Proposal

To continue on with the train of thought in my reflection: education can and should utilize digital media. Kids more and more these days are being involved in the production of these medias. It may seem like there is a lack in literacy in terms of words on a page, but the youth is greatly understanding digital media more than the older generations ever good – hence electracy. Why should the educations institutes then not take advantage of this? Our education system is still very much stuck in a primitive arrangement. We need to grasp modernity and start teaching these occurrences on the internet as significant. Instead of traditional essays, exams, quizzes and all of those mundane forms of accessing knowledge teachers can take hold of this new wave of participatory culture and create a new curriculum. Have the students create remix videos or memes to represent the content they are learning in class. I do believe that this is a shift that is already beginning to happen as we have a younger wave of teachers coming in and the old, stuck in their ways, ones are retiring. But in order to get these methods accepted as assessment rather than just assignments is going to take effort and convincing of it’s importance.

From my study I have learned a lot of valuable information about my current culture that I was blind to otherwise. Although, it is bizarre to academically analyze ones own culture, it helps to shed some light on potentially positive outcomes of this. We need to manage to take this participatory culture and network rhetoric and place it into our academics. In doing so, we would create an environment where students can learn in a way that interests them – whether that be linguistically or alinguistically. In order for this to be successful, though, we need to have educators that are not only literate but electrate.

Education needs to start evolving with our evolving culture and technology. Technology is becoming an integral part in our day to day lives and it is literally rewiring our brains and the way we process things. We could greatly benefit by including this into our education systems. Taking the already well known traditional form of rhetoric and incorporating that with the new and evolving digital rhetoric. Maybe then eventually we can have a greater amount of digital media that has political, academic, civic and other forms of intentions.