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Progress Blog 5: Unit 3

These three assigned readings were a bit complicated for myself to read as they were long and drawn out. The assigned readings were uninteresting most of the time and it was hard to force myself to read them. In the first assigned reading, Shannon Carter talks about mainly communities and then that of her brothers communities. She first describes what a community is and then uses her brother as an example of communities and the requirement. In the second assigned reading, Seth Kahn appeals to students thoughts as he talks of ethnographic writing, what it is and why we as students need to write one. In the third assigned reading, Tabetha Adkins talks about interviewing a group of members from an Amish community and how she got to know them, their values, their community, and how impacting it was to create the relationships she had with the members of the community.

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Progress Blog 3: Unit 2

When this unit started, we had to comment in a group discussion board and plan our meetings with our assigned group to work on our project. However when the date came and passed to message in the board, no one else from my group had messaged. I was worried that I would fail the assignment without a group until the professor emailed the class and people started talking on the board. We had planned to meet on Thursday in the library and get a study room. It took us a while to figure out who was in our group but when we did it seemed like we clicked immediately. On this first day we had quickly gotten started as one person had already had an ethnography to do the group project over. We had split up all the slides we had to do and read as we worked. We asked questions to each other and managed to get most of our project done that day. Planning to meet on Friday to finish everything and turn the project in.

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Progress Blog 4: Unit 2

When we met on Friday, we finished our presentation and had everyone go over each slide and make sure nothing looked wrong and suggest things we thought might be changed to sound better. Although because the instructions did not explicitly say that we needed to record our voices over the presentation for each slide, my group believed we did not need to record our voices for a “Voice Thread”. I am worried that we did have to record our voices because the thread was called a “VOICE” thread and we may be docked a lot of points without it but it was a group decision and the decision was to not record our voices. Writing the reflection essay will be easy as it will just be over the assignments and the page requirement is only one to two pages. I feel as though I could make a proper ethnographic study after reading over the one our group chose. 

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Progress Blog 2: Unit 1 Literacy

Writing my essay was very hard for me and I did not think that I would do well on the assignment. After the tedious process of reading the three assignments from the Writing Inquiry book, I did not really grasp the concept that they were trying to convey. But I tried to write my essay the best I could. With the requirement of three to five pages, I thought I should talk about two communities I was in because I did not believe I could hit the page requirement with just a single community to discuss. While I was writing, I was unsure of what terms to include in my glossary and I worried that it might cause my paper to fail for plagiarism for all my definitions. But I was glad to receive my essay with the grade and feedback, especially in text feedback. It definitely boosted my confidence in writing.

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Progress Blog 1: Unit 1 Literacy

From what I learned last semester, I understand that literacy is a very broad subject and cannot be singled out for a simple definition. It can be understood as the ability to read and write but many people write differently and people can “read” images. We can look at graffiti and photography and understand what emotion is being produced and can infer what the images meant. There is also no right or wrong way to write. People can have different styles for writing and nothing is truly “perfect writing”. Being taught outside of school is more common than being taught while in school for most as well. Kids sometimes are pre-taught, where they learn reading and writing before school, like when parents read bedtime stories and teach them how to read as well. Kids can also be influenced from watching their parents read novels and work on emails or other paperwork, just living their daily lives.