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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 1: Technologies develop and change quickly and, given this rapid pace of change, people often miss learning about a technology when it first appears and may take it up only later when it seems antiquated and obvious, like the fax machine does today. For this reason, teachers of digital writing cannot assume that students are comfortable with any specific technology such as the comment function in Word or Boolean operators for computer searches.
Lesson 2: Being asked to learn and use any technology can be uncomfortable. As technological literacy sponsors, teachers need to productively engage that discomfort, disarming it when appropriate, and addressing it when a critical engagement is more appropriate. Teachers must not assign responsibility for a perceived failure to one person, nor is it productive to generalize about or blame a generation for what is perceived as a technological illiteracy.
In response to questions about the use of computers while she was a child, Jacobs presents a positive narrative about technology use in the home. She describes having consistent access to computers as a child and portrays herself as being comfortable and confident with technology. This part of her story constitutes a narrative of stability (Gergin & Gergin, 1997). She then tells a story about not knowing how to use a technology—the fax machine—in high school. This event embarrasses Jacobs because feels that she is generally knowledgeable about computer hardware and software as well as handheld technologies.
Jacobs asks for help and links her lack of knowledge to a dominant cultural narrative about how technology is making people less able to do simple tasks, connecting her story to the idea that calculators make people less proficient at addition and subtraction. This linkage provides some insight into Jacobs' definition of technology literacy. For Jacobs, it is imperative to be literate in a variety of technologies but to keep a critical distance from technology and avoid an overreliance on technology. This critical technology literacy brings to mind both Selber’s (2004) types of literacy (functional, critical, rhetorical) and Banks’ (2005) levels of access (material, functional, experiential, critical, transformative). Jacobs’ unfamiliarity with the fax machine is situated in the context of a progressive narrative, which indicates that she is willing to learn and change and holds onto a positive, if skeptical, attitude about technology, in part because of how the people around her act. She demonstrates an understanding of functional and critical literacies and has enough distance from the experience to differentiate between levels of access to technology.
Ultimately, Jacobs portrays the experience of learning about the fax machine positively. She recalls feeling embarrassed, although the other office workers agreed that she was a product of her culture and not at fault for that gap in her knowledge. As technology literacy sponsors, we can help our students develop a more complex understanding of when and how different technologies are engaged with and help them gain critical distance to see that technology practices have socio-cultural life spans (Selfe & Hawisher, 2004), as Jacobs was able to do a few years after her experience with the fax machine.