Sunday, August 27, 2006

Selber, Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.

Selber develops a three-part framework while extending a "detailed investigation into the nature of computer literacy programs in higher education" (3). His motive is remedial, motivated by a problem-solution approach to many of the striking inadequacies in computer literacy programs, which tend to be either slap-dash or highly instrumental in their approaches. Selber begins by opening up a some of the givens and myths related to computer technologies: computers are all-powerful (panacea), access and equality remain issues (hypercritical), production and efficiency imperatives drive the dehumanizing industrial-mechanistic engine (cautionary distance).

Selber seeks to keep the three categories open and dynamic--"suggestive rather than constraining," but he is more direct about the implications of this framework elsewhere: "Students who are not adequately exposed to all three literacy categories will find it difficult to participate fully and meaningfully in technological activities" (24).

Again, his framework divides into three terms:

1. Functional: not as bad as you might at first think
Functional computer literacies are necessary; they involve educational goals, social conventions, specialized discourses, management activities, and technological impasses (31). Functional literacy involves a metaphor of computers as tools (35).
Skepticism about functional/instrumental approaches to technology remain, in part, due to the arhetorical associations of functionalism.

2. Critical
Unlike functional approaches, which posit technological neutrality, critical approaches blend constructivism (75) and critical literacy (consensus as "an exercise of power") (83).
Critical literacy involves a metaphor of computers as cultural artifacts (86).
Critical literacies correlate to the following heuristics: design cultures (106), use contexts (111), institutional forces (117), and popular representations (technical and ethical) (125).

3. Rhetorical: "Overall, this chapter insists that students who are rhetorically literate will recognize the persuasive dimensions of human-computer interfaces and the deliberative and reflective aspects of interface design, all of which is not a purely technical endeavor but a form of social action" (140).
Rhetorical literacy involves a metaphor of hypertextual media (166). Rhetorically literate students will recognize the following aspects of interface design: persuasion, deliberation, reflection, and social action (139).

Selber ends with a respectful call for change, one that holds in high regard existing research while also proposing strategies for action toward multiliteracy programs. He introduces a nested model (Bronfenbrenner-like in its concentricity) to account for the following orders: institutional-departmental-curricular-pedagogical-technical (185).

Terms: "postcritical stance" (8), computer competency requirements (20), "theory and practice" (26), heuristic (27), instrumentalism (38), declarative and procedural knowledge (43), primary and secondary discourses (97), Pfaffenberger's technological regularization (102), adjustment, and reconstitution (104), captology (the study of computers as persuasive technologies) (146), nodes (172), open/closed systems (190).

"Although much of the discussion is conceptual in nature, it provides a framework within which teachers of writing and communication can develop comprehensive programs that draw together functional, critical, and rhetorical concerns in the service of social action and change" (xii).

"In the context of computer literacy, for example, computers will be understood primarily in instrumental terms--as systems for supporting status quo, relatively hierarchical student-teacher relationships, or for automating repetitive and routine tasks, or for making difficult texts and concepts ostensibly more interesting to study" (9).

"In one way of thinking, the tool metaphor is useful for discussions of agency because it can still help instill a sense of control in a world increasingly permeated by technology" (40).

"In terms of production contexts, the artifact metaphor encourages an attention to the political, social, and even psychological assumptions embodied in computers as well as any unintended consequences of their designs" (86).

"Imagined in artifactual terms, computers can be defamiliarized as inherently cultural in both origin and consumption. Their affordances disclose psychological and social preferences crafted in the interpretive communities in which competing perspectives eventually decompose to singularly approved designs" (95).

"But this [tool] metaphor also restricts teachers because its neutral dimensions insist that teachers do not need to know about the design issues associated with computing infrastructures, which are considered to be the domain of impartial technologists" (123). ^Is there a corollary in the preference of the artifact metaphor that, in turn, takes as insignificant the functional knowledge of computing?

"Reflection strategies for interface design have been classified under the rubric of usability, but reflection as a conceptual category shifts the focus from the product (Is the interface usable?) to the process (Is the designer reflective?) in useful ways" (160).

Related sources

Nardi, Bonnie, and Vicki O'Day. Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.

Pfaffenberger, Bryan. "Technological Dramas." Science, Technology, and Human Values 17 (1992): 282-312.

Zuboff, Shoshana. In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York: Basic, 1988.

Posted by Derek Mueller at August 27, 2006 9:50 PM to Writing Technologies