Tag: literacy

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Brieya Walker 9/11/2018 WEEK 3 Marie Battiste, Print Culture and Decolonizing the University

For this weekly response I’m reflecting on Print Culture and Decolonizing the University, written by Marie Battiste. This reading shares the history between Euro-Christian travelers/missionaries and the indigenous peoples. These travelers and missionaries completely transformed and tried to erase the history of their aboriginal literacy and claimed the Indians to be illiterate because they didn’t agree with or understand their ideographic and symbolic literacy. Aboriginal literacy relates to the spiritual, practical, public functions of symbolic literacy which includes their pictographs petroglyphs, notched sticks, ideographs, and wampum. I believe this reading successfully showed that any literacy process can work as long as people have a use for it because it shows how critical it was to many Indigenous societies. In addition, it mentions that many of the history taught regarding the indigenous people and the Europeans is very one sided and I one hundred percent agree with that. Reading this automatically made me think about a passage I read in an English class called American Identities. The passage basically spoke about how Indians were portrayed as savages, how they were always killing each other, and their excessive alcohol use, which all were true but we’re not taught why this occurred. This week’s reading made me think of this because this is another example of how the Europeans portrayed the Indigenous to be illiterate but in fact their culture influenced their own creations in several ways.

Marie Battiste. “Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page: Part 1.” The Future of the Page . University of Toronto Press, 2004.

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Weekly Response #5

The History of Printing and Printing Processes, dives heavily into the dates and years for important momentous occasions in the history of printing human languages into text. The first record of a text being put onto a piece of wood can be seen in China around 800 C.E. The article then describes the first printing press, The Gutenburg Press, emerging in Germany around 1420. This was the first known practice of mass producing a piece of literature, The Bible. The most interesting aspect of this timeline of the are of printing is the heavy industrial influence it had in the 1800’s. Many countries, Germany, France, and Scotland, started producing machinery and steel tools to help print literature at a higher volume. The stereotyping and rotary web-feed letterpress all were momentous steps in the printing world because it exponentially increased the accessibility of literature worldwide.  The first example of a mass produced book was The Bible. This is important to me because the bible was such an influential piece of literature that may have actually sped up the creation of the Gutenburg press.

 

 

Bellis, Mary. “The History of Printing and Printing Processes.” ThoughtCo, Jun. 14, 2018, thoughtco.com/history-of-printing-and-printing-processes-1992329.

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Jessica Colasacco Blog Post 2

For this weeks blog article, I decided to focus on Walter Ong’s “Orality and Literacy.” This article was interesting to be because Ong argues that the concept of writing “weakens the mind” and warns “those who use writing will become forgetful.” To me, this concept seems obscure because writing is such an integral part of today’s world. There is not one class in college that I have taken that did not have at least one paper due during the term of the class. Also, since I was a little kid, I have kept a journal in which I write down interesting things that happen in my life that I do not want to forget. To this day, I can go back and read those writings and remember exactly how I felt in that moment, which goes against Plato’s claim that writing would make people forgetful. I do agree with Plato’s claim that “written text is basically unresponsive.” When writing, someone is having a one worded conversation that cannot be debated, as opposed to having a conversation with someone, which allows someone else to interrupt and include their own opinions.

Sources:

Ong, Walter J. “Orality and Literacy” in The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006.