The gallery below shows the most recent entries on on my Share Your Digital Literacy Stories Vimeo channel. For more info on my digital literacy interviews, scroll down below the video gallery.
WHAT’S A DIGITAL LITERACY NARRATIVE?
The “literacy narrative” is a very popular genre among writing teachers, as it encourages students to reflect on their relationship to reading and writing in general, but the genre has also grown in popularity beyond the classroom, largely in response to the work of the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. The DALN gathers literacy narratives from all kinds of people, in a variety of multimedia formats, and while some of them do focus specifically on “digital literacy,” most focus on traditional print literacy — or reading and writing in the medium of alphabetic text.
EVOLUTION OF AN IDEA
In the Fall of 2010, I asked my WRTG 1150 students to write their own digital literacy narratives, focusing not on how they learned to read and write print texts but how they learned to “read” computers and the internet — and how they learned to “write” in/through them.
I thought it might be helpful to them to consider how communicating online requires a certain set of literacy skills — reading and writing skills — which is why we were focusing on those skills in a writing class. I also thought it might be kind of interesting to hear stories from the perspective of so-called “digital natives.” You can find a few selected narratives in the FORMAT: Audio category on the sidebar.
The projects were pretty enlightening, so in the Spring I gave the topic as an option for my WRTG 2090 students, who also produced some enlightening narratives. Then I started thinking that it might be interesting to gather “digital literacy narratives” from a variety of people, not just students but people of all ages and occupations. So I bought a fancy digital camcorder, registered this domain name, and set out to find volunteers.
WANT TO SHARE YOUR STORY?
If you’re interested in sharing your digital literacy story, please contact me. I registered the domain name shareyourcomputerstories.net for this purpose, but right now the domain forwards to this page.