Newer Literacies and Technologies

Kjeldsen’s rhetorical analysis of PowerPoint that focuses on its affordances, limitations and constraints for the meaning making process brings back to my attention the need to teach our students to “think rhetorically” about their compositions with multimedia technologies in literacy and ELA classrooms. What that basically means is that English language arts/literacy teachers who ask students to work with Power Point, and other technologies/software, in addition to teaching them how to create  let’s say slides in PPT, need also to engage them in conversations about these technologies from a rhetorical composition stance. Ideally, such conversations should help students to embrace the ways technology tools can either enable or limit the writer’s/author’s intended meanings and ideas that are being communicated in multimedia compositions.

In our own experiences we have participated in PowerPoint presentations that were really bad, which typically means long, boring, glitzy, over the top presentations. The poor use of technology tools, is often linked directly to their users’ lack of “rhetorical awareness and competence (2006, p.11) of technological limitations and possibilities” (p.12) that most technologies have. Kjeldsen refers to such knowledge as “media rhetoracy.”

Have we however been explicitly taught how to communicate effectively through PowerPoint/other technologies from the rhetorical stance?  Have we been taught “media rhetoracy,” to use Kjeldsen’s terminology? Sadly, many of us probably would answer, “NO”. We certainly do not want that for our students, do we?

 What thus teaching to think rhetorically with technological tools should involve?

How can such learning become an inherent part of teaching English language arts?

I am currently exploring these and similar questions with my students in a literacy methods class and will shortly report on our conversations. Before this happens though, please join us to share your answers to the questions that we are examining.