The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy
J. Elizabeth Clark
LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York
Abstract
In our nascent digital culture, the traditional essayistic literacy that still dominates composition classes is outmoded and needs to be replaced by an intentional pedagogy of digital rhetoric which emphasizes the civic importance of education, the cultural and social imperative of “the now,” and the “cultural software” that engages students in the interactivity, collaboration, ownership, authority, and malleability of texts. My readings of Yancey, Balkin, Vaidhyanathan, Lanham, and Gee have enabled me to reconfigure my composition classroom as an emerging space for digital rhetoric. Through the calculated and sequenced introduction of ePortfolios, digital stories, on line games, Second Life, and blogs, all of which create a new digital infrastructure for my course and assignments, I am working to create a set of practices that work together to explore the ways in which writing instruction can change to meet a new digital imperative; as such, I attempt to use technology in my courses to re-create the contemporary worlds of writing that our students encounter everyday.
Read the whole article: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/moser/eng%207506/Digital%20imperative.pdf
New Worlds of Errors and Expectations: Basic Writers and Digital Assumptions Marisa A. Klages and J. Elizabeth Clark
ABSTRACT: This article examines the challenges of teaching basic writing today as stu- dents come to the classroom with the basic fluency of digital natives but have the same need for learning writing and critical thinking skills that has traditionally marked basic writers. While most basic writers are adept at accessing information digitally, they are not as proficient when it comes to producing digital information, nor are they able to code switch between informal cyber-situations and the expectations of academic and professional cyber-literacy. They also need to deepen their understanding of the role writing can play in developing digital texts. This article addresses how ePortfolios, blogs, and Web 2.0 tools included in basic writing classes at LaGuardia Community College help students to become effective users of digital media and learn how to write for a multimodal environment.
Read the whole article: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ851081.pdf
Teaching Writing at John Jay College 