“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Douglas Eyman”
Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019
Digital Rhetoric in the Classroom
Xchanges: You are a digital scholar, a professor of classical, contemporary, and digital rhetoric, a web author, and a digital publisher. In your book, you discuss the necessary prerequisite of digital literacy to the more complicated understanding and study of digital rhetoric.
What do you see as our obligations to students in the 21st century in terms of teaching communication and composition skills and understanding? What place does digital rhetoric have in the college composition classroom today?
DE: I think we’re seeing a large rise in teaching digital literacy practices to students starting in elementary and middle schools, teaching kids programming, teaching kids about algorithms, teaching kids about digital literacy practices. We don’t see this yet hitting us at the college level. But in the next five to seven years, as soon as these children are in first-year writing classes, we will see college students who are much better versed in using software but not always with a critical understanding of how the technology works. Sure, students can use cell phones to do all sorts of amazing things, but they don’t always think through why they should or should not do those things or what data is being collected about them as they do those things, and why that is even a problem.
When I teach composition, I teach some critical digital literacies, but I don’t make it a central focus. I’m starting to rethink how that might operate. When I’m talking about literacy practices, I’m thinking about basic functional literacy like how to use the thing, but then you also have to develop these critical literacies — the hows-and-whys and the moral imperatives and the ethics. These things all need to be layered in. You can’t just teach how to use Excel. We have to understand how and why you would use it, and we have to understand what it’s good for and how you can use and misuse it.
Thinking about this kind of focus on literacy too, I highly recommend Annette Vee’s book, Coding Literacy: How Programming is Changing Writing. She’s done an amazing in-depth analysis.