English 808: Technology & Literacy
Course Overview, Philosophy, Goals, and Expectations
Dr. Gian Pagnucci
Course Overview
“What
was it?” Hiro says. “I just glimpsed some snow at the very end.”
“You saw the whole thing,” Da5id says. “A fixed-pattern
of black-and-white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred
thousand ones and zeroes for me to look at.”
“So in other words, someone just exposed your optic nerve to,
what, maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information,” Hiro says.
“Noise, is
more like it.”
“Well, all information looks like noise until you break the
code,” Hiro says.
(--from
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, pp. 73-74).
Bytes.
Snow. Noise. TechSpeak. Technology is changing how we speak, how we
think, and how we learn. In this course we’ll explore, together, the
ways technology impacts our literacy. We’ll
study the history of literacy technologies, from the the pen to the
Internet. We’ll work in the classroom and in
cyberspace. Students in this course will have the opportunity to
explore not only how technology impacts the ways we speak, read, and
write, but also how technology shapes our races, classes, and genders. We’ll
discuss the value and the cost of technology for promoting world wide
literacy. And we will work to develop some theoretical understandings
about the role technology plays in our society.
As
we explore the intersections of technology and literacy, we’ll be
working in a computer classroom and spending time working with current
technological literacy tools such as:
- the
web
- blogs
- email
-
films
- virtual envrionments/MOOs (multi-user domain object oriented environments) like Second Life
- web page composers
- wikis
Course Linking
This course has
been specifically developed to link with English 800: Introduction to
Research in Composition and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages). This linking is designed to give students a unique
community-based opportunity in which ideas, concepts, and discussions in
one course are meant to add to ideas, concepts, and discussions in a
second course.
All doctoral
students entering the C&T program now take English 800 and 808 at the
same time. Instructors for these courses have worked to develop
complimentary course curricula.
In these linked
courses we explore several key related ideas. First, research methods
affect the making of knowledge in all disciplines. Second, technology
also impacts knowledge making, particularly the nature of literacy
knowledge. Third knowledge is in turn grounded in the philosophical
beliefs and assumptions of members of the scholarly community. In both
courses, we will unpack these ideas in our readings, discussions, and
observations of data.
Guiding Questions for Course
I've
designed this course around 4 major questions I'd like us to
investigate. We will discuss these questions multiple times throughout
the semester:
- How does technology X change
literacy?
- How does technology X reconstruct society?
- How can we teaching using technology X?
- How can we research technology X?
Course
Philosophy
I
design this and every course based on current pedagogical theory as
well as my personal beliefs about teaching and scholarship. The works
of Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky lead me to believe that learning takes
place through social interaction. For this reason, active in-class
discussion is essential by every class member. To facilitate this socially-based learning,
students in this class will read and share their writings with each
other. The work of other people in this course is just as valuable as
works published by professional authors, and we will treat it as such.
For this reason, adequate time will be allocated to read and discuss everyone’s
writing for the class. As the teacher of this course, I will strive to
make sure that all voices are heard and that no one voice is
privileged, not even my own voice. Following the work of Kenneth Bruffee,
Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford, I’ll ask students in this course to work
collaboratively on some projects to increase opportunities for
dialogic thought.
Course
Goals
There are two primary goals for
English 808: Technology & Literacy:
-
introduce you to theoretical
ideas about how literacy and technology are developing in the
Digital Age
-
help you expand your
technological skills so that you can teach students the literacy
skills they will need to be successful in this Digital Age
Since both the theory and the
technology may be new to 808 students, we'll take things in small steps,
reading, writing, talking, making occasional mistakes, and learning as
we go. By the end of the course, students should have a greater
understanding of what it means to be literate in the Digital Age and
also some ideas for how to use technological tools in their teaching.
By the end of English 808: Technology & Literacy, students
should also achieve these secondary goals:
- improve
their understanding of what literacy is and how it is impacted by
technology
- gain
insight into effective approaches for using technology to teach
literacy
- enhance their basic technology skills
- improve
their ability to write scholarly material
- improve
their ability to do bibliographic research and annotation
- develop
a basic understanding of the field of Computers and Composition
- strengthen
their collaborative scholarly work skills
Course
Expectations
This is a graduate seminar which will demand a high
commitment from you as a student. If you want to do well in this course, I expect
you to:
- improve yourself as a teacher
- grow as a scholar
- work hard
- speak regularly in class
- read a lot
- do all the work
assigned
- attend class
- try your best
- work well with
others
- keep an open mind
- be courteous
- learn as much as
you can
- have some fun
Graduate students who meet all
these very basic expectations will do well in this course.
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