Katherine V. Wills is an assistant professor at Indiana University Purdue University at Columbus. Her work has appeared in Kairos, Pedagogy, Across the Disciplines, Journal of Business Communication, and Midwest Quarterly. She is a coeditor of Critical Power Tools; Technical Communication and Cultural Studies (with Scott and Longo 2006 SUNY), which was awarded the NCTE best book on technical communication for 2006. She co-edited the Politics of Information: Electronic Mediation of Social Change (in Alt-X (with Marc Bousquet) (http://www.altx.com/ebooks
/infopol.html). Her research and pedagogy focus on computers and writing and multimodal writing.
by Katherine V. Wills
Abstract
This article serves as a ten-year retrospective of Cynthia L. Selfe's Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention (1999), a text that called for for paying critical attention to the links between technology, literacy, and the American public educational system. The author uses a Bakhtinian theoretical frame to analyze the public policy document The National Information Infrastructure Initiative Agenda for Action (1993). Wills argues for the continued need to pay attention to public policy such as the Agenda and, more recently, the Spellings Report. Such documents act on the public imagination and influence material conditions in education and perceptions about education in public spheres. The article asks specialists in the area of computers and composition to consider the implications of public policy on their work and critical technological literacy as they near the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century.