Digital Divides in Higher Education
My student web zine and my own essay posit that there are multiple digital divides structuring the use of computers in university writing classes. These tensions are built around the following oppositions: academic discourse vs.individual expression; current-traditional authority vs. critical pedagogy; individualistic writing vs. collaboration; the modern delivery of universal knowledge vs. the social construction of relativism; progressive teaching vs. grading; democratic sharing vs. intellectual property, and globalized instruction vs. localized discourse communities. I argue that these binary differences are often hidden or repressed in most accounts of contemporary educational environments. Furthermore, I believe that the use of critical technology literacy and electronic discourse formats can work to bring these latent conflicts out into open.
The pedagogical model that I am articulating here calls for the need to simultaneously teach our students both how to use and critique new media (Selfe, 1999). Therefore, instead of rushing into having our students develop new media writing projects, I argue that it is important to also develop a critical understanding of the media we want students to learn how to use. In this structure, we can combine the power of new media functionality with a critical pedagogical perspective (Selber, 2004). For as Johnson-Eilola (1997) has posited, the risk of teaching our students how to use and develop hypertexts is that these highly functional and efficient systems of information processing tend to undermine the ability of people to stand back and analyze the various social, cultural, and subjective effects that these new technologies perform: “The text denies its context in the act of functioning” (p. 52).
Technology, Writing, and Higher Education
Student Writers as Hypertext Users
Changing Conceptions of Academic Writing
Home and School Models of Literacy