Critical Digital Literacy Education in Action
The Course A few semesters ago, I taught a "Digital
Writing" course for the Writing Program at Syracuse University. Geared
primarily for writing majors, this class prompted students to become familiar
with the tools of digital writing, consider convention and practice in various
digital exigencies, attend to ways in which the digital has shifted the social,
and develop an understanding of rhetorical strategies and concepts across a
variety of composing spaces. I called my course "The Digital DIY," pitching
the class to students as: ...a course about writing in digital spaces. We cannot
think about writing separate from context and technology, and so this course is
about those too. In this course we will explore through doing, think through
composing, and collaborate through conscious social writing processes. In a
series of (what I intend to be fun and exciting) writing projects, we will
learn together how the digital age has changed what we do and how we do it. How
have social movements and culture jamming relied on the digital, for instance?
How has your family, and how have those of your peers, encouraged or inhibited
digital literacy development? We will ask how digital texts are read and
understood differently from their print cousins. And we will do all of this
while learning the practical and rhetorical means of digital production for a
real audience.Welcome to the Digital DIY. Welcome to the present. I went into the semester with
a well-thought out structure for the course, but in
the spirit of James Paul Gee's (2003) "just in time" teaching, I reoriented the major projects
to account for time and student interests. A sense of the structure of the
course should be helpful in understanding the ethically complicated assignment
I'll be focusing on in a bit–it went like this: 1.
Throughout the semester, students were tasked with presenting
new and interesting digital and social media tools to their classmates.
Students demoed and described sites like Grooveshark, Jing, Tumblr, Picnik, Digg, and more. 2.
In another semester-long assignment, students developed and
customized their own blogs on Wordpress, LiveJournal, or Blogger and used their sites as a place to respond to readings and post
their creations. We discussed the function of blogs and issues of audience and
style as they worked to develop their bloggerly voices. 3.
Using Lynda.com (a video tutorial site with an extensive range of platforms
covered), students learned to work with Photoshop and put their skills to work
through a quick, fun project in which they placed their own face over an
original actor's in a movie poster of their choosing. The lightness of this
assignment was intended as an easy way for students to learn the program's
interface before moving to the more critical work to come. 4.
In a larger project, students were asked to write a literacy
narrative that captured and investigated a significant moment in their personal
digital literacy development. Next, they rendered their stories into a Prezi, which they
illustrated with images created or altered in Photoshop. Finally, students used
Quicktime Pro's screencapture function to live-record a voiceover of their
digital literacy narratives, while moving through their Prezis in
sequence. The final videos were uploaded and shared on our class's YouTube
channel. 5.
In order to investigate viral online content, remix, and the
materiality of video, students created a stop motion remix of a video that had
gone viral on YouTube. They used drawings, text, images, themselves as actors,
and even clay in one group's case, to create a meaningful and interesting
remix. Using iMovie, students formatted their hundreds (in some cases
thousands) of images to match the conventions of stop motion: roughly twelve
individual frames/images per second. The final stop motion videos were uploaded
to YouTube and tagged in such a way that they would be recognized in search
results as a remix of the original video. 6.
The "Righteous Remix" assignment is described in more detail
below, but for now suffice to say that it intended for students to recognize
that the playfulness of the earlier learning experiences rendered skills that
could be used toward much more serious, intentional public engagement. They
were required to remix a human rights video of their choice that explores a
problem in another country, by integrating their own and sampled text, images,
sound, and video. Additionally, students had to struggle through the
sophisticated task of posing an identifiable argument through the remix
process. 7.
The final project of the semester asked students to build a
reflective digital portfolio using a Wordpress
installation hosted on http://theirname.digifolio.org. Choosing a template from
Wordpress's gallery, the students learned a small amount of coding in order
to customize the template through manipulating the CSS. The task included the
challenge of establishing their site's architecture by defining a layout and
organization that worked within the affordances of the Wordpress interface.
