Why Digital Literacy?

WIDE (Writing in Digital Environments) Research Center Collaborative; 2005; "Why Teach Digital Writing?" from KAIROS, Volume 10, Issue 1, Fall, 2005: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/10.1/index.html

Why Digital Literacy is a great source for the argumentative rhetoric necessary for supporting the need for writing in digital environments. Although it focuses on the college classroom - and doesn't take into account the public school realm - this writing offers much to the high school writing teacher.

I became most interested in the small conversation of space: "It is near impossible for us to separate the considerations above from issues of space—intellectual space, technological/digital space, institutional space, physical space. We have found, on different campuses and within different institutions, that traditional classrooms work to separate students from teachers, students from each other, and, importantly, tools from production. Traditional spaces constrain our work in intellectual and in physical ways. And, often, the traditional model and layout of classrooms is remediated in computer-based spaces."

Everything is political, and so I'm wondering about the politics of an online, digital community. In so many ways, the mere introduction of such "spaces" changes much of the academic rhetoric and theorizing that has occurred since print-based composition studies began. With this said, I'm sure there are multiple parallels that can be carried over into the new realm of digital communities and composition.

Also of note from this source:

"The process of orchestrating multiple media makes possible a meta-semiotic knowledge of how various sign technologies work together to produce meaning."

I am interested in the cross-sections here with the work of arts based research methodology.

Going further,

"Writing isn’t just scripting text anymore. Writing requires carefully and critically analyzing and selecting among multiple media elements."

How an individual composes an argument or story or presentation of thoughts, etc. has the potential of merging text with multiple other ways of making meaning -- not only in the rhetorical, traditional argument alone.

And concluding:

"We imagine a pedagogy based on principles:
*Situated in contexts of rich affordances for writing
*Rooted in a rhetoric that is technological, social, and cultural
*Linked to a thoughtful, critical consciousness of technology
*Framed by learning how to learn
*Anchored by multimodal approaches to writing"

We are amidst a great, historical moment in time.