Many scholars have made the argument that teachers of college composition are uniquely positioned to facilitate digital literacy acquisition (Selfe & Selfe, 2002; Selber, 2004; Wysocki, 2004; Takayoshi & Selfe, 2007; Palmeri, 2012). However, the actual practice of teaching digital literacy is challenging because literacy is not something that can be taught as a fixed and standardized skill, nor can it be accomplished in a single course. Instead, digital literacy needs to be practiced and cultivated over years and in varied situations, in an across-the-curriculum style.
As I’ve argued throughout this webtext, one way to accomplish this is to view digital literacy as a learning outcome. To explain this strategy in more detail, I first offer example applications of each characteristic, then describe ways to design for and assess digital literacy as a learning outcome across the curriculum.
In some ways, multimodal composition is the most straight-forward characteristic to integrate into college writing courses because there is a clear directive—ask students to produce a multimodal composition. There are also many articles with examples of how others have accomplished this, demonstrating the variety of possible approaches. For example, instructors might ask students to create multimodal compositions as a brainstorming exercise for research papers (Denecker, 2010; Adams, 2014), as the final project in the course (Comstock & Hocks, 2006), or as remediations of textual essays (Briggs, 2014; Selfe & Selfe, 2008).
It is also important to note that the goals of a course and the infrastructure of an institution may not lend themselves to assignments that require students to engage in extensive digital media production. In these instances, instructors can still facilitate digital literacy acquisition by creating activities and discussions around the topic of multimodal composition. For example, students can discuss the ways a message changes when presented in different modalities, or reflect upon the ways particular modes are appropriate for particular audiences. Additionally, instructors might require students to engage textually in synchronous chats and/or post an audio podcast to an asynchronous discussion forum, then discuss the differences between asynchronous versus synchronous, and verbal versus written, communication.
Information and Collaboration are less straight-forward because they are more likely to be integrated into the classroom as concepts, not projects. There are, of course, ways to design projects around these concepts—for information, students can track the ways they consume or distribute information in a given week, or analyze the different processes for sharing information online versus in print; for collaboration, students can participate in and analyze collaborative online communities, or they can track the influences that make their own compositions collaborative.
A more coherent approach, however, is to pair discussions of and activities around information and collaboration with students’ hands-on work creating multimodal compositions. For example, as students locate resources to integrate into their multimodal compositions, they can investigate the tools and power structures that enabled them to access the information, and they can analyze issues of authority and ownership around those resources. They can also investigate the publication processes for the resources they collect, and then detail their own process for publishing and distributing the multimodal compositions they create.
One of the greatest benefits of thinking about digital literacy as a learning outcome is that it can be applied across the curriculum. For example:
In a course that focuses on digital literacy, the three characteristics (multimodal composition, information, collaboration) could make up discrete units of the course; students could read the scholarship cited in this webtext and engage in the collaborative production and distribution of digital media.
In first-year or upper-division writing courses, instructors can incorporate multimodal composition by asking students to produce digital media, or to justify why one particular (digital or nondigital) combination of modes is the most appropriate given the students' rhetorical goals. Instructors can talk about information as part of the research process (how do the constraints of tools and the values of people dictate credibility?), as part of online publications (what mechanical and human filters influence the information available online?), or as part of peer review or group work (what biases and interpretations accompany the distribution of information?). Finally, a writing instructor can focus on collaboration by asking students to collaborate in online spaces (discussion could occur via social media, peer review could be online), to observe and critique online collaborative communities, or to examine the ways notions of authority, originality, and ownership influence the production and distribution of information in print versus online communities.
Instructors teaching writing in the disciplines courses, writing-intensive courses, or courses that do not specifically focus on writing can integrate the three characteristics by giving the students opportunities to create multimodal compositions, asking students to examine how information is produced/distributed in the academic discipline associated with the course, and asking students to question the ways authority and expertise are achieved in the discipline.
In each instance, dividing digital literacy into three concrete characteristics not only assists in course design, but it also provides a path for assessing students’ digital literacy. For example, in the final course project, the instructor can look for evidence of (a) rhetorically effective multimodal composition, (b) a demonstration of being "information wise," and (c) a conceptual understanding of the collaborative nature of authority. Alternatively, the instructor can measure students’ multimodal composing skills through a final product, and measure students’ mastery of the concepts of information and collaboration through other activities or discussions in the course. Finally, depending on the goals of the course, an instructor may emphasize one characteristic of digital literacy over the others.
The value of this approach to digital literacy is that it is simultaneously concrete and flexible. There are clear ways to incorporate digital literacy instruction into college courses, but the details of that integration are adaptable. Furthermore, identifying discrete characteristics of digital literacy enables learning outcome mapping. If a first-year composition course emphasizes multimodal composition, a writing-in-the-sciences course emphasizes information and collaboration, and an upper-division writing course highlights all three characteristics of digital literacy, a writing program administrator or academic dean could track and measure students' digital literacy acquisition over the course of a program or series of courses. In other words, this strategy provides a way to measure digital literacy as a programmatic or institutional outcome, as well as a course outcome.
By using the three characteristics of digital literacy as a guide, all instructors could incorporate elements of digital literacy instruction into their courses, thus providing students across the curriculum with opportunities to develop the skills necessary to enact the social practice of digital literacy in the internet age.
For more information about literacy instruction, see History of Literacy Instruction. For more information about the relationship between literacy and digital tools, see The Problem of Tool Use. For more information on the factors that define digital literacy our current social context (multimodal composition, information, and collaboration), see Characteristics of Digital Literacy.
Created by Mary K. Stewart (2014)