Open-source and free digitized materials that college student are most familiar with are the MOOCs(massive open online courses) that distinguished universities offer. Compared with traditional further education that universities offered by professors mostly, more than half of the MOOCs offered in Chinese universities are held by non-professors. As the lecturers of the MOOCs mainly focused on the current students’ intellectual interests, the course materials are devised to be more readable, with fewer official language than the traditional courses contain. Besides, the MOOCs do not limit the capacity of a class so strictly so that most of the students may access it in their own convenience through the Internet on any electronic devices like smartphones and PCs, without time and space limits. This will also liberate professors’ time and energy which will be alternatively be utilized, like delving into research programs. However, for students who get used to absorbing most of their new knowledge from the website, often they might struggle with classroom discussions which includes alternative views of thinking.
Nowadays,social media is a second ID for people to get to know each other. Billions of people around the world use social media daily to get to know strangers. And the personal information posted on the social media is actually an essential part of digital archives representing our modern society. Sadly, the fact is that today’s society is still a men-dominated society. In the USA case, for example,white men dominate over every single field, including the digital archival materials. Women fill out their social media personal information and often their profile photos are overly software-processed photos to illustrate their personal fashion taste or beauty while men just fill out their profile photo with the super stars or other symbols which represent power and social status. As a woman, I may have the higher risk of receiving sexual implication social media messages from unknown persons than a man has, just because social media gender setting as female, which is gender-biased. And in some social media apps, say WeChat, the options of gender are only male and female. Apparently, transgendered people lose their opportunities to choose their gender identity on WeChat. The digital technologies may only be another platform for the society to ostracize woman and under-represented group from the mainstream. So far, the people with less political speaking rights might be continuingly challenged daily unless the society shifts into a more gender equal harmonious circulation.
Rosemary is a sophomore studying in Digital Humanity class in fall 2018 at Bucknell University. She is from Southern part of China. Her intended major is Environmental Studies and French.
