Introduction

Composing technological literacy narratives in such a classroom environment requires students to re-create their past experiences with technology from a new perspective (the present) and for a new audience (classmates and instructor). Adding an explicit focus on comparing different narratives written by students in the class and drawn from the DALN encourages students to re-evaluate their technological literacy experiences from another vantage point, one that asks them to see their literacy experiences as part of a classroom and generational cohort. Finally, scholarship that theorizes literacy trends and practices culturally, socially, and historically encourages students to see their own and their cohorts’ literacy experiences in a broader cultural and historical context. Such an approach to literacy narratives asks students to draw on the rich personal detail found in their own and DALN contributors’ literacy narratives to build on and/or intervene in existing scholarship on technological literacy.

This exhibit suggests an approach for looking at student literacy narratives in a way that connects the local, personal experiences and contexts of literacy to some of the global and social trends and conditions which have shaped those experiences. It uses a group of technological literacy video narratives from the DALN to model one method of setting a cluster of narratives in conversation with each other to draw out the intersections and divergences between them. Because these texts are narratives, attention will be paid to both the content and the construction/performance of these video texts, focusing on what these narratives demonstrate about the effects or perceptions of the experiences they describe rather than the factual accuracy of the details they contain. This exhibit aims to demonstrate some of the benefits of taking a subset of technological literacy narratives to 1) look across the narratives for similarities and differences and 2) contextualize the trends found across multiple narratives in social and historical accounts of computer literacy during the time period the narrators describe.