Stuart Selber's "Technology & the Human Intellect: Computer Literacies and Development of the Creative Mind"
Rebekah Shultz Colby

Stuart Selber, an Associate Professor of English and Science, Technology, and Society and an Affiliate Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University, as well as author of Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, chaired a conference hosted by DUs Center for Teaching and Learning entitled Technology and the Human Intellect: Computer Literacies and the Development of the Creative Mind Friday, April 27. The conference was organized around three workshops which each explored an aspect of literacy: the functional, the critical, or the rhetorical. Then DU faculty from diverse disciplines all over campus gave mini-conferences which illustrated one of these literacy aspects in their respective disciplines. For instance, Joe Kraus gave a presentation on functional library literacies, Alvaro Arias gave a presentation on critical math literacy, and Rafael Fahardo gave a presentation on how to use video game design to teach rhetorical literacy.

During lunch, Selber gave a presentation which emphasized the need for all three literacies to work together to make technology and writing instruction the most effective. He began this discussion by pointing out four frequent literacy myths. Myth #1: Computers make writing better. He succinctly pointed out studies done in the 80s which showed that although students tend to write more when they use computers, this writing isnt necessarily better than writing that was done before computers entered the writing classroom. Myth #2: Computers save time and money. Selber argued instead that computers hardly save either. Usually software programs take a considerable time investment to learn when they first come out and, far from saving money, computers require considerable capital just to acquire not to mention maintain. Myth #3: Computers level the educational and social playing field. While many of us would love to believe this, obviously when computers require so much time and money to acquire and learn, they hardly end up leveling anything rather they tend to deepen the social divide, affording considerable learning advantages to the upper middle class and leaving the economically disadvantaged far behind. Furthermore, computer software is designed more often than not by upper middle class white males for other upper middle class white males, which creates implicit cultural barriers for women and other minority software users. Myth #4: Computers are neutral tools. Again, Selber contested that computers are cultural artifacts. He asked, for instance, what are the cultural assumptions behind Microsoft Word and how do these assumptions shape student writing?

Selber went on to argue that without integrating a critical and rhetorical perspective of literacy, conventional approaches tend to focus on just functional computer literacy. The benefits of only utilizing functional literacy are that it can be applied quickly in the short run, it is easy to assess, and it is easy to operationalize. Students learn to backup disks, use a word processor, and maximize screen real estate as they design digital texts. However, students dont learn to use these skills in meaningful or critical ways not to mention the fact that most college students already have learned most of these basic functional literacy skills before they enter the college classroom. For instance, while they may learn the mechanics of how to name and save a file, they dont learn to create meaningful file schemes for organizing and retrieving large amounts of data. They dont learn to write effectively or participate appropriately on a listserv. Finally, they certainly dont learn to situate technology in economic, political, or cultural contexts.

So, instead of only teaching a perspective of functional literacy, Selber argued that teachers from all disciplines should work to not only help students become functional users of literacy but also to help them become critical questioners who participate in informed critique and rhetorical producers who engage in reflective praxis of these same of these literacies as well.

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