Students wrote an overall personal statement reflecting on the experiences of
the semester, embedded each of their final projects, and wrote brief
descriptions on the process and content of each major assignment. In all, the curriculum offered students
experience with and development of a range of skills that fluctuated between
traditional academic print-based literacies and the social, playful, visual and
aural, static and interactive, original and remixed conventions of 21st century
digital culture. It is important to acknowledge here that I am not intending to
dichotomize print and digital literacies. I take to heart the teachings of
literacy scholars who have helped us understand the ways in which new ontologies,
ideologies, and literacies emerge out of what has been made possible by those
that came before. But I do believe that learning is differently accessed
through digital composing and engagement, and that the impetus and outcome are
firmly rooted in the emergences of the current historical situation. I will now
offer a description of the "Righteous Remix" assignment for a deeper look at
the pedagogical impetus and outcomes that shape the ethical obligations and
challenges prompting this essay. The Assignment "Righteous Remix," named for its mode of
production and social goal, was an assignment inspired by a very quick aside
made by Witness' Sam Gregory during his presentation at a Digital Witness
Symposium at Syracuse University in
the fall of 2010. He briefly mentioned the words "localization" and "remix" in
the context of discussing his organization's mission of distributing video
cameras to people in times and places of social and political struggle. In the
words local and remix, I heard the opportunity to provide students with what Byron Hawk (2007) calls an occasion that can: situate
student bodies in complex ecological environments as an epistemological basis
for invention. In this newer model of method and techne, particular heuristics
are seen as parts of larger constellations rather than as abstracted general
procedures. This more open method fits our current electronic context and the
complex ecologies in which students write and think. (p. 208) In other words, thinking about Gregory's pitch
to consider the circulation of politically dangerous human rights video and the
possibility of student learning through remix, I saw the opportunity to
occasion for my students a project that would: 1) immerse them in political
economic, material, global concerns, to ask how we–at the state and local
levels–are complicit in those problems, and 2) encourage use of their
traditional academic literacies in tandem with their newly-developed or
enhanced digital composing skills to learn, and to participate in public
discourse through the process of collaborative multimedia production. As you
can read below, my aim in this assignment was to get students in groups to
explore the challenges of remixing video, constructing a coherent argument
through video, audio, image, and text, performing political economic analysis,
considering the ethics of making and circulating public digital arguments, and
localizing problems that might at first seem unrelated to the interests of the
Syracuse University community. Here is the assignment sheet: Righteous
Remix In six
words, Lawrence Lessig encapsulates the differences between the older and younger
generations: "We watched TV; they make TV." Contemporary culture is
participatory; people create their own entertainment and distribute it online
for others to enjoy, critique, or ignore. Much of this entertainment takes
older media and represents it in a new way, often adding a new layer of social
commentary. This is called remixing. Along with remixes, Internet
memes—"a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to
person via the Internet"—have become important parts of contemporary
culture. Complementing the viral spread of memes are imitations of the memes.
These imitations can also go viral, and when enough imitations are made a
community emerges. ~Bill Wolff Digital
literacy, in part, involves the ability to recognize and participate in
cultural/social memes. In the first session of this class, we watched the
"Double Rainbow" video and several remix and parody responses on YouTube. In
this unit, I ask you to participate in the culture of the meme and the remix
first by completing the collaborative project in stop motion video, and second,
through a group project in which you will glocalize a human rights advocacy
video. In the process of this project series, you will work with digital
photography and video, iMovie, and video-snatching applications, along with
Photoshop, Flickr and other software. Digital
witness and activism are fast-growing ways that citizens around the world are
sharing information and spreading awareness about local political
struggles–including contemporary slavery, governmental abuse and
oppression, rape as a weapon of war, famine, racial violence, and women's
rights issues among many, many more. In this project, you will choose a human
rights video from the Witness Hub gallery, or another approved source, and you will remix it for a local
audience. The goal
of this project is to make the video you've selected relevant to Syracuse
University students in order to motivate them to support the cause advocated by
