In the Mirror of Genre: Students Write this
World
Nancy Kaplan's Mission Statement
It's probably obvious why all of this matters, but I think that Nancy Kaplan
captures the urgency of it best in her article "E-Literacies: Politexts,
Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print."
Equitable access to computers, modems, and Internet services alone
will not be sufficient. Unless people know how to read what they see and
to write when they can -- unless e-literacies are also equitably distributed
-- equitable access will be for naught. The humanists among us must take
responsibility for the literacy education that makes access meaningful.
So here is my challenge to English departments, Education departments,
and teachers everywhere: learn this space. And contribute. Write this world.
For me, this issues a challenge. We need to do more than read books
on efficient hypertext design. We need to become actively involved
in discovering how web texts perform in a living social space, and to learn
how to use that knowledge to empower students to construct their own web
texts with full rhetorical understanding. Since web text is evolving
faster than we can ever hope to understand, this task is of course impossible.
But that has never stopped rhetoricians before.