Dear Tom,

I thought it would only be appropriate to do this "cover letter" as a blog, as

• this is a class on digital literacy
• the first thing I learned to do in your class was a blog
• it is more fun than writing a plain old boring letter!

I feel like I have come a long way since that first blog on Pandora. Right now, I am listening to Deezer.com instead of Pandora (even though I still love Pandora, Deezer is nice in that you can listen to an entire album for free!) Right now I am listening to Josh Ritter.

I am using Google Docs to write this letter, which I learned in your class as well. I haven't done it yet, but I remember you showing us that I can post this directly to my blog by hitting "publish." I am adding links, bulleted lists, bold text, etc. here, so I hope it works!

This is a cover letter to introduce my final project. Instead of doing a service project for the English Language Center, I decided to set up a service learning project for my 102 class next semester. I figured that was a bit more "bang for my buck." For this project, I have arranged for my students to do a service learning project in either the English Language Center or Fairmont Junior High. My students will prepare and teach an English writing lesson to the ESL students at either institution. This will be part into our semester-long inquiry into the causes and effects of migration. Specifically, I want my students to explore the issue of immigration through writing, research and reading. This service learning project will provide my students with an opportunity to observe and interview refugees and immigrants as a means of gathering information for their ethnographies on immigrant groups in Boise.

Of course, I had to include technology in all of this! Please feel free to peruse my newest and best wiki yet: www.researchwriting.pbwiki.com ! I have used a wiki as an organizational tool for this class, and I will have students use a wiki to publish their writing, have online reading discussion groups, and to create a classroom textbook on this subject of immigration. One idea that I got from Heidi is to assign two class "ethnographers" every class period- their job will be to write their observations on the class on their wiki- that way my students will have a resource to go back to in order to review what we did in previous classes. It will also be a great resource for students who were absent. Pairing this with the wonderful online calendar gives students absolutely no excuse for not turning in all work on time!

I have learned a lot about organizing such a tool from this semester's experiment with wikis. First of all, name them well! My first wiki, www.unit3multigenreproject.pbwiki.com was probably the worst name for a website ever, seconded only by one of the class wikis: www.yourunitthreeclassworkwiki.pbwiki.com. Ok I take it back. The second one is worse. Yes, I know, awful. My poor students, having to remember that! This time I stuck to the simple www.researchwriting.pbwiki.com and for my students, www.researchwritingclass.pbwiki.com. That should be easier to write and remember!...

I went from doing individual units as their own wiki (unit3multigenreproject.pbwiki.com and unit4project.pbwiki.com ) to doing one wiki for the entire class (researchwriting.pbwiki.com). That is better for obvious reasons. Since I started using wikis mid-semester, I didn't think to use the same wiki for both units three and four. That would have been a much smarter move. Oh well, you live and learn, right? :)

OK I am going to practice with publication. I am going to publish this to my blog to see if all the links and formatting worked... here goes...

It worked! Wow, digital writing is fun. I feel so distinguished! I do think that writing for the web gives one a sense of audience and makes writing more exciting. I do agree with Mary Sellen in "Information Literacy in the General Education that we are doing our students a mis-service if we aren't weaving digital literacy into our work as writing teachers. Evaluating websites for validity is crucial for democratic participation in today's web-savy world:

One of the goals of general education is to give students the
skills and knowledge to be citizens who live useful lives in a democratic
world. The new technologies of electronic publication and
the dissemination of information add another dimension to this
citizenship. The social mechanisms that will define what is the
responsible use and creation of information are still being defined
and will be written by the students in our classrooms now. Minimally,
information literacy gives students the skills to understand
the structure, use, and evaluation of information. Through this
understanding students gain a framework to evaluate the impact
of these technologies on the decisions and choices they make. It
also gives students foundational information so they may participate
in the social mechanisms that will control and regulate the
future of the creation and dissemination of information (125).

As Sellen eloquently notes, information literacy helps our students understand the texts they are reading on the Internet. Being literate means to constantly evaluate the information you interact with- this is crucial on the Web. I hope that by using a wiki in my classroom, my students will not only be creators of content, they will learn to to be critique-ers of content as well. That is, if the democratic Internet survives the encroaching corporate take-over...

As I peruse our syllabus, I am struck by how much virtual ground we covered. I don't even know where or how to begin talking about everything we learned in class this semester! Obviously I can, and am, making visual the practical digital literacy skills I have learned this semester. On that note, this seems like a great spot to insert a video I made as an example for my 101 class:

But how to represent the complex understanding of digital rhetoric I have gained? I could mention a few that really stood out: Daniel Anderson's Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Consumption and Production in Continuum is one that comes to mind immediately. To me, that was an amazing article in that it showed so many possible applications for digital rhetