Personal reflecion essay...

When we first asked to define literacy, we almost got crazy as we found literacy is such an abstract word. From dictionary, literacy is simply defined as the ability to read and write, however the existence of some words like “Economic literacy”, “Mathematic literacy” and “environmental literacy” made us confused about what actually literacy is.
In class, we talked about every possible literacy forms that we generally accept, not only in our daily life, but also in our major field and jobs. We found that literacy is everywhere. However when we got out from the classroom, I still found myself knowing nothing about literacy. Therefore I started to pay attentions to things around to see if something is related to literacy. Symbols, books, newspaper, paper, music, sports, and skill and so on, I think about almost every substance around me. I collect similarities and relationships among these things. Generally conducted that Literacy is an expression and comprehending of things including emotion, culture, willingness, etc. The ability to express and comprehend extend into other skills like communication, computer, language, mathematic, etc. This is what we refer to new meanings of literacy; however it is still based on ability to express and understand. There are still some other forms and meanings of literacy exist in our everyday life. When we get older, which means gaining more life experience, we should be able to better explain what literacy is.
About the group literacy map, firstly we listed out all our literacy that is relative to our personal experience and ability. Then we sit together and tried to find out those similarities and differences. We summarized our thinking about literacy in order to find a most acceptable definition of literacy. Finding relationships among group members is not a hard job compare of listing them in a same map. We spend nearly one whole lab class time in searching for map forms via Google. We hope it works.
This project helps us gaining more information about literacy. I really enjoy the process co-operating with my lovely group members: Bofei Wang, Cong Hui and Richeng Liu.