Receipts, Records, and Real-Life Learning: What a Budget Can Teach Us

Welcome back to another episode of Black-Liberation.Tech. I’m your host, Dr. Renée Jordan — educator, instructional technologist, and your companion on this journey toward digital clarity, confidence, and liberation.

Today, we’re doing something special.

We’re taking it back — all the way to June of 2021 — to two videos that lived on my dissertation website. At the time, they were simple demonstrations of digital literacies. But looking back now? They were snapshots of survival, strategy, and everyday instructional technology in real life.

And today, we’re revisiting them through a liberation lens — asking what they taught me then, what they reveal now, and what they might offer you as you level up in your own digital literacy journey.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

In this episode…

• You’ll hear two archival demonstrations of digital literacy from 2021.
• We explore budgeting as a form of digital navigation, planning, and self-determination.
• We examine credit monitoring as a digital literacy tied to agency, advocacy, and long-term decision-making.
• We connect personal financial management to broader themes of empowerment, community uplift, and tech-enabled confidence.
• We reflect on how digital literacies show up in places we often overlook — especially in Black, Afro-Latina, and Latina communities.
• We make space for thinking about how your everyday digital habits reflect resilience, creativity, and purpose.

REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS FOR LISTENERS

1. When you think about your digital habits around money — budgeting, banking, tracking, planning — what do they reveal about your relationship to stability and self-trust?
2. What digital tools do you already use to support your financial, academic, or career goals? How might you use them more intentionally?
3. How did you learn your earliest financial lessons, and how do those memories shape the way you navigate digital platforms today?
4. Where in your life are you already practicing digital literacy without naming it?
5. If you could build one new digital habit this year — big or small — what would it be?

If you enjoyed today’s episode, go ahead and rate, review, and follow the podcast so more people can discover this work.

And until next time, remember: your digital skills are not just tools — they are pathways to freedom, clarity, and possibility.