The "Digital Imperative" and 21st-Century Audiences

J. Elizabeth Clark's article, "The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy," focuses on using new media in the classroom, and I am particularly interested in her discussion of audience. She claims that "artifacts of student learning have the potential to become actual published products, or works that raise questions around the public/private split of contemporary writing" (29), yet I have concerns about new media's assumed ability to help our students negotiate this split.

Clark describes "Ally," one of her students who entered the class with a common student perception of classroom writing tasks: "She thought of writing as a performance for the teacher, but not as something that had a significant role in her own life" (30). And she goes on to describe the effects of assignments that use new media on Ally's understanding of audience: "Without the ePortfolio and her blog, Ally's work in the course would have been a series of disconnected assignments written for a teacher-peer audience. With the publication of her work on the ePortfolio and the blog, her work immediately changed focus, as she now had the ability to share her work" (30). While it's possible that Ally developed the deep understanding of audience described in the article, we should not assume that assigning new media compositions will concretize student conceptions of their audiences.

Clark's desire to expand student audiences beyond the classroom highlights an issue that Joseph Petraglia refers to as pseudotransactionality, which basically refers to the inauthenticity of classroom writing tasks that--no matter how the prompt frames them--are always directed at a teacher-audience. Ally's "ability to share her work" is supposed to be transactional in that Clark describes it as being directed at a "real world" audience, with real world consequences. However, my own research suggests that the kind of blog assignment described by Clark does not transgress the pseudotransactional classroom situation quite as easily as we might assume. In fact, out of the 19 students in one Freshman Comp class I surveyed, when asked if they had ever been assigned to write for an audience other than the instructor, 8 identified a blog assignment, 6 identified various other assignments, and 5 said they never had such as assignment. I had not expected these responses, and I was surprised because the 8 students who identified a blog assignment were referring to an assignment they had just completed two weeks earlier in that vary class. In other words, 11 of the 19 students did not appear to conceive of the blog assignment as one that asked them to write for an audience other than the instructor. While this is only one class, their responses agree with much of what I've read and discussed with fellow instructors.

Clark addresses this issue with her second exemplum student, whose online personal essay included specific details of illegal activities, which could have had serious real world consequences that the student apparently did not foresee. After describing the student's situation, Clark says, "students--and in fact most users of Web 2.0 technologies--have yet to fully understand the implications of living a publicly accessible life. Responsible digital literacy can only come from helping students to make conscientious choices about how to use technology conscientiously and critically" (31). I agree with this statement, and despite my criticisms of parts of Clark's argument, I think that teaching new media is a crucial aspect of teaching 21st-century audience awareness. After all, how else will our students learn to be more savvy about their Facebook privacy settings and why they should avoid posting pictures of their friends performing keg stands.

Having said all that, there are other ways to negotiate pseudotransactionality, some of which may actually be more effective than new media. A seemingly necessary component for students to recognize an audience external to the classroom is the reception of feedback from that audience. Other teachers who find blog assignments ineffective say one main reason is because many students think that, out of the multitude of blogs available on the vast internet, no one outside of the class is going to bother looking at theirs. Instructors can team up with one another to expand blog writing assignments beyond the classroom, but then they're only really expanding the pool of peers from which they can conduct peer review. Writing for publication assignments don't have to use new media, and if a student has a letter to the editor published in a local paper, then it really might be viewed by a larger (and/or more "authentic") audience than their blog would ever receive. Additionally, even if their letters aren't published, the editor's acknowledgment of receiving those letters could solidify the external audience to a greater extent than any blog comment.

Clark's article was published in Computers and Composition 27 (2010) 27-35, and in case the link to Petraglia's article stops working: Petraglia, Joseph. “Spinning Like a Kite: A Closer Look at the Pseudotransactional Function of Writing.” JAC 15.1 (1995): N.p. Web. 2 June 2010.