Goode, Joanna. “The Digital Identity Divide: How Technology Knowledge Impacts College Students.” New Media and Society 12.3 (2010): 497-513. Print.
The digital divide is a common concept when discussing the role of technology in education. Joanna Goode’s article attempts to dig deeper into the significance of this divide than has previous scholarship. Her concern is that the prevailing discussions about the digital divide center on “deterministic” matters like access and use. In this article, she claims that to more fully understand the digital divide, we must consider sociocultural elements that contribute to the creation of this divide and how the divide affects students and their quest for academic success. She explores how students construct their own “technology identities” through narratives about their relationship with technology. The theoretical framework she applies to her study couches the student narratives in four key beliefs: “beliefs about one’s own technology abilities; beliefs about the importance of technology; beliefs about participation opportunities and constraints that exist; and one’s sense of motivation to learn more about technology” (502). She then highlights three student responses to the study as representative of different technological identities.
Not surprisingly, the student at the lowest end was from an economically disadvantaged area. Her high school lacked good facilities and qualified educators in general, not to mention its lack of technological opportunities. The two students who fell in the middle (fluent but indifferent) and upper (“highly fluent [. . .] and infatuated” [508-09, emphasis in original]) categories came from middle-class families and had ready access to technology at home and in school. Goode then focuses on the consequences for these students. The more adept students used technology efficiently: registering for courses, using various software applications for different classes, even saving money and time by using various online services. For the student at the lower end, the university’s reliance on technology and minimal support proved significant obstacles, limiting her ability to effectively perform activities such as research and registration. She also had limited knowledge of programs such as free home internet access for off-campus students.
Though Goode tries to distance herself from “deterministic” concerns about access and use, she does not fully elaborate on how her notions of technology identity significantly differ from previous work on the digital divide aside from her comments about the direct effects on students’ perceptions of their relationship with technology. However, the reminder her article creates for us as educators is particularly germane, especially for English studies pedagogies relying on new technologies. As educators, we cannot assume our students’ level of technological abilities. At the college level, we may tend to trust that students have the basic competencies needed to function effectively. Goode’s article reminds us of the pitfalls of such an assumption. We need to familiarize ourselves with our students’ technology skills (as we would with their writing abilities). This reiterates the importance of the New London Group’s calls for Overt Instruction and Situated Practice (Cope and Kalantzis 33-34). Students need particular competencies so they can effectively engage in critique and production—and so they can have better chances for academic success.
Work Cited
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. “Introduction: Multiliteracies: The Beginning of an Idea.” Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. London: Routledge, 2000. 3-37. Print.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Written by Me, Designed by Someone Else
Arola, Kristin L. “The Design of Web 2.0: The Rise of the Template, the Fall of Design.” Computers and Composition 27 (2010): 4-14. Print.
Calls for developing student competencies in multimodality to make students more successful as students and professionals are not new. Nor are calls for critical awareness of potential consequences of the use of these different modalities. So in some ways, Kristin L. Arola’s article is a bit old hat. However, her emphasis on the rhetoric of templates in Web 2.0 technologies (specifically in social networking sites) seems a useful addition to issues instructors should consider in their multimodal writing course. By analyzing the predominance of templates in Web 2.0 technologies, she argues that templates have not only reduced users’ ability to determine how others view them but also have strengthened the notion that form and content are separate and insignificant for one another.
She notes this divide is especially troublesome now as rhetoric and composition becomes more focused on instructing students in composing with various technological applications. An irony exists here: on the one hand, we attempt to encourage students to think about how and why they design a text as they do (in addition to content considerations), but on the other hand “Net Generation students, as well as ourselves, are discouraged in Web 2.0 from creating designs” (6). And as we lose this control, we lose certain amounts of individuality on the Internet and opportunities to more fully and rhetorically consider the role of design. She notes this is especially true on social networking sites. Her examples include Facebook and MySpace. She argues through these examples that page layouts and the control (or lack thereof) of what information appears and where it appears suggests an identity dictated by the platform. For example, when people view our Facebook page, they see our image most prominently; but when we view our own pages, we see our News Feed most prominently, suggesting this is perhaps how Facebook designers feel we should view ourselves. She does praise MySpace because it allows users to vary what content appears on the page, but these can only appear in predetermined locations, again establishing patterns of identity not controlled by the user.