your video. More specifically, your video will be assessed on how well you use
relevant rhetorical tactics (see 10 Tactics below) toward positioning a local
audience as invested in the issues of the video and to pose a possible course
of action for that audience. You will mix into your chosen video a combination
of live-footage, text, images, and borrowed and original sound and video clips
that will help your audience understand why the issue described in the video is
relevant to them, now. More specifically, I'd like you to include media
(original and sampled) that give a sense of how the US is involved in or
responsible for the problems and solutions addresses in your video. Furthermore,
I'd like you to give a sense of what SU students can and should do to help
solve the problem, and why. Material
you include in your remix can come from a variety of sources, but I suggest
some of the following: ○
interviews with relevant campus experts (profs
from the Women's Studies Department, for instance), SU students and community
members; ○
text from historical figures and documents, such
as presidential foreign policy speeches and state and town political campaigns,
and other relevant sources; ○
images that help further develop your audience's
ideas about the topic–you might, for instance, incorporate some of the
image-layering and juxtaposition techniques employed by Pixel Press to contrast propaganda with realistic images of the issue at
hand; ○
audio from rallies, speeches, relevant music,
etc.; ○
video of the same sort, as seems relevant ○
original images, text, video and audio as fits
your intention. Resources
and Materials for this project will include: ○
The Witness Hub (search for download to find accessible videos) ○
10 Tactics from Tactical Technology
Collective ○
Kigo Video Converter
for Mac and Altysoft for PC ○
18 Ways to Download
Video off the Web ○
Your SD card ○
Your portable hard-drive ○
A camera ○
iMovie ○
Garageband ○
Photoshop ○
Flickr ○
YouTube In preparation for the Righteous Remix
assignment, students were asked to read/watch, blog about, and participate in
class discussions of the following: ●
Social
Networks Spread Defiance Online ●
Weak
Ties, Twitter, and Revolution ●
Malcom Gladwell's "Small
Changes: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted" ●
YouTube
Blog on "Human Rights and Free Expression" ●
Lawrence
Lessig on the Colbert Report The first four articles
positioned students to consider and comment on to what degree social media can
influence, complicate, or enable revolution, political protest, or social
change. The YouTube blog offers an interview with Witness' Sameer Pandia and
Youtube's Head of News and Politics, Steve Grove on the capacity and role of
the site's hosting of human rights video material. In a preamble to the
interview, Grove
and Pandia (2011)
write that: People everywhere use platforms like YouTube to share their
stories with the world every day. Sometimes those stories are as simple as an
idea, a thought or a diary of life through your eyes; other times, those
stories expose abuses of power or human rights violations in ways that are
changing how justice is served around the world. Whatever you decide to use the
web for, we believe it's vital to a free society to keep the Internet open, and
it's through discussions like these that we can continue to teach each other
how to do so. In concert, these readings
helped my students consider in what ways digital media might be used toward
ends of social justice. Although many remained skeptical about the realistic
progress or actual change afforded by these platforms, they certainly became
more well-versed in a range of views on the topic. The Lawrence Lessig video
clips and fair use guidelines, on the other hand, provided in-roads to
discussions of intellectual property and the politics of remix. Students voiced
a range of diverse perspectives, from authorial concern for the future of their
own and others' compositions, to an enthusiastic verve for the spirit of free
exchange of texts for the purpose of creativity and innovation. While not all
students warmed to Lessig's advocacy of fair use for the purpose of making
future creation possible, the fair use guidelines provided students with a
vague (but clearer than none) understanding of what would likely be considered
acceptable parameters for the use of others' original content within their own
"Righteous Remixes." Other preparations for the
remix project included an introduction to Creative Commons on Flickr; practicing storyboarding as a means of
rhetorical planning; discussions of how to set collaborative agendas;
co-composition versus task delegation; how to build a coherent means of
attribution within a creative visual work; and a look at the material
constraints of YouTube's upload policies (specifically video length and file
size). Though this was my first go-around in teaching an assignment with such
complex goals and requirements of diverse literacy sets, I felt that the
combination of preparations had given students a strong base for being
functionally able, environmentally prepared, and conceptually prepared for the
development of strong remixes. What I was not prepared for, however, was the
ethical murkiness that was to arise out of the actual work students produced.