So that we can attend to some of the intellectual contexts for our work with students and with technology, the D-WRD Working Group is gathering summer readings to share in preparation for our meetings and workshops next year.
For starters, this summer, these two work well as a pair:
- “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.”
Harvard Educational Review, New London Group, 1996. - “Live and Learn: Why We Have College.”
Louis Menand, The New Yorker, June 6, 2011.
Then, in the fall:
- “Designs for Social Futures.”
Ch. 10 in Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, 2000. - “Writing Program Administration and Instructional Computing.”
Ken McAllister and Cynthia Selfe. The Writing Program Administrator’s Resource. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. - “Writing, Technology and Teens.”
Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2008. - Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Arum and Roksa, University of Chicago Press, 2010. Excerpts on writing and critical thinking.
- “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.” David Noble. First Monday, 1998.
Some of the questions that we can pursue together:
- What do we know about writing? How do we know it? How should we teach it?
- What theory of language or discourse informs your classroom practice?
- How are changes in higher education and the shifting purposes for attending college affecting our understanding of media, technology, literacy, and learning?
- What is the relationship between Vincentian social values and teaching with technology?
- “What are the instructional goals of the writing program? How can these goals be made to drive a computer-based program/course/activity/facility/decisions?” and “Who is being served by these goals and the computer-based instruction that is derived from them? Who is not?” (McAllister & Selfe 345)
