Reflection on My New Literacies Project

I feel that this project definitely expanded my knowledge on the components of emotional literacy and the multipurpose aspect of blogs. What I genuinely liked about my project was the easy accessibility of blogger.com; it would be very easy for my current field placement students to explore a similarly structured website and to understand blogs' multiple possibilities. This project also surprised me because my preconceptions on effective literacy exercises were false. For example, prior to this project, I felt that assigning a specific question for a blog would be the best forum for students to maximize their literacy potential. However, upon further exploration of a variety of blogs, I realized that broadly-based blogs produced the most metacognitive and interactive posts; narrowly focused blogs produce little to no emotional literacy. Thus my understanding of literacy exercises expanded through this project.

It was also interesting for me to see how the 'traditional literacies' of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing are intertwined with emotional literacy. Even though emotional literacy is primarily defined through individual metacognition, my blogging project reinforced that the 'traditional literacies' often catalyze emotional literacy. For instance, in "The Messy Mom" blog, the writer discusses her everyday life through writing, video clips, etc; she captures memorable moments with photos for her audience to view and she recounts discussions/interactions with friends and family. As stated in my powerpoint, the act of writing inherently promotes metacognition; thus blogging allows a writer to explore traditional literacy while catalyzing self-analysis of their emotional literacy. 

Based on my argument in the second paragraph, it could be argued that traditional literacies could serve as an ample forum for emotional literacy; why is it necessary to utilize blogs? I genuinely feel that blogs do allow for a much broader audience as opposed to handwritten diaries or letters. Because blogs allow for a much broader audience, they potentially allow for a much greater pool of constructive criticism. Blogs also give writers much more accessibility in terms of expressing themselves, such as the option of quickly creating a photo essay or uploading multiple videos to create a post. Thus I would argue that reflective blogs are an invaluable tool for fostering emotional literacy and vice versa.