Background
Defining literacy in the writing classroom is a difficult project, as the sheer amount of literature on the subject (Cargile Cook 2002) and various articulations of literacy (Spilka 2009) demonstrate. Despite the struggle to identify an agreed-upon meaning for literacy in writing classrooms, pedagogical scholarship voices a need to understand literacy as literacies, or as plural, multidimensional, or multilayered (Cargile Cook 2002; Breuch 2002; Selber 2004; Hovde and Renguette 2017). Furthermore, as technologies including data analytics, wearable devices, and immersive technologies (like VR or AR) increasingly affect writing processes, the classroom significance of addressing digital literacy is abundantly clear. Multidimensional literacies present a need for multidimensional instructional models, yet there is no innovative model for building digital literacy. Focusing specifically on digital literacy, which includes “making ethically informed choices and decisions about digital behaviour … digital safety, digital rights, digital property, digital identity and digital privacy” (Traxler 2018, 4), our ongoing collaborative research project, Building Digital Literacy (BDL), aims to discover how students understand and develop digital literacy. In this article we provide assignments implemented in several writing courses as part of the BDL project. We hope to highlight how instructors can develop assignments that engage students with the multiple literacies needed to be successful critical thinkers in their personal and professional digital lives.
The BDL Project and The Fabric of Digital Life
In the BDL project, we have developed assignments centered around The Fabric of Digital Life (FoDL), an online cultural analytics database and repository that catalogues discourses surrounding emerging technologies (Figure 1). Created by Isabel Pedersen, one of our collaborators, and members of the Decimal Digital Culture and Media Lab at Ontario Tech University in Canada, FoDL highlights the processes by which technologies become embedded into daily activities. In the fall of 2019, participating instructors across institutions implemented assignments that asked students to explore, contribute, and/or curate collections on the FoDL site (we detail a selection of assignments in the next section).
FoDL consists of textual, visual, audible, and interactive digital artifacts that discuss emerging technologies, such as news articles, marketing materials, and video clips. Artifacts are organized into collections exploring specific themes and rhetorical implications related to technology use, including technology’s relationship to age, gender, culture, and health. For example, in the Humanoid Robots collection, curators seek to track the rise of embodied robots designed to interact with humans (Figures 2 and 3). This collection brings together several types of artifacts that demonstrate how humanoid robots have been characterized across different forms of media. In addition to collections, the technologies represented through various artifacts are organized into “platform” types, including carryables, wearables, implantables, robotics, and others.
BDL Instructor Assignments
The following assignments asked students to engage with the FoDL website in three ways: through exploration, contribution, and/or curation (see a discussion of these assignment types in Figure 4). The assignments were created for a range of writing courses, so they reflect the objectives and goals for each course. We have provided brief overviews of the assignments, thoughts on successes and challenges, and PDF copies of assignment sheets.
As we reflected on our assignment deployments and student reflections, it was clear that difficulties and outcomes were closely intertwined; what we identified as challenges also spurred successes in some cases. Our reflective discussions overwhelmingly pointed to a productive ambiguity that students felt in working with these assignments. We found that our students’ struggles to navigate the critical layers of digital literacy simultaneously resulted in some successes—the “productive” element of our “productive ambiguity.”
Examine: Katlynne and Nupoor
“Examine” assignments aim to have students reflect critically on the rhetorical nature of digital artifacts and archives. With this assignment type students are tasked with rhetorically analyzing chosen collections or specific artifacts within these collections. In Katlynne’s assignment, students explore how curators construct arguments about technologies through collections and how they communicate those arguments to FoDL audiences through the inclusion, or exclusion, of certain artifacts. After choosing and analyzing a specific collection, students express their analysis in memo format. Nupoor’s assignment also asks students to conduct a rhetorical analysis, but focuses specifically on individual artifacts within the Humanoid Robots collection. Students investigate the technological affordances and limitations of these artifacts by focusing on audience, data, design, usability, and accessibility. Students responded to questions regarding those characteristics and uploaded a Markdown file into their Github account for public access.
The rhetorical analysis of “Examine” assignments challenged students to practice rhetorical thinking about, and within, digital spaces. Many of Katlynne’s students quickly focused on technologies of interest, but did not always acknowledge how curators had made rhetorical choices with respect to the representation of technologies. Some students argued that curators simply created their collections only to champion the usefulness of technologies, even though curators may have articulated different goals for their collections. Nupoor noted that in her class, some students found their assignment useful for understanding rhetorical concepts. Approaching the Humanoid Robots collection as a multimodal repository gave students a designated space to put their analyses of audience, design, and other concepts to work. Both of these assignments helped students to navigate FoDL as a space for rhetorical meaning-making.
