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This is a diagnostic assignment I’ve been giving students for about a decade, first only in composition classes, and now in most of the first-year classes I teach. In addition to helping me learn how each student writes, I use this assignment to learn about students’ changing relationships with technology. This is how I initially learned about Snapchat and streaks, or the fact that many of my students opened their first social media accounts at a sleepover in elementary school, without their parents knowing. Too many of them remember their first incident of bullying or being bullied in a group message in high school, and most tell me they get their news from social media, especially Instagram and TikTok.
After this task, we created together a set of community best practices for the use of technological devices in the classroom, taking into account different needs and adaptations. The related conversations that follow, about new and emerging technologies, span entire semesters.
This is because the way students are growing up and their daily lives are changing at such a rapid pace that without those conversations to bring us together, we could be communicating as if we were using smoke signals. Just as higher education once transitioned, unevenly, to the integration of writing and training practices throughout the curriculum, an effect largely of postwar changes toward greater democratization and diversification of universities , it is also time to make the case for digital literacy across the higher education curriculum.
Librarians have already been doing this work, often unrecognized, for years, but those of us in classrooms need to highlight the cause and join forces collectively. We need a set of principles developed by instructors from different disciplines and all types of institutions that can be integrated into national professional development training and continually cultivated over time.
Many of the same basic principles of what are known as Writing Across the Curriculum programs could be applied to this new area, such as the importance of self-reflection on behaviors and practices (what that initial writing task evokes), the emphasis on teaching the whole student (which means going deeper into how students now spend so much of their time), and attention to different expectations and norms depending on discipline, gender and context, something that could be applied effectively to reception , creation and dissemination of information and stories in all types of online modalities.
It’s 2024, and most American teens own iPhones and are on social media daily, many declaring that they use multiple platforms “almost constantly.” This is where the majority of the adult public, including teachers, also spend at least some of their time, to socialize, obtain or share opinions and information and, just as often, express complaints. While conversations about technology and education often focus on legislation and policies imposed from above, often induced by panic, these are ultimately palliative and inadequate solutions to a complete reconfiguration of the world as we know it. There is still little professional training or sustained development in teachers who teach students whose experiences of the world are increasingly tied to the digital spheres in which much of their social, educational and professional lives take place.
At colleges and universities across the country, these changes began long before COVID. I have witnessed teachers around me struggling, often on their own, to discover best practices for integrating digital tools into their classrooms, or teaching students appropriate ways to find, evaluate, and use online sources. For example, is Wikipedia an appropriate resource? Both students and professors I coach ask me this question almost every semester. What makes things so complicated is not only that context and usage matter, but that the answer has changed over time. How should the use of cell phones and other technologies be treated in the classroom? Ask 10 teachers, get 10 different answers.
One of the central problems appears to be that teachers themselves have little training or training in understanding the history and development, including the design and use, of various online platforms and technologies. Consequently, as with teaching writing, they may feel deprived and fearful. (Consider, for example, the recent and continuing widespread panic around ChatGPT.)
No wonder: technology is changing at a propulsive pace, and no individual aside from those working in the tech industry, or, put another way, those working in digital studios, is expected to be able to keep up. while continuing with his professional obligations. That is why we teachers, with the support of our administrations, must come together and create a new movement, using the successful Writing Across the Curriculum movement as a model, to introduce Digital Literacy across the curriculum.
It’s not like we have to start from scratch. The Stanford History Education Group, for example, created its Civic Reasoning Online curriculum in 2014. It has free resources for educators, in high schools and beyond, interested in teaching students to diligently search for and evaluate all kinds from online sources. A colleague recently told me about Courageous RI, a media literacy program run by the University of Rhode Island and the Media Education Laboratory. These are just two of many programs, which have often been created independently in reaction to the current crisis around the use and understanding of technology in education.
Most educators are well aware of the problems that an integrative curriculum like this would respond to: things like the rapid spread of misinformation and misinformation, an already urgent problem that is destined to be magnified with the integration of more artificial intelligence models; an alarming mental health crisis; and, perhaps least prominent and most difficult to address, a general lack of awareness and reflection about where and how digital technologies and tools might best fit into our lives.
The effects of technology are not predestined conclusions. Instead, technology consists of tools that can be molded to work on the missions that many higher education institutions have long set for themselves. We just have to be more intentional about making those connections.
Teachers are not expected to deal with every new change in technology, small revolutions within a larger revolution, on their own, especially when many now work as contingent workers and when most have experienced a reduction in resources and supports. These are not changes we can face alone, and asking support services units in colleges and universities, such as libraries and technology labs, to shoulder the burden is unfair and marginalizes the problem. We already have the Writing Across the Curriculum model that we can turn to as we look to integrate digital literacy across the curriculum: Let’s use it!
Tahneer Oksman is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Language, with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and Media Arts, at Marymount Manhattan College, where for four years she directed the academic writing program. She teaches writing, literature, comics, and journalism classes, and for years has been training faculty at her own institution and beyond in teaching writing, research, and critical thinking in the college classroom.