However, as Arola claims, this represents an opportunity for instructors in composition and rhetoric. By calling attention to these limiting features, we can teach students about the roles and rhetoric of design: we can rely on a space familiar to our students and encourage them to think in new, critical ways about it. And under Arola’s discussions simmers the idea of empowerment (and, indeed, she uses the term on occasion), yet she does not take this opportunity to explore how this greater awareness of the rhetoric of design can bring us into discussions of power, hierarchy, and personal identity with our students. This may be by design, of course, with the intention of leaving such discussions open to individual instructors, but if we are not to separate form and content, leaving out the discussions of the consequences of form beyond their rhetorical effects seems to do just that.
Calls for developing student competencies in multimodality to make students more successful as students and professionals are not new. Nor are calls for critical awareness of potential consequences of the use of these different modalities. So in some ways, Kristin L. Arola’s article is a bit old hat. However, her emphasis on the rhetoric of templates in Web 2.0 technologies (specifically in social networking sites) seems a useful addition to issues instructors should consider in their multimodal writing course. By analyzing the predominance of templates in Web 2.0 technologies, she argues that templates have not only reduced users’ ability to determine how others view them but also have strengthened the notion that form and content are separate and insignificant for one another.
She notes this divide is especially troublesome now as rhetoric and composition becomes more focused on instructing students in composing with various technological applications. An irony exists here: on the one hand, we attempt to encourage students to think about how and why they design a text as they do (in addition to content considerations), but on the other hand “Net Generation students, as well as ourselves, are discouraged in Web 2.0 from creating designs” (6). And as we lose this control, we lose certain amounts of individuality on the Internet and opportunities to more fully and rhetorically consider the role of design. She notes this is especially true on social networking sites. Her examples include Facebook and MySpace. She argues through these examples that page layouts and the control (or lack thereof) of what information appears and where it appears suggests an identity dictated by the platform. For example, when people view our Facebook page, they see our image most prominently; but when we view our own pages, we see our News Feed most prominently, suggesting this is perhaps how Facebook designers feel we should view ourselves. She does praise MySpace because it allows users to vary what content appears on the page, but these can only appear in predetermined locations, again establishing patterns of identity not controlled by the user.
However, as Arola claims, this represents an opportunity for instructors in composition and rhetoric. By calling attention to these limiting features, we can teach students about the roles and rhetoric of design: we can rely on a space familiar to our students and encourage them to think in new, critical ways about it. And under Arola’s discussions simmers the idea of empowerment (and, indeed, she uses the term on occasion), yet she does not take this opportunity to explore how this greater awareness of the rhetoric of design can bring us into discussions of power, hierarchy, and personal identity with our students. This may be by design, of course, with the intention of leaving such discussions open to individual instructors, but if we are not to separate form and content, leaving out the discussions of the consequences of form beyond their rhetorical effects seems to do just that.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Infovis and Composing in Web 2.0
Sorapure, Madeleine. “Information Visualization, Web 2.0, and the Teaching of Writing.” Computers and Composition 27 (2010): 59-70. Print.
This article introduced me to a Web 2.0 technology I knew little about: information visualization, or infovis. This technology allows users to upload information (parts of a text, personal information, statistics, etc.) and create various visualizations with that data. Madeleine Sorapure argues that this technology can provide students with critical perspectives of Web 2.0 texts and software by offering instructors opportunities for improving assignments, students’ abilities to analyze software biases, and student competencies in conceiving and creating texts. In short, she claims infovis makes students better producers and more critical consumers of Web 2.0texts.
