"No Red Pill No Blue Pill" Response

To begin with, I thought that this post was really well written. The author had a unique writing style which I admired - all the fragmented sentences and precisely chosen wording resulted in a very effective blog post. Honestly, though, it took me a while to figure out what the author was saying! Between the complicated language and various interesting pictures/graphs, it was a little hard to understand at first. And yet, each time I read (and reread, and reread) the post, I started to grasp her ideas more and more.

To the best of my understanding, I think that the author is writing to other educators about her struggle to get her students excited about digital learning. She writes about how her "inheritance this semester are students who have little or no digital skills. Nor do they wish to acquire them. Hence this inner bare landscape, withering away in a fractual of questions I seek light and possible solutions." The author also encourages other teachers to continue to push their students towards the digital way of learning, even though it may be difficult ("Immersion into digital learning and acquiring digital literacy skills takes time – and a degree of willingness.") Her message is that learning is completely up to the individual ("Learning may be social, but in the end it is individual.")

Still, I do not think that “digital learning” is the ONLY topic the author discusses in this blog post. She broadens her subject matter to touch on themes like “motivation” and “change.” And to me, these themes are very important ones. I wholly agree with her thoughts on the idea of “resistance to change”, and how difficult it can be. Personally, I have trouble adjusting to change, and I will admit that I was a bit iffy on the idea of creating our own blogs when Ms. Lees first introduced the concept to our class! Now, though, I find myself enjoying blogging a lot more, especially since it allows such a diverse range of feedback on my writing. I am a lot more conscientious towards my posts when I know for a fact that it is out there on the internet and that anyone can see it. If I had resisted the digital learning push our class is doing this year, English 10 would not be a very enjoyable course for me!

Overall, I thought that this post was an excellent one. It was enjoyable to read and almost poetic in a sense, especially towards the beginning and end. Most of the visuals enhanced the presentation and were very interesting to look at (I particularly enjoyed the “8 Steps to Be Great” image). However, some of the pictures were a bit redundant and didn’t really add much to her writing; all they did was stick out into the paragraph and make it confusing to read! They were very dramatic looking, though. I 100% agreed with Ana Cristina Pratas’s blog post, and I hope others will embrace digital learning as well!