The NCSU Center for Information Society Studies invites you to a Research Seminar in the Distinguished Lecture Series, sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology, & Science.
Dr. Cynthia L. Selfe
Michigan Technological University
"Critical Technological Literacies for the 21st Century"
Monday, November 6, 2000
12:00pm - 1:30pm
Page Hall, Room 109 (building 34 on map)
NC State University
About the talk
The truth of the matter, unfortunately, is that technology is not
available to everyone
in this country or to every student in our schools--and often, when it
is, students are provided only with simple functional literacy
skills that are inadequate to their needs as citizens. This tendency to
focus on functional literacy skills exacerbates social inequities
along the related axes of race and class. The poorer individuals are and
the less educated they are in our country--both of which
conditions continue to be closely correlated with race--the less likely
they are to have access to computers for their language and
literacy practices; the less likely they are to have acquired a critical
perspective on, and understanding of, technological literacy; and
the less likely they are to secure to high-paying, high-tech jobs in the
American workplace.
In the United States, literacy instruction is now fundamentally and
inextricably
connected to technology through a complex set of related social
practices: the
electronic literacy practices that citizens undertake daily in their
private and public lives; the technology-rich curricula that drives
many of the nation's schools; the electronic literacy practices that many
teachers have adopted in their classrooms; the influence
that large-scale government programs and funding for technology programs
have exerted--and continue to exert--on public literacy
instruction; the ways in which professional organizations have linked
literacy and technology in their official standards.
About Dr. Cynthia Selfe
Dr. Selfe has served as the Chair of the Conference on College
Composition and
Communication and the Chair of the College Section of the National
Council of
Teachers of English. In 1996, she was recognized as an EDUCOM Medal award
winner for innovative computer use in higher education--the first woman
and the first
English teacher ever to receive this award. Her vita is available at her
website: http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~cyselfe/
Dr. Selfe is the founder and co-editor (with Gail Hawisher) of Computers
and Composition: An International Journal for
Teachers of Writing.