Thoughts on Maranto & Barton and Sorapure

I found Sorapure’s argument for utilizing infovis tools more compelling than Maranto and Barton’s argument on using social networks to help students with rhetorical awareness and identity formation.  (Disclaimer:  As I don’t use either Facebook or MySpace, my thoughts about their use for educational purposes are speculative.)  Maranto and Barton cite four skills that former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich believes should be included in modern educational programs:  abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration.  (44)  Maranto and Barton argue that these skills are at the core of social networking sites.  While these skills are critical to functioning in today’s workforce, students could develop these skills through other new media besides social networking sites. 

Maranto and Barton liken online social networking technology to “older high school traditions:  cruisin’, the high school yearbook (or annual), and courtship rituals (love notes, ‘going steady’)” (39).  Later they assert that “these sites bring the age-old traditions of high school onto the Web and greatly extend their reach.” (43)  This is a good thing?  Reflecting on innumerable embarrassing lapses of judgment as a high school and college student, I’m relieved that my foibles were only known to a limited number of people (and few adults, as far as I know) at the time.  Young people should be able to construct their identities, for better or worse, free from interference or prying from well-intentioned adults.   Such trials and errors are better left “private,” or at least free from their teachers’ scrutiny.  Maranto and Barton quote a college professor:  “Facebook can be a medium for faculty, staff, even administrators to be in contact with students, and maybe provide a little adult guidance.”   (39) Maranto and Barton then suggest that the “collective presence” of “adults” might be able to alter students’ online behavior.  (39). If familiar adults had started cruising on the streets where my high school friends and I roamed, we would’ve promptly moved to other streets.  I would expect the same result online.

Despite these reservations, I strongly agree with Maranto and Barton and Sorapure about the need to incorporate digital literacy in our composition classes. I think it's inevitable that students (and the rest of us, for that matter) will rely to an increasing degree on digital media for information.  Maranto and Barton quote Fred Kemp, formerly head of the Writing Program at Texas Tech University: “I think the exceptional attractiveness of Internet interaction offers too compelling an alternative to the instructional force-feeding that the classroom has acclimated us to for traditionalists to survive now that the choice is so clear.”  (37) 

As posited by Sorapure, the best way to help students become educated consumers of digital media is to give them an opportunity to produce such media themselves.  Sorapure quotes Stuart Selber: “Students should not be just effective users of computers, nor should they be just informed questioners . . . . In order to function most effectively as agents of change, students must also become reflective producers of technology” (60) Sorapure adds that, “in discussions of visual rhetoric, the element of design is crucial; as students produce their own photographs, drawings, and digital images, they gain a better understanding of how arguments and ideologies are embedded in particular design choices.” (60) Studying and actively experimenting with these choices is an appropriate use of class time in the composition classroom.