Conclusion: Technology Literacy Narratives' Relevance to Education

What constructing and discussing technological literacy narratives like these in a classroom context also offers, however, is a chance for students to engage in macro-level discussions of computer literacy, inviting students to see their own technological literacy experiences alongside and in juxtaposition to those of others from their generation. This is a bird’s eye view of the literacy experiences represented across a group of students that becomes evident to teachers examining an entire class’ narratives. However, this wider view remains hidden from students unless they put their own literacy narratives in conversation with each other's and with those of their peers in the DALN, setting these collective experiences against accounts of the home and school technological ecologies described by Selfe and Ito. Such an emphasis on experiences with technology on both the local and national scale puts individual experiences into their social context. As Jennifer Clifton, Elenore Long, and Duane Roen explain, this kind of contextualization “can help teacher- and student-rhetors re-see not only the narratives within the [DALN] archive but also the ways they might construct and situate their own narratives.”

Critical comparison of their own technological literacy narratives with others’ and against histories of computer education in the U.S. offers students the chance to doubly re-see their own experience. First—as Bamberg explains—when telling stories narrators must re-create past events, which they do in relation to their current purpose, context, and audience. When these narrative re-creations are put in conversation with other narratives, however, student-authors have the opportunity to re-envision their narratives from a third perspective, one informed by the original experience, the process of recreating that experience through narrative, and the process of re-thinking the experience and their narrative presentation of it in the context of class discussion.