A Triangulation Approach to Understand Multi-Cultural College Students’ Technology Literacy in a Composition Classroom

Despite intense debates over the use of computer and networked technologies in composition classrooms, research has been limited by one dimensional support or criticism of integrating technologies into classrooms. The inability to consider students as a central role in the literacy acquisition process has led to many problems in the rhetoric of technology as well as in the implementation of computer and networked technologies in a composition classroom. This study employed a triangulation method to gather empirical data to better assess and critique the rhetoric of technology in composition pedagogy literature. The author collected both quantitative and qualitative data to uncover issues critical to students’ technology literacy in a technologized composition classroom. A questionnaire survey was distributed to 62 bi-cultural undergraduate students conveniently recruited from a large southwestern university near the U.S.-Mexico border. Findings from the quantitative method discovered that English instructors’ technology literacy had significant impacts on students’ own technology literacy. Furthermore, narratives from the qualitative method identify the following themes about technology: effectiveness, practicality, instrumentality, and institutional enforcement. In conclusion, the author discusses the importance of technology literacy in composition classrooms to demonstrate its implications on global literacy theory and practices.

Real-Time and Social Media in Trans-Atlantic Writing/Translation and Translation/Editing Projects

This chapter illustrates the ways in which seemingly peripheral contact and communication via social networking are effective means by which members of international and intercultural Networked Knowledge Communities (NKCs) can, in largely informal ways, educate one another in terms of culture, custom, and language use. The authors argue that these increases in communication via new media have resulted in both successful writing/translation collaborations and, in many cases, satisfying long-term personal and professional relationships. To illustrate these claims, the authors draw from written student reflections collected in the last two years in the long-running Trans-Atlantic Project linking writing classes with translation classes. The reflections reveal that, in many ways, the informal, pseudo-immersive communication of new social media and real-time media can be even more effective than traditional pedagogical practices that rely largely on textbook-centered approaches to intercultural education, especially when carried out through a NKC.

Re-Evaluation of Nepali Media, Social Networking Spaces, and Democratic Practices in Media

This chapter first analyzes the Nepali mainstream media and social media’s effect upon its relationships with audiences or news-receivers. Then, it explores how social media is a virtual space for creating democratic forums in order to generate news, share among Networked Knowledge Communities (NKCs), and disseminate across the globe. It further examines how social media can embody a collective voice of indigenous and marginalized people, how it can better democratize mainstream media, and how it works as an alternative media. As a result of the impact of the Internet upon the Nepali society and the Nepali mainstream media, the traditional class stratifications in Nepal have been changed, and the previously marginalized and disadvantaged indigenous peoples have also begun to be empowered in the new ways brought about by digital technology. Social networking spaces engage the common people—those who are not in power, marginalized and disadvantaged, dominated, and excluded from opportunities, mainstream media, and state mechanisms—democratically in emic interactions in order to produce first-hand news about themselves from their own perspectives. Moreover, Nepali journalists frequently visit social media as a reliable source of information. The majority of common people in Nepal use social networking sites as a forum to express their collective voice and also as a tool or medium to correct any misrepresentation in the mainstream media. Social media and the Nepali mainstream media converge on the greater issues of national interest, whereas the marginalized and/or indigenous peoples of Nepal use the former as a space that embodies their denial of discriminatory news in the latter.

Sporting Safe in the Liminal Sphere

Facebook, like any other social networking site, troubles the traditional categories of private and public spheres. As it complicates (and transcends) the distinction, it can be called a different space, or a liminal space, which falls somewhere in-between private and public spheres. The author argues that this recognition of Facebook as a liminal sphere has important implications to the (re) definition of public and private spheres and to the ways rhetoric should work or be used in the Web 2.0 sites like Facebook. The author also proposes that Michael de Certeau’s notions of “strategy” and “tactics” can be powerful rhetorical tools to deal with Facebook’s liminality and to enhance the rhetorical performance of self in Facebook and other similar new media forums.

Twitter in Higher Education

Twitter as a micro-blog in higher education has been considered a new pedagogical tool for social and academic communications among educators and students since its inception in 2006. Twitter provides space and opportunities for students and faculty to engage in social and academic activities as a new pedagogical tool. Despite the limited research on Twitter as a learning tool, a significant number of educators in the US, the UK, Australia, and other parts of the world have used Twitter to interact with students, to share course information, and to collaborate research among educators. This chapter presents existing literature on Twitter and debates on the usage of Twitter in higher education as a learning pedagogy.

