Length: 750-1250 words
Phase 1: The past
Begin by doing freewriting in response to the following questions. You should try to write for at least five minutes in response to each question. Use as much detail as you can — try to imagine as clearly as you can but don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or structure yet.
- Please write about when, where, and how you first came to interact with computers, and how you first learned to use computers.
- How did you feel about computers when you were growing up? Did you like them? Why or why not? What did you use computers for? (Games? Email? Writing?)
- What are your experiences with social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, or others? What do you remember about your first experiences with such sites? If you haven’t used social networking sites, why not?
- Do you text on a cell phone or blackberry-type device? If so, what do you remember about your first experience with texting? If you don’t text, why not?
Now that you’ve done some brainstorming, I’d like you to write an essay in which you analyze the importance of technology in your life up to this point, especially with regard to reading, writing, and communication.
Take a step back and reread the freewriting you did, looking for any interesting patterns that you surfaced about your relationship with technology. You do not need to directly address the questions above or include the freewriting you've done, but hopefully in the process of freewriting and thinking about those questions, you've recognized some issues or patterns that are interesting enough for you to analyze more carefully.
Later in the term I will ask you to look at your current and future relationships with various technologies. I will also ask you to remix the pieces in some other ways.
Nuts and Bolts
Publish your narrative as a page on your class subdomain (make certain to add it to the menu, so we can all find it).
As with everything you publish for me this semester, you need more than just words for your narrative — you must have at least one image, video, or audio file with your narrative. You’ll need to provide a caption and give credit to the creator of the image (even if it’s your own).
Once you have published the page, write a separate post in which you link to the page and reflect on your own writing.