My work has been developed from many years fighting for quality education, after completing the University of São Paulo’s Letras course (Literature and Languages, Humanities), with a Bachelor’s degree (2007-2012). While my academic production is something I value, my experiences online have built a certain range of opinions and feelings not to be ignored, which are constantly disputed when faced with realities at home and my “real life”, so to speak.

The fact that this blog is free should be able to give me a place in any conference for English teaching professionals in the world. It absolutely does not. Along with the music, also available for free, and many of my contributions on Twitter for public discussions of all kinds (I believe that’s not an exaggeration), the need to say where my content comes from seems almost paired with blatant dihonesty. We don’t have to talk about surveillance if we’re forcing a discussion on intellectual property. These, arguably, are mutually exclusive in many contexts. That being said, all links in the blogs contain reference, often more detailed, eventually not detailed at all, on the themes discussed.

I believe, with Kress, that literacy is a set of skills that involves knowing what formats of media we consume, which doesn’t necessarily restrict itself to text and speech, as traditional Linguistics explored for decades, with limitations. Today, programs to correct your writing and artificial intelligence to recognize your voice are used by big corporations, but few seem to realize the demand for explaining the content we’re dealing with is actually higher, for the simple fact that production intensified. A sociolinguistic approach to learning is one that deals with technology and browsing with criteria that should make readers, watchers, website and app visitors and people who interact with the channels linked here, all of them able to assess what’s important and what’s not, according to them. Knowing about media vehicles is considered an important aspect of learning, and so they are linked for a purpose, which is never to “steal” the debate or to miscredit or discredit any informational source, but contains commentary and is often challenging.

As for the images, most of them are taken from free image banks using Creative Commons (there are slight differences), and their use is simply for design purposes, as well as educating people on media literacy. Language is sometimes explicit, but that comes from an understanding of data analysis and culture that does not exclude explicit materials and language from the average person’s life. Approaching these issues in classes is always a moderation effort, and it’s been successful so far in bringing people awareness of what the future of the web might look like, and what we need to act on right now.

To support the continuity of this work, visit: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ivoesc