Writing with Pixels

As a result of the features available on social media, users are able to present an up-to-the-minute picture of who they believe they are, what they are all about, and what gets their attention to the world in a remarkably savvy way. These sites enable students to practice concepts such as agency, situatedness, and constraints as well as gain experience with visual rhetoric itself. This chapter argues that the ability of instructors to tap this voluntary rhetorical activity and channel it into academic endeavors is of critical importance to creating new pedagogies to teach a new generation of rhetorically aware citizens.

Getting Past Our Assumptions about Web 2.0 and Community Building

While many social media technologies present opportunities to create Networked Knowledge Communities (NKCs), hierarchies among users, content managers, and programmers persist. In the classroom, instructors must manage these power dynamics, yet few have been trained to critically examine technological programs’ affordances to see how they foster community or not. The authors examine a blog assignment for a pedagogy course in which students, after posting several entries, are required to analyze the class’s blog usage to address whether a community was formed through the social media. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the blog assignment the authors learned that while several students claim that the limited number of interactive posts resulted because the instructor did not model community-forming behaviors, community is too complex to impose upon a group. As a result, the authors conclude that instructors, as “programmers” of the rhetorical and instructional situations, need to design and articulate the desired outcomes of community building.

Knowledge Sharing for Improving Effectiveness of University-Industry Collaborations

Knowledge is one of the most important strategic resources in industrial organizations. Knowledge sharing is a mechanism to capture, disseminate, transfer, and apply useful knowledge. For these reasons, knowledge sharing has become a strategic issue as a source of funding for university research and as a policy tool for economic development for industrial organizations. Collaborations between universities and industrial organizations can play an important role in the areas of knowledge sharing. There are many factors that can affect collaboration between industrial firms and universities. This chapter begins with the description of the term knowledge. It discusses knowledge sharing and collaborations between universities and industrial organizations and the importance of communicational channels, especially information and communication technologies and university libraries. Finally, this chapter proposes a conceptual model for knowledge sharing collaborations between universities and industrial organizations.

Emerging Pedagogies in the Networked Knowledge Communities

The chapter discusses networked knowledge societies, networked knowledge communities, digital technologies, and emerging pedagogies. Then, it examines the breadth and depth of Web 2.0 tools, social networking sites, and interactive cloud spaces in relation to a digitally globalized world. It further stresses how networked communities and networked societies tend to blur the traditional concept of social, cultural, linguistic, and political dichotomies. After these discussions, it explores some sites of emerging pedagogies in networked communities, especially in academic institutions, social institutions, and networked global communities. Finally, by showing some problems and concerns of digital technologies and networked knowledge communities in the context of twenty-first century cloud era, it concludes by offering some potential future directions. Overall, this chapter accentuates the process of digital collaboration, content creation, dissemination and consumption of knowledge in the networked communities, and how networked knowledge communities and technologies are impacting global epistemic shifts in the twenty-first century digital village.

Visuality and the Difficult Differences in Networked Knowledge Communities

This chapter argues that as Networked Knowledge Communities (NKCs) become increasingly the way knowledge is constructed, represented, and circulated, visuality in information-based societies is also being shaped, and shaped by, the interactive and collective ideologies of digital technology environments. Like the written text, which constructs and imposes hegemonic ideals of identity through discursive practices, visual representations of identities also serve as powerful discursive reservoirs of subordinating representations. By focusing on NKCs as an epistemic space that reflects, recirculates, and reacts to bodies of knowledge produced by the institutions of power in the larger social culture, this chapter examines the vulnerability of subjugated identities to normative processes of identity formation in digital networked communities. This inquiry positions visuality not as a subordinate and incomprehensible form of discourse to the written text, but as a symmetrical and understandable discursive practice and democratizing pedagogy imbued with all the possibilities and inadequacies that come with interpreting identity and the difficult differences. Without question, globalization is a key factor in this debate despite the lack of transparency in its meaning and use. However, despite its resistance to a comprehensive definition, globalization will provide an important ideological framing from which to begin this argument given its loosening of sociopolitical, cultural, economic, and technological borders.