Carpenter (2009): Boundary negotiations

Some great stuff in this article that I first read for the EDC10 course. Cited text indented, followed in turn by my comments.

"...students enter composition classrooms already possessing technological skills that often surpass those of their teachers." (p139)

Comment:

"Students read and construe meaning from cultural products in complex, nuanced ways. employing a wealth of strategies gained from years of immersion in media-rich environments." (p139)

Comment:

"We have had to expand, if not outright revise, our notions about text, literacy, reading, composing, authorship, intellectual property, argument, research, learning space, plagiarism, assessment, and a host of other concepts." (p140)

Comment:

[Cites Catherine Hobbs (2002:27)]: "Writing teachers today are living through a revolution in literacy."

Comment:

"Texts composed in or for electronic environments have little in common with that bastion of academia, the traditional academic essay." (p140)

Comment:

"...responses to inquiries regarding electronic texts and academic literacy usually resort to a reliance of the traditional standard of academic classification and clarification: comparative analysis of textual features and forms." (p141)

Comment:

"Texts can be recast from containers or receptacles to processes and practices that operate within, between, and among networks of social networks."

and

"Freed from the frustrating constraints of form and content, electronic texts can be considered on their own grounds, in their own environments..." (p141)

Comment:

"These interactions, coupled with the powerful and innovative ways of composing and communicating allowed and engendered by new technologies, have in turn caused new kinds of writing and texts to emerge and evolve." (p143)

and

"...a seemingly endless variety of tools-in-use." (p143)

Comment:

"In response, Trupe compared the characteristic features of the traditional academic essay with those of an electronic text." (p144)

Comment:

"But a skilled writer in any medium is reflective and analytical, understanding that texts are meaningful, or produce meaning, through the mediation of genres, old or new, that are always already socially constructed and rhetorical." (p145)

Comment:

"As scholars have long pointed out, students may have developed electronic literacies through frequent immersion in digital environments and systems, but that does not mean they possess critical literacy skills as well." (p146)

and

"Additionally, some scholars have pointed out that technological literacy is not the same thing as critical technological literacy (Selber, 2004; Duffelmeyer, 2000)." (p146)

Comment:

"As new and emerging technologies continue to alter writing practices and pedagogy (not the mention the landscape of education in general), it is crucial that students and teachers alike expand their notions of literacy." (p146)