Dr. Harrington’s Blog

Stuart Selber is a professor of technical communication at Penn State University.  This piece was published in CCC, like several others we’ve read.  Selber writes, then, in a formal voice, and his vocabulary is often quite sophisticated.  But his aim is clear: he wants us to consider how functional literacy—an emphasis on doing interesting things with computers—can be an important part of what it means to be computer literate today. So learn a few big new words and feel proud of enhancing your vocabulary, and look for the places where he is outlining what kinds of things students like you should be able to do with computers.  We’ll use his essay as inspiration for the assignment that gets each of us learning some new literacy skills.

Here’s an outline to help you navigate the piece:

Selber’s introduction notes that universities are increasingly requiring students to meet a computer literacy requirement, and that English faculty are rarely consulted on such matters.  On pg 471 he lists some of the questions that have gotten attention from English teachers and researchers, and he ends that list with a discussion of the most recent trends in the conversation, focusing on critical concerns about technology (see the top of 472 for a nice paraphrase of the kinds of questions asked by critical researchers—who include Hawisher and Selfe, by the way).

Selber explains that functional literacy has not drawn a lot of positive attention from English teachers.  Functional literacy has been associated with very basic literacy activities (like decoding words out of context).  While Selber notes that much criticism of functional literacy approaches have merit, the history of the term suggests things are more complicated.  The first scholar to use the term was interested in promoting independent learning through functional literacy.  Over time, though, functional literacy has become tied to work force productivity and has been tested with objective, not-in-context tests.

But Selber wants to reclaim the earlier senses of functional literacy, and he argues that there are four reasons that functional literacy should be an important concern for us (see 475).

So what would that look like?  He’s not interested in listing skills that everyone should have.  He outlines five parameters:–“educational goals, social conventions, specialized discourses, management activities, and technological impasses”—which can guide the development of a functional literacy program.  In a way, the rest of the article is a manifesto on the subject:

Educational goals: A functionally literate student uses computers effectively to achieve educational goals.  He or she learns to situate mechanical skills in a pedagogical context…(475-76).   “pedagogical activities [should] stress three area: understanding what computers are generally good at, using advanced software features that are often ignored, and customizing interfaces (476).

You should have a sense of the various activities Selber links to this parameter—what kinds of software features he teaches students, for example

Social conventions: A functional yliterate student understands the social conventions that help determine computer use (481).

You should have a sense of the kinds of activities Selber invites students to do.  How can social conventions be studied and learned?

Specialized discourses: A functionally literate student makes use of the specialized discourses associated with computers (484).    He argues that we need to know the terms associated with different types of computer hardware and software in order to report problems and more importantly to use computers for our own rhetorical purposes.

You should have a sense of the kinds of ways students might get involved with learning some new terms.

Management activities: A functionally literate student effectively manages hir or her online world (488).  Selber explains several ways in which students can learn to manage information online.

You should have a sense of some strategies Selber thinks are important for  a pedagogically sound approach to controlling online resources.

Technological impasses: A functionally literate student resolves technological impasses confidently and strategically (493).  Performance-oriented impasses (those that affect our ability to do something) shoule be our concern (vs. learning-oriented impasses, which involve learning basic aspects of how a computer works).  On 495, Selber argues that teachers need to help students think about how things break down and what to do about them—not that we shouldn’t take advantage of the tech support available, but we need to think carefully about what our problems are and what might be causing them.

Selber ends by noting that he is aware of the links between literacy, culture, and power.  He’s careful to show the ways his approach to functional literacy is in alignment, to some extent, with the calls for critical literacy skills.  But, he concludes, functional literacy is one important part of an approach to computer literacy overall.