Week Six Response

Selber Response

From the article by Selber, I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been teaching computer literacy wrong this whole time. Ugh, what a thought. Selber included the sections of the computer literacy test from FSU, and many of those technologies and literacies are obsolete. Am I wasting time teaching students present-day technologies when they might not be utilizing them in five years? And yet, I know that the rate of computer tech advancement has slowed considerably.

On the flipside, Selber points out three possible areas of computer literacy: functional, critical, and rhetorical literacy (25). I comfort myself that while I do spend some class time (far less than <5%) addressing functional literacy, I’m largely focused on rhetorical literacy with students as creators of technology. I think there’s a lot to be learned about rhetorical choices, context, and audience when students are thinking about a broader Internet context instead of a limited student-teacher context.

Btw, the Conference Paper Title Generator is cracking me up. I think I’ll use it to name my dissertation. :DD

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Vee Response

I’ll admit that I didn’t wholly get why the author kept going back to Medieval Europe and their literacy rates until I got to “...[I]t would be impossible to assess an individual’s literacy without taking into account complex contexts for its multiple uses and forms” in regards to literacy in English, French, and Latin (186). Now I can see the nexus of these two contexts: that Medieval Europeans’ literacy rates are complex due to multiple literacies of language - reading, writing, speaking, and quasi-literacy of three languages - and that modern American literacies are as complex - reading, writing, and speaking multiple languages in addition to a robust technological literacy of varying accessibility options and proficiency.

The book concludes with commentary on political and educational efforts to encourage people to code. Vee notes that pressure to induce others to code stems from economic pressures/philosophies; that is, that using technology is wasteful, but creating it for profit is good. Hour of Code’s messaging stated: “Don’t just buy a new video game; make one[...]” President Obama’s messaging echoed the same economic incentivizing. In this way, modern literacy stems from an economic drive to use technology for market forces. That said, people especially interested in computer literacies and technologies also often support democratizing forces in the technological market. The text mentions Bitcoin. I also thought about VPNs, the Internet of Things, GNU/Linux distros, and Raspberry Pi.

There’s certainly an argument to be made that with GNU/Linux running most of our machines from smartphones to washing machines and Java running the rest, it seems terribly unfair that for-profit corporations have commodified these free resources and charged the consumer. Without knowing any code, the consumer doesn’t know any better. Nine-hundred dollars for less than twenty dollars for materials to run software that people have been developing and distributing for free for decades. (I’ll put my pinko commie flag down, now.) If the consumer knew coding, they could design, control, and upgrade their own devices. Instead, we’re forced to rely on businesses that commodify our lives.

Vee argues that coding “augments” literacy (224), and I tend to agree with her. The threshold for “literacy” is difficult to mark. Like our literate Middle Ages citizen with varying degrees of literacy in multiple languages and modalities, we too experience literacy with different levels of competency. She almost has me convinced.

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