I'm working with a team of graduate students at Kennesaw State University (Spring 2011) to develop a position statement on digital technology in the writing classroom. My group is establishing principles of good practice for a digital writing/new media classroom, as well as faculty responsibilities that support those good practices.
Below are six principles I wrote as part of our collaborative statement. I welcome your feedback on these principles.
(I cite page numbers from The National Writing Project's Because Digital Writing Matters with Danielle DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks (2010, Jossey-Bass):
First, as teachers of digital writing, we must engage in an ongoing review and refinement of current practices, and invent new ones for digital literacy. In doing so, we need to assure that principles of good practice governing these new activities are clearly articulated. Thus, we make the following assumptions about writing courses that engage students in developing digital literacies. Features of these courses should:
a. provide students with a clear articulation that being a digital writer is composed of information literacy, including the development of ongoing skills in research, file saving, file storage, file transfer, composing, revising, editing, and the ability to manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneously presented information in participatory environments (p. 13, 97);
b. address the rhetorical complications and implications of paper-based and digitally-mediated texts to enhance the critical dimensions of students’ thinking and writing (p. 14, 59);
c. focus on the participatory culture that digital literacies sustain; and thus build skills including “play, performance, simulation, appropriation, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, negotiation, and visualization” (p. 11, 13).
d. develop proficiency with tools of technology, but should transcend specific technologies so students can change and evolve with technology, rather than remain rooted to skills anchored to one particular tool or technology (p. 40);
e. equip students to be more than passive information consumers (p. 13, 31), and take into account literacy barriers, language barriers, and cultural diversity, since the Internet tends to be geared toward English-speaking middle-class learning methods (p. 31) that divide the “have’s” and “have nots” (p. 12, 31);
f. lead to specific student outcomes as represented in an e-portfolio, that minimally demonstrate a progressive development of Yancey’s four-part framework: self-knowledge; content knowledge; task knowledge; and judgment (p. 109-110).
Below are six principles I wrote as part of our collaborative statement. I welcome your feedback on these principles.
(I cite page numbers from The National Writing Project's Because Digital Writing Matters with Danielle DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks (2010, Jossey-Bass):
First, as teachers of digital writing, we must engage in an ongoing review and refinement of current practices, and invent new ones for digital literacy. In doing so, we need to assure that principles of good practice governing these new activities are clearly articulated. Thus, we make the following assumptions about writing courses that engage students in developing digital literacies. Features of these courses should:
a. provide students with a clear articulation that being a digital writer is composed of information literacy, including the development of ongoing skills in research, file saving, file storage, file transfer, composing, revising, editing, and the ability to manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneously presented information in participatory environments (p. 13, 97);
b. address the rhetorical complications and implications of paper-based and digitally-mediated texts to enhance the critical dimensions of students’ thinking and writing (p. 14, 59);
c. focus on the participatory culture that digital literacies sustain; and thus build skills including “play, performance, simulation, appropriation, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, negotiation, and visualization” (p. 11, 13).
d. develop proficiency with tools of technology, but should transcend specific technologies so students can change and evolve with technology, rather than remain rooted to skills anchored to one particular tool or technology (p. 40);
e. equip students to be more than passive information consumers (p. 13, 31), and take into account literacy barriers, language barriers, and cultural diversity, since the Internet tends to be geared toward English-speaking middle-class learning methods (p. 31) that divide the “have’s” and “have nots” (p. 12, 31);
f. lead to specific student outcomes as represented in an e-portfolio, that minimally demonstrate a progressive development of Yancey’s four-part framework: self-knowledge; content knowledge; task knowledge; and judgment (p. 109-110).
The full position statement written collaboratively by the graduate students of my class may include an introduction written by our professor, Dr. Laura McGrath. As a class, we are considering submitting this article for publication. I will post a message on my blog with a link to the published document in the event that we get it published.
3 comments:
When I've worked on technology-related faculty development initiatives, I've noticed some concern that we're just throwing out the old and uncritically embracing the new. When you write, “we must engage in an ongoing review and refinement of current practices, and invent new ones for digital literacy,” you seem to be acknowledging that current and longstanding practices aren’t to be thrown out; instead, you invite scholar-teachers to review and refine those practices.
Thank you for visiting this blog, and thanks for your response. I think the keyword of your statement was a concern for the 'uncritical" embracing of the new, and I agree. I appreciate your recognition of my support for continuance of traditional writing practices but the need for an ongoing review and refinement of them. I would value your feedback on my Feb. 21 post about assessing digital writing.
My thoughts are very much along the lines of my colleague Laura M's. It is too easy to say that there is the old media and there is the new media and never the twain will meet. To make a historical comparison, the creation of the printing press, although it had a profound effect on orality, hardly rendered orality irrelevant. A theoretical framework we need to be constructing is one acknowledging that "old" and "new" media are working in tandem, often seamlessly, all around us. The genres of such hybrid discourse are endless. In the near future, I would like to see a less ideological approach to digital communication and one that explores the presence--and power--of syncretism.
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