 

Wait! Don't look, I don't know you!

It seems the follow classmate Jaclyn and I have be thinking about the same issues of ownership and how they impact our daily lives, see her blog here. 

And now for my post....

I am not sure if it is that my life begins to reflect what I am doing in class, or my in class life reflects what I do outside of school, but more and more these two world seem to converge upon one another.  Maybe it is just the my education has made more more aware of life around me.

Over Christmas my Father found my facebook page and naturally we became friends.  Up until his request I have been unaware that he had a page, and that most of my siblings had a page as well.  In the last few weeks it has been a landslide of family on facebook, which for the most part I am enjoying.

One notable exception to the enjoyment has been the addition of my oldest sister, B, to my friends list.  Not because I don’t want her as a “friend” or because she has run amok with applications and such, but because of the issues of ownership (over myspace/facebook pics) we were talking about in class last week.  

The first thing she did upon becoming my friend was to use facebook to take an inventory of my life, friends and morality (or so it seemed) and then email me all of her qualms with my existence.  Her main issue seemed to be that I have pictures of children that are not “mine” in a photo album titled “People I Love.”

Three of the kids in question are her stepdaughter, son, and daughter and the rest of them are my god-children or family. All of the other parents involved have seen this part of my page and are comfortable with it, and all of these other parents (including B) have pictures of my daughter somewhere in there lives if not on facebook/myspace. 

B, however, took issue with them being on my page, saying that I took “her” pictures off of “her” myspace and them put them on my page, and asked me to either remove them or change the settings of my page so that nobody else could see them, citing that he and her husband are really protective and don’t want just anyone to be able to see their kids and that these pictures are hers and I didn’t ask about using them.

She seems to really feel as if she owns these pictures and can therefore tell me what to do with them, but I question the validity of this statement.  Most of the pictures in question were taken over Thanksgiving, when all of my family and upwards of twenty cameras were around.  All photos were later collaborated and every member of my family has a disk with all 500+ photos and I am not sure that anyone of us can be sure who took what pictures.  (Outside of the safe guess that you didn’t take the ones you are in, and Aunt R took all the one that look as If they are looking down on the room, because she is the only person that was spotted standing on a table.) But all the same, B thinks these pics are hers, either because she has the same ones posted else where, or because they may have been taken with her camera, or, more likely, because her kids are in them.  Well my kid is in them as well and I am not excreting claim of them, they are pics, nothing more.  But if her kids are in them, as is my kid, and my brother’s kids, and my other brother’s kids and so on, who owns the pic?  Do we vote, one vote per kid?  Or is ownership determined by who “took” the pic?

I would also venture to say that now they are owned by facebook and myspace as myself and many of other members of my family (including B) have posted them on both sites, and my removing them or changing my settings has little to no impact on who might see them. And if I subscribe to the idea of removing them from public space (which I can’t remove them from the WWW in any real way) do I then have to take them off my walls and not hang pics of these wonderful kids in my home because from time to time strangers enter my home to do things life repair pipes and change the carpet? How far do I have to go to make sure nobody outside of friends and family can see these kids?  And does she then get so sort of approval system over my friends list, who is and who is not ok to be added and have the privilege to see her kids? 

Also, does this woman never take her kids outside if she is so worried about “other people looking at [her] kids”? 

 

Blogging as classwork

So I have recently come to the conclusion that I am not a good blogger.  Ironically I was super excited about having my own blog after learning it was one of the class requirements.  I thought that it was going to be yet one more creative outlet for me.  As it is right now, I find the format of the blog to be more restrictive than freeing, but that might just be because I haven't played around with the formatting yet.  It might also be a product of my having never had a blog before and not being used to posting one on a regular basis and now needed to do so.  I am hoping over the next few weeks I will grow to love blogging, and that I will be able to find a way to make this one prettier.  

In the mean time, I will let her pretty up the page for me...

Worst/Best Jan 18th

Worst - Jan 18th being the day Verizon said my internet would work, only to have it roll around and Verizon to tell me my internet will work on Jan 25th.  Looks like 7 days at a time, they are getting me to pay for nothing 

Best - Holding hands with my daughter and spending the raining day with her and Miss N passing the time with games and books.

Worst/Best for Jan 15th

Worst- The kid being at her Dad's house. I am sure she is having fun, but I miss her.

Best- My morning with the best friend before I had to head off to school.

Worst/Best for Jan. 14th

Worst - Tie - Waiting all day for the UPS guy, only to have him show up as soon as I got in the shower and started washing my hair and Going to pick up L last night for poetry only to have him text and say he wasn't home yet as I pulled in his driveway, then laving only to have him text that he was on his way and would be there in 5 mins, so I waited only to be told he wasn't going to make it causing me to be late for poetry :(

Best - The slam poetry event in Pomona...Good poetry and good friends, what could be better?

Faigley and the Revolution

“Some have made quite remarkable use of this new literacy. Even though Generation X often gets bashed for its political apathy, many students have used their digital literacy to engage social and political issues.”

 

            I chose these two lines to be the two that I wanted to respond to because they are the base of my thoughts on the mood of Faigley’s address.  I agree that the general mood of this piece was sadness.  Faigley seems incredibly sad about the state of the literacy not just in our classrooms but in our society.  In class, coming to the agreement that Faigley was saddened by the state of literacy (especially that of multimedia literacy) but I had a slightly different feeling about why he was sad about it.  Most of our class seemed to think that he was sadden by what we were gaining access to with the invention of the world wide web, and it easy to understand why it is that this could be the case.  The question that came up in class is really valid, what is it we are really getting access to?  I however, think it was something different that was making Faigley sad.  I think he was sad because if what we are using this amazing tool for.  He points out how powerful the world wide web can be in engaging people in civic issues and political arenas, but all too often we chose to use the web for escapism and entertainment over education and activism. 

My first blog....

This blog should have hit the web yesterday, but unfortunately my home internet issues won’t be resolved until Monday so I am left at the mercy of the ever growing AT&T wifi hot spots for now.   That being said I am super excited about having my own blog, at least for now, we will have to wait and see how long that excitement last.  I will be keeping this blog in accordance to the requirements of my English 658 class as well as to in some small way document the happenings of this year because 2010, the year of my MA program, will be amazing. 

So an explanation of the only element the will be consistent from post to post.  I have long realized that it is impossible and undesirable to share every moment of everyday with even the people that you love the most in this life, but it important to know their basic moments of joy and defeat on a daily bases as well as to keep lines of communication and understanding open.  It is one the foundation of this belief that I started my “worst/best” thing.  At the end of everyday I ask my daughter what the worst part of her day was and what the best part was, because while I wasn’t there for all of her day, this will give me not only a pretty good understanding of her day, but also what makes her happy, sad, excited, angry…and so on.  So here I will document the worst and best parts of my day at the end of everyday (I hope).