Overall I found this assignment very enjoyable. I liked putting together the pictures and it made me think about the awesome friends I made in each of these places and how significant they all are in my life. Each place represents, I feel, a different chapter in my life and as they say, a picture is worth 1000 words so it's easier to make a collage than write a detailed description of my nine months at UMD. I found it much easier to capture several memories at once in the pictures. For example, one of the pictures in the UMD collage is of me in a pep band rugby with two of my friends from freshman year but it speaks to me and it might not speak to others as directly. I feel that when doing creative writing, the purpose may be to entertain the reader but I also think that it's important to convey feelings and emotions and maybe even inside jokes that are funny to the writer to make it more personal. As our students move into a generation where textoids, youtube and Facebook will replace reading articles, watching DVDs and meeting people in real life, it makes sense that assignments about personal narrative/exploration reflect this change. I know that working with these photos was a trip down memory lane and I remembered what my dorm room looked and felt like in Griggs and how I loved being home in Summer 2007. I think visual literacy has the power to engage more students and to perhaps increase the depth of expression, connection and agency a student feels because it isn't just words on a page; the impact of the image (with limited explanation) is immediate and a reader doesn't have to search as deeply to find the author's meaning within a complex text.
