Navigation:
Video Segment 2: What were your parents' attitudes toward literacy and/or education?
Video Segment 3: How would your life be different if you didn't know how to read and write?
Video Segment 4: What is your experience with and attitude toward computers?
Lessons 1 & 2: Narrating Technology Use
Lesson 3: Technology Resistance
Lesson 4: Complexity of Technological Engagements
Working Definitions of Technological Literacy and Narrative Analysis
Lessons from the technological literacy experiences of Jacobs, Madraswala, Kamara, and Mays:
Lesson 4: Students may hold very nuanced and complex understandings of technology use and long-term experience using computers. They may also have learned to moderate their own use of technology and have found academic and professional uses for computer technologies without direct classroom instruction.
Of the four young women, Madraswala talks the most about her parents’ perceptions of technology and how their mistrust of technology led to restrictions on her behavior. She portrays her parents as concerned about social uses of computers and aligns her adult self with those concerns while also recollecting a period of her life during which she resisted that concern. She dramatizes her resistance by telling about communicating on IM until 5:00 a.m. in middle and high school but not using IM any more as an adult. She tells a regressive narrative about her diminishing uses of some communication technologies, embedded in a progressive narrative about her life in general, indicating her conflicted attitude about the role of technological literacy practices in her life.
Life with computers is normal for all these women. All of them describe using computers as early as elementary school and seem particularly accepting of how useful computers are for schoolwork, including researching and writing papers. This narrow definition of productive use of technology also shapes how positively the women portray their social or recreational use of computers, whether they are chatting online or watching television on their computers, and may contribute to a more negative description of their own practices.