Creating a Digital Support Center

On a mid-sized university campus, the library proposes a new functional digital technology support service, and Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC) proposes a new critical and rhetorical digital support service; however, the collaborative process leading to the renovation of the library basement into a digital commons that will house these two differing digital centers has revealed missing, yet fundamental, questions about the purpose and structure of both services. Though building the digital commons could provide support in all three technological literacies, functional, critical, and rhetorical (Selber, 2004), decisions about the material aspects of the renovation preceded discussions of the theoretical foundations that necessarily inform mission and purpose and that should shape the work of the two centers. As a result, the collaboration has thus far produced an emphasis on only the first layer of technological literacy: creating functional users. The primary stakeholders' distance from the disciplinary knowledge of speaking and writing center scholarship combined with a lack of familiarity with recent trends in multiliteracy scholarship have resulted in a problematic disconnect between how the space should look and what the space should do.

Creating a Digital Support Center

On a mid-sized university campus, the library proposes a new functional digital technology support service, and Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC) proposes a new critical and rhetorical digital support service; however, the collaborative process leading to the renovation of the library basement into a digital commons that will house these two differing digital centers has revealed missing, yet fundamental, questions about the purpose and structure of both services. Though building the digital commons could provide support in all three technological literacies, functional, critical, and rhetorical (Selber, 2004), decisions about the material aspects of the renovation preceded discussions of the theoretical foundations that necessarily inform mission and purpose and that should shape the work of the two centers. As a result, the collaboration has thus far produced an emphasis on only the first layer of technological literacy: creating functional users. The primary stakeholders’ distance from the disciplinary knowledge of speaking and writing center scholarship combined with a lack of familiarity with recent trends in multiliteracy scholarship have resulted in a problematic disconnect between how the space should look and what the space should do.