Digital Literacy Autobiography: Prologue: Little Critter

It’s story time. Bear with me because this is an unusual story. It’s the story of my development in digital literacy. Before I get into the meat of this series of posts, here is a little prologue about my very first use of a computer.

This is pretty much exactly what my dad’s sewing machine looks like.
Title: A Singer Treadle Sewing Machine
Author: Mattes
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singer_Corporation#mediaviewer/File:Singer_sewing_machine_table.jpg
CC license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

I got my first video game when I was about five or six years old. I loved my Little Critter video game. It was based on one of the books in Mercer Mayer’s series. Entitled Nur Oma und Ich, (Just Grandma and Me) it was a story all about a day Little Critter spent with his grandma. The game was basically a digital version of the book. My dad got it for me to play on the PC he set up in the living room. He used an old treadmill sewing machine as a desk.

My step siblings and I used to pretend that pumping the sewing machine’s pedal was part of the game. We were old enough to know that the desk and the computer were two separate entities, and that the movement of the sewing machine had no impact on the video game, but we all found it fun to pedal while we played.

My dad must have appropriated that sewing machine for the desk out of necessity, but somehow it seems this combination came about by design. My dad spends his entire workday in front of a computer, but he doesn’t watch TV or go to the movies. He gets his news from the paper and his entertainment from books. He keeps in touch with me via email (he’s in Austria, I’m in the US), he reads travel blogs that he sometimes sends me links to, he reads my blog (hi dad!), and he shops online for specialty items like camping ovens (I will eventually post about our adventure with the camping oven in my road trip series). Because he travels a lot, he does have a Kindle and a digital camera, but that is where his connection to technology more or less ends. He doesn’t use his cell phone much. He doesn’t even let shoes get between himself and nature. So as you can imagine, my dad has always been an advocate of getting us kids outside to play. He let us use the loft above his wood shop as our club house, and we were free to travel fairly far up and down the quiet country road he lives on. I’m sure he was glad, even relieved, that we incorporated at least some engagement with the physical world into our time spent at the computer.

Works Cited

Little Critter. Mercer Mayer. Little Critter. 2013. Web. 8 Feb. 2015.

Mattes. “A Singer Treadle Sewing Machine.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia. 25 March 2006. Web. 8 Feb. 2015.