Digital Literacy

Readings

Course Description

This course will investigate how the digital challenges our perceptions of what we have come to call literacy (and thus, composition). Is literacy a relevant term for digital production, or do we need a new term to describe the process of acquiring and producing knowledge? If literacy includes what Jack Goody describes as the ability to create referentiality, categorization, and definition (ideas which dominate composition studies and its textbooks), what happens to these kinds of practices when we compose digital texts or texts clearly shaped by the emergence of a digital apparatus? We will read texts which narrate the history of literacy studies, demonstrate literacy practices, and challenge conventional understandings of literacy in terms of digital culture. Readings will either directly reflect what we might label digital literacy – the ability to produce knowledge within digital environments - or, because of their focus and purpose, will be generalizeable to digital culture and writing. Therefore, not all readings will be obvious digital texts, but many of their theoretical assumptions can be understood as the result of digital culture.