She begins her work with some basic explanation of Web 2.0, mostly emphasizing that our students are often already creators of Web 2.0 texts but are not critical of these texts, which she also calls for in her use of infovis. She then turns to three common writing assignments—textual analysis, personal reflection, and the persuasive essay—but re-envisions them with infovis. She asks students to upload text, create a word cloud (a type of infovis) from this text, and reflect on their choice of text and methods of manipulating the text. Some students noted greater insight into their texts; others found software failing to account for personality or subtly in language. Her second example of an infovis assignment relied on student use of personal information (credit card purchases, music listening habits, or even photos taken, for example) to create a new way for students to think of themselves. Finally, she used infovis to address broader social concerns, asking her students to search for statistical information on a meaningful social issue and put that information into a visualization that would be meaningful for their audience.
Because this article gives examples of typical writing assignments, the application of infovis seems quite achievable. And although this Web 2.0 technology intrigues me, I feel that Sorapure’s goal of being critical of this new technology slips away from her. She does note that students were aware of the limits of this technology; however, she misses (or takes for granted) some key issues. First, she does not say if her students were freshmen/sophomores, juniors/seniors, or graduate students. The class was “Writing in New Media,” which seems to suggest a course designed for undergraduate students at the junior or senior level or graduate students (at least students with writing and research experience). So the types of research and software manipulation she suggest here may be somewhat taxing for lower-level undergraduate students without extensive instructor intervention, limiting the scope of infovis application. Next, and related to this, she fails to mention the learning curves associated with the software discussed here. Harried teachers who may want to incorporate innovative practices may find the programs too onerous to learn effectively. Finally, she does not mention how much visual rhetoric instruction students needed (or had had previously) to become the critical producers and analyzers of Web 2.0 texts she described at the beginning.
This article introduced me to a Web 2.0 technology I knew little about: information visualization, or infovis. This technology allows users to upload information (parts of a text, personal information, statistics, etc.) and create various visualizations with that data. Madeleine Sorapure argues that this technology can provide students with critical perspectives of Web 2.0 texts and software by offering instructors opportunities for improving assignments, students’ abilities to analyze software biases, and student competencies in conceiving and creating texts. In short, she claims infovis makes students better producers and more critical consumers of Web 2.0texts.
She begins her work with some basic explanation of Web 2.0, mostly emphasizing that our students are often already creators of Web 2.0 texts but are not critical of these texts, which she also calls for in her use of infovis. She then turns to three common writing assignments—textual analysis, personal reflection, and the persuasive essay—but re-envisions them with infovis. She asks students to upload text, create a word cloud (a type of infovis) from this text, and reflect on their choice of text and methods of manipulating the text. Some students noted greater insight into their texts; others found software failing to account for personality or subtly in language. Her second example of an infovis assignment relied on student use of personal information (credit card purchases, music listening habits, or even photos taken, for example) to create a new way for students to think of themselves. Finally, she used infovis to address broader social concerns, asking her students to search for statistical information on a meaningful social issue and put that information into a visualization that would be meaningful for their audience.
Because this article gives examples of typical writing assignments, the application of infovis seems quite achievable. And although this Web 2.0 technology intrigues me, I feel that Sorapure’s goal of being critical of this new technology slips away from her. She does note that students were aware of the limits of this technology; however, she misses (or takes for granted) some key issues. First, she does not say if her students were freshmen/sophomores, juniors/seniors, or graduate students. The class was “Writing in New Media,” which seems to suggest a course designed for undergraduate students at the junior or senior level or graduate students (at least students with writing and research experience). So the types of research and software manipulation she suggest here may be somewhat taxing for lower-level undergraduate students without extensive instructor intervention, limiting the scope of infovis application. Next, and related to this, she fails to mention the learning curves associated with the software discussed here. Harried teachers who may want to incorporate innovative practices may find the programs too onerous to learn effectively. Finally, she does not mention how much visual rhetoric instruction students needed (or had had previously) to become the critical producers and analyzers of Web 2.0 texts she described at the beginning.
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