- Instructor: Katlynne Davis
Course: Technical and Professional Writing
Assignment: Fabric of Digital Life: Rhetorical Analysis - Instructor: Nupoor Ranade
Course: Digital Rhetoric for Artificial Interactions/Intelligence (AI)
Assignment: Excursions based on artifacts from the Humanoid robots collection on FoDL
Contribute (Revise, Edit, or Improve): Saveena (Chakrika) and John
“Contribute” assignments ask students to revise, edit, or improve FoDL in different ways. Focused on the nuances of archiving, Chakrika’s assignment tasks students with selecting and adding new artifacts to an existing class FoDL collection. Students first identify emerging technologies that can be used to solve an issue in business communication. They then add artifacts related to these technologies to the ongoing class FoDL collection by using media editing tools such as graphics and video editors to create a thumbnail for each archived artifact. With John’s assignment, students contributed to FoDL by creating instructions to help others navigate the FoDL site. Students studied the website navigation closely, noting places where their instruction sets could help FoDL users more quickly perform certain tasks.
“Contribute” assignments pushed students to engage with the rhetorical, subjective nature of curation. In some situations, as with Chakrika’s assignment, students were made aware of the rhetoricity of archival actions made with metadata; naming an artifact, assigning tags, and writing artifact descriptions helped them see how they each framed technologies in different ways. Examining these archival actions led students to think more critically about the power behind their archival choices. In John’s class, students encountered productive ambiguity from their own positions as instruction-set designers for the FoDL website. They initially zeroed in on certain artifacts, but needed to ask how audiences might navigate or interpret those artifacts. Together, these assignments pushed students to grapple with how they or others engaged with FoDL as a digital archive.
- Instructor: Saveena (Chakira) Veeramoothoo
Course: Business and Professional Writing
Assignment: Proposal for Exploring Emerging Technologies for Business Communication - Instructor: John Misak
Course: Writing for the Technical Professions
Assignment: Instruction Set for Using The Fabric of Digital Life Website
Curate: Jason, Daniel, Ann, and Danielle
With “Curate” assignments, students develop a novel collection for possible publication on FoDL. Students collaborate as they develop a thesis or unique point of view as to technology’s relation to the body, or other areas of interest. They then express or “argue” for that thesis by identifying various artifacts that support the thesis. As part of this process, students write a collection overview that articulates the reasoning behind their archival choices while also adding metadata for each of the artifacts they have included.
As the more involved assignment type, instructors noted how “Curate” assignments cultivated a wide range of digital literacies while also introducing productive ambiguity. For Ann and Jason’s students, the act of collaboratively curating or archiving a collection pushed them to make tough decisions about how artifacts should be clearly categorized using metadata. Daniel noted that while students quickly identified technologies they wanted to archive into a collection, they found it challenging to determine how they, as curators, should fit that technology within a larger representative theme. In her course, Danielle scaffolded curation by asking students to first complete Katlynne’s “Examine” assignment to help them become familiar with FoDL and metadata. They then engaged those new skills in curating a collection. Across these assignments, students also honed functional or conceptual literacy skills that might be useful in the workplace, such as learning how to develop metadata and how to dive into new and unfamiliar technical tasks.
- Instructor: Jason Tham
Course: Technical and Professional Writing
Assignment: Exploring Emerging Technologies for Technical Communication - Instructor: Daniel Hocutt
Course: Theories of Modern Rhetoric
Assignment: Exploring Educational Technologies for Teaching Composition - Instructor: Ann Hill Duin
Course: Writing with Digital Technologies
Assignment: Collection Curation Assignment - Instructor: Danielle Stambler
Course: Technical and Professional Writing
Assignments (combined sequence): Understanding Rhetorical Theory; Exploring Emerging Technologies for Technical Communication
Next Steps: An Invitation to Collaborate
As our team looks forward to the Fall 2021 semester with new collaborators, insights, and assignments, we are grateful as we reflect on how we, as writing instructors, can strengthen the diverse digital literacies of our students. We believe that highlighting productive ambiguity in our assignments underscores how critical, rhetorical, functional, and other forms of digital literacies are embedded within and support one another. Additionally, we invite comments, feedback, and new collaborators as we continue our work with the BDL project. Those interested can reach out to Ann Hill Duin (ahduin@umn.edu) and Isabel Pedersen (Isabel.Pedersen@ontariotechu.ca).
