It's a Digital World!
Our Students Swim in a Sea of Technology
Take a Quick Dive with Me...
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”
- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
"In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms."
- Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
"Literacies include diversity of language and culture as well as a range of expressive modes offered by various media. Instead of literacy being tied to alphabetic text and a set of encoding-decoding skills, literacy is recognized in a range of semiotic modes and in the various life domains of schools, homes, workplaces, and public spaces, where literacies are valued and used in different ways"
- Daniel Keller, Chasing Literacy: Reading and Writing in an Age of Acceleration
“Writing Instruction Appropriate for the world today requires us to consider what new skills and dispositions students might need for the digital age.”
- Danielle Nicole DeVoss, et al.,
Because Digital Writing Matters:
Improving Student Writing in
Online and Multimedia Environments
Okay, But Why Assign These Projects in My Class?
"[T]hese students did plenty of emailing, and texting; they were online a good part of every day; they joined social networking sites enthusiastically. But rather than leading to a new illiteracy, these activities seemed to help them develop a range or repertoire of writing styles, tones, and formats along with a range of abilities"
- Andrea Lunsford,
"Our Semi-literate Youth? Not So Fast"
"Technology may be homo sapiens' super power. It is everywhere all the time, whether digital, mechanical, or simply practical. We do technology always, and so railing against it, or feeling a twinge at the loneliness of the pixel must be tempered. To gear a technological future is to deny a technological past and present. And there is nothing new about sounding the alarm. Luddism has roots in a powerful kind of human agency, but to assume that technology necessarily removes agency is to misunderstand its use. Even the luddites knew when and how to throw sabots."
- Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy
"When students engage in digital writing, they seek out new information online and recombine it in a new and meaningful way through a process called content creation. In this way, digital writing is not just writing. Instead, it is a complete composition woven from separate but related strands of multimedia content."
- Lorraine Dagostino and Christina Castaelli, "Content Creation for a New Generation: A Guide for Digital Writing"
"As more technology is introduced into business and education, it will become even more important for people to develop unique and innovative ways to implement that technology. . . . Moving forward, the people who are willing and able to adapt to new technologies and the opportunities that they provide are going to have the best orientation toward success."
- Lasse Rouhiainen, The Future of Higher Education: How Emerging Technologies will Change Education Forever