The Impact of Code Breaking and Meaning Making
Code breaking and meaning making are two concepts that, although I am sure have done constantly throughout my lifetime experience with the digital world, I have now become fully aware of whenever I am using technology.
Code breaking in my understanding, is the ability to learn how to use new digital spaces effectively. In the past two weeks, my work has required code breaking a lot! In class, I was assigned the task of using Flipgrid to create a video post and discussion. This is a website that I had never seen until now and I am also not familiar with the creation of video discussions, as I am used to written text. Therefore, I broke the code of this digital space as I worked through the creation of my personal video.
When I think about meaning making, in the context of digital literacies, I believe that it encompasses the idea of using digital spaces to create content that is useful to not only to myself, but also to my digital peers, in order to enable collaboration and discussion. In my work these past weeks, I have thought about the meaning making first, when I created my discussion post for my classmates on Desire 2 Learn. As I wrote, it was important to me that I presented my thoughts in a way that would entice my classmates to respond, by providing examples and personal ideas.
My Creative Makes
For this blog post, I have tried two new creative ‘makes’. The first creative make I used was the website Mindomo. With this digital space, I created my own concept map for, The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies, as they were described by Doug Belshaw in the video (Belshaw, 2012).
In this video, I found that the speaker explained digital literacy in terms of the past and present. The past focused on elegant consumption, however, he explains that now, we should move beyond elegant consumption and encourage people to remix ideas. As I used Mindomo to create this map, I was required to code break the website as it is another new space to me. Being newly aware of the code breaking concept, I first tinkered with the website functions to learn how to use everything, and then proceeded to complete my map. While I completed the actual content of the map, I thought about meaning making and created it in a manner that I believe to be visually appealing and simple to understand from an outside perspective. I even added the images, as can be seen, to aid understanding of the map’s meaning even more.
The second creative make that I tried was creating my own meme, which is pictured to the left. Doug Belshaw uses memes throughout his entire talk about digital literacies, and so I found it appropriate to attempt to create one of my own. To do this, I used a Meme Generator online. I participated in breaking the code, once again, while doing this as I clicked the different picture options for my meme to discover what was available. Then, when I added my own text to the meme, I thought about the meaning it would give to, specifically, my professor and fellow classmates who would be viewing the meme. I ensure it will give them a giggle!Resources That Helped Me
The number one resource that I believe helped in both my code breaking and meaning making in the many new digital spaces I have encountered, is practice. Practicing with the tools of the new spaces and tinkering with the different options was the most effective means for me to fully understand how the spaces work and how I can use them to contribute meaningfully to those around me. To briefly give an example, when creating my Flipgrid video, I first watched the videos of some classmates to gather an idea of how to position myself in front of the camera and the way I should structure my discussion. Then, I practiced using the video tools by creating a short welcome video. This gave me the sense of what to expect when recording a longer discussion video next.
