Complicating the Digital Romance

• In Event: Literacy as a Body Without Organs: Democratic Assemblages, Multiplicities, and Intensities of Multimodal Practices

Abstract

This presentation draws on Deleuze and Guattari (1986) to “deterritorialise” the field’s romance with digital technologies. The speaker observes provocatively that the rush to digitize literacy has advanced far more rapidly than school districts’ ability to finance or join the revolution. It recounts Mi Song Kim’s conclusion that the introduction of digital literacy tools typically overlooks the fact that people in schools have not necessarily developed attendant psychological tools to take good advantage of the technologies. In contrast to practitioner advocates like Troy Hicks, who has asserted that in this century digital literacies and literacy are now one and the same thing, the speaker challenges the digital romance using data from current research and practice. He demonstrates how schools are often not ready, either financially or psychologically, to embrace technology in the manner advocated in higher education.

Examples that provide a counter-narrative to the digital-changes-all rhetoric of the field are taken from research-in-progress in rural school districts in the U.S. South. In one district, the taxpayers have refused to support millage ballots that finance even the operation of a full school year—a circumstance shared by more than half of the districts in this state—resulting in annual “furlough” or non-paid days when school is not open, yet in which continual (or “continuous” as they often say) learning is expected. Meanwhile, the state now requires that many tests be taken online, having invested $40 million in a new test without supporting upgrades in school infrastructures so that the tests may be taken smoothly. As a result, during the many lengthy periods of time when students are testing, the rest of the school cannot do anything online, from emailing parents to submitting grades to using any technology that requires an online connection.

Infrastructural problems have also produced tragicomic fiascos like the administration of online End-of-Course tests whose results are not available until the following fall semester is underway, and the administrations of high-stakes online examinations in which the software crashed, negating all scores and wasting weeks of instructional and testing time.

Although these illustrations are not part of the field’s romance with technology, they are of paramount importance to school administrators and state policymakers. Thus, they occupy all available bandwidth that might otherwise be available to teachers and students for using digital tools and gadgets to promote learning, a point overlooked in much advocacy. Further, they reduce technology to single-mode media that take no advantage of the field’s vaunted multimodal emphasis.

Even when the infrastructure accommodates both testing and technology, the assumption that technological literacy and literacy are one and the same finds limitations in actual practice. The speaker argues that Kim’s observation regarding the need for attendant psychological tools to accompany the introduction of technological tools is a key reason for the disjuncture between theory and practice. Examples include great investments in tablets that immediately became props for a lascivious dance (“the twerk”). The speaker concludes with words of caution about technological advocacy to provoke lively discussion and debate.

Author

• Peter Smagorinsky, University of Georgia