Diigo Community

how to use them within the context of a particular action: finding, retrieving, storing, and re-accessing a certain bit of information

Only recently, with the pervasiveness of social bookmarking software (such as Del.icio.us and Diigo) and the ubiquity of RSS feed readers (such as Google Reader and Netvibes), have technologies been available for all internet users to compose their own dynamic storage spaces in multiple interconnected online locations.

These dynamic storage spaces each contain what Jay David Bolter (2001) calls writing spaces-online and in-print areas where texts are written, read, and manipulated. Web 2.0 technologies are replete with multiple writing spaces, each of which has its own properties, assumptions, and functions

If we can see these spaces as semiotic domains, then we must also see them as spaces for literacy-a literacy that is a function of the space’s own characteristics.

[T]echnological literacy . . . refers not only to what is often called "computer literacy," that is, people’s functional understanding of what computers are and how they are used, or their basic familiarity with the mechanical skills of keyboarding, storing information, and retrieving it. Rather, technological literacy refers to a complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved in operating linguistically within the context of electronic environments, including reading, writing, and communicating. The term further refers to the linking of technology and literacy at fundamental levels of conception and social practice. In this context, technological literacy refers to social and cultural contexts for discourse and communication, as well as the social and linguistic products and practices of communication and the ways in which electronic communication environments have become essential parts of our cultural understanding of what it means to be literate.

I teach a portion of a team-taught course called Introduction to Writing Arts that is now required for all Writing Arts majors. In groups of 20 students rotate through three four-week modules, each of which is taught by a different faculty member. My module is called Technologies and the Future of Writing. Students are asked to consider the relationships among technology, writing, and the construction of electronic spaces through readings in four main topic areas: origins of internet technologies, writing spaces, ownership and identities, and the future of writing.

how can we prepare students for the kinds of social and collaborative writing that Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies will demand in the coming years? How can we encourage students to create environments where they will begin to see new online writing spaces as genres with their own conventions, grammars, and linguistics? How can we help students-future writers-understand that the technologies they use are not value neutral, that they exist within a complex, distributed relationship between humans and machines? And how can that new-found understanding become the basis for skills that students will need as they continue their careers and as lifelong learners?

so much of writing is pre-writing-research, cataloguing, organizing, note-taking, and so forth-I chose to consider the latter question by introducing students to contemporary communication tools that can enable more robust activities at the pre-writings stage.

I wanted students to begin to see how ideas-their ideas-can and do flow between multiple spaces. More importantly, I wanted them to see how the spaces themselves influenced the flow of ideas and the ideas themselves.

The four spaces that I chose create a reflexive flow of ideas. For example, from their RSS feed reader they find a web page that is interesting or will be useful to them in some way. They bookmark the page. They blog about it. The ideas in the blog become the basis for a larger discussion in a formal paper, which they store in their server space (which we were using as a kind of portfolio). In the paper they cite the blog where they first learned of the ideas. The bookmarked page dynamically appears in the social bookmark widget in their RSS reader so they can find it again. The cycle continues, feeding ideas, building information, compounding knowledge in praxis.