“The very (Greek) definition of definition is one of judgment from the context of a courtroom, kategorein: to accuse. To define is to accuse to a particular role, and not every species, at least within a scientific ecology, will have an advocate” (112).
Morey argues that literacy encourages a categorization system based on whole and homogeneity; this necessarily means that there are parts we do not end up seeing. This is problematic when we consider how the left out parts relate (or not) to the things in our categorization. For instance, to create a categorization system that states that humans have fingernails suggests that those born without fingernails are not human (108). Also, we should create categorization systems based on what we need to look at. Meanwhile, Morey states, electracy encourages a look at the parts, particularly because even when we consider wholes, we recognize that those wholes are part of bigger wholes. So, he argues that we should start with the individual and work out way out (111). This helps us reconsider and redefine what we categorize because we should need to take the categories apart to re-stitch them (which would be continually repeated). He also maintains, “An electrate nature would not replace literate nature, but provide another ‘tool’ for cutting and stitching.” (119).
“The very (Greek) definition of definition is one of judgment from the context of a courtroom, kategorein: to accuse. To define is to accuse to a particular role, and not every species, at least within a scientific ecology, will have an advocate” (112).
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Bruce encourages his readers to consider understand that “ideologies construct the meaning of technologies in different situations.” Literacy technologies “are designed, accessed, interpreted, and used to further purposes that embody social values. More than mechanistic, they are organic, because they merge with our social, physical, and psychological beings.” Bruce states that ideologies are embedded in technologies is four ways:
He emphasizes the process through which technologies because invisible: "as [the technology] is used more widely, the actions it affords move from novelty to habit, the tool becomes commonplace. Soon it is treated as part of daily activity…Through this process, we move from looking at the technology as an addition to life to looking at life through that technology. The embedding of the technology in the matrix of our lives makes it invisible. In fact, the greater its integration into daily practices, the less it is seen as a technology at all.” More, “as a tool becomes embedded in social practices, our conception of the ability required for an individual to use that tool changes as well. In the early stages of use, disability is counted as a flaw in the tool: We say that poor design of the technology makes it difficult to use. Later, the disability becomes an attribute of the user, not the tool. We say that the user needs more training, or worse, is incapable of using the tool.” Bruce makes a connection with Truscello (my own connection, not his explicit connection) in discussing embedded systems. He explains that, though embedded systems offers greater user-friendliness, the invisibility of the technological workings means that fewer people will be able to fix technological problem. Bruce uses ecology primarily as an argument for studying social practices around technology. He quotes Lemke as he ties literacy to ecology: Literacies cannot be adequately analyzed just as what individuals do. We must understand them as part of the larger systems of practices that hold a society together…if we think the word society means only people, then we need another term, one that, like ecosystem, includes the total environment: machines, buildings, cables, satellites, bedrock, sewers, farms, insect life, bacteria. Bruce writes, “An ecological model of literacy helps us to visualize the whole, and to see a range of options as part of the whole, neither dismissing nor naively accepting technology wholesale.” Key Terms
Wardle and Roozen respond to Yancey’s call for a fourth wave of assessment that takes into account the multiple dimensions of students’ literate development. They suggest that we use an ecological model of assessment.
Based on a perspective that situates students’ writing development across an expansive ecology of literate activities rather than within any single setting (what we refer to here as an ecological model of literate development), an ecological model of writing assessment gathers data addressing students’ wide range of experiences with writing and the impact those experiences have on their abilities to accomplish academic tasks…The basic goal of an ecological model of writing assessment is to offer students, teachers, departments, institutions and other stakeholders a fuller, richer account of the kinds of experiences with writing that are informing students’ growth as writers throughout the undergraduate years. (107) The authors argue that, thus far, we have operated under a monocontextual, or vertical, model of assessment. This model values primarily school settings for literate activity and understands “the growth of writing abilities…as the product of increasingly deeper and fuller participation within a particular community’s engagements, with newcomers acquiring greater facility with the community’s valued knowledge and skills as they move along a trajectory from the periphery toward some more central location, not just through repetition over a period of time, but through an expanding awareness of the community’s beliefs, values, and interests” (108). Importantly, the authors do not argue that we should stop using this model; instead, they recommend that we use this and an ecological model. Along similar lines, they assert that, though we have started using an ecological model when designing programs, we are not yet assessing our programs with an ecological model. “Assessing the success of these programs and how students develop within them must entail examining the vertical, horizontal, and longitudinal—the fully ecological—nature of literate development” (111). Using all forms of assessment would allow the university to find the more immediate results that stakeholders want, while also gaining an understanding of the long term successes and failures of the programs. The authors envision an assessment model that incorporates portfolio creation, revision, and assessment over time and at multiple locations, and is framed with student statements that are revised at various points, with transfer of writing-related knowledge and student agency as specific aims; local surveys at multiple points (including after graduation), given in conjunction with NSSE surveys; and small longitudinal ethnographic studies of students from various programs and with various literate backgrounds. (107) This kind of assessment would involve talk across many departments, including writing centers, WAC programs, Composition programs, general education programs, and other affected departments (114). Identity in Literacy Development Wardle and Roozen also spend a portion of the article discuss identity in literacy development.
By looking at a network of momblogs and the practices the writers use to compose their posts, Younker works toward a definition of network literacy.
She starts with Jill Walker’s definition – “network literacy as ‘writing in a distributed, collaborative environment’” – and expands on it in the following ways:
Key Term
For Younker, networks seem to be more concerned with the connections among participants; these connections can be one way, two way, direct, or indirect (such as two people involved in the same network, but not directly associated with each other). She specifically writes, “Participating as a networked writer requires material connection-building.” Though Younker recognizes that communication is mediated, she does not look to tools or technologies when thinking about connections. Therefore, networks seem to be centrally about people. Also, networks have “a distinguishable set of shared practices”; this is not necessarily true for ecologies. Killingworth and Krajicek argue that literary environmentalists have tended to hold to a triad of “intellectual conditions”: ecology, alienation, and literacy (41). The writer is alienated (by himself) in nature, uses literacy to communicate with a reader, then the reader is alienated while he reads. However, “close identification with the form of environmentalism that depends upon the conceptual triad of ecology, alienation, and literacy, may alienate that teach of ecocomposition from…a large percentage of any contemporary class of students, and may thereby stand in the way of effective teaching” (42). Therefore, “we should recognize the opportunity for participating in the development of a more socially conscious environmental rhetoric, which advances both environmental protection and social justice” (53). The authors recognize, then, that writing and environmentalism toggle between alienation and socialization, as writers read and write alone, but come back together to discuss, share, and critique with others.
Roorda defines the literacy myth (though he calls it the literacy thesis) as well as autonomous and ideological literacy. He argues that environmentalists are still using the literacy thesis and that environmentalists and literacy theorists can learn things from each other. He argues that literacy theorists “in their own zeal over ideology…have been wont to conflate the varied ideologies of those propounding such distinctions, and to fetishize specificity unless generalizations of their own are at issue” (100). He also argues that in eschew technological determinism, literacy theorists assume that any “attention to literacy as technology must amount to determinism, and the consequent of neglect of technology as prime, perhaps primary, among the factors ‘embedded’ in literacy’s cultural milieu (109). A biocentric (the environmentalist) view “will insist that there are differences worth contemplating in the modes of distance and proximity our technologies promote, and that these are related to our modes of sustaining relations of community in place” (110). Also, looking at orality can “refute the notion that changes in instrumentation, even quite drastic ones, are tantamount to human progress” (112). This also encourages to acknowledge and to look at the differences that do exist between literacy and orality (which he implies literacy theorists gloss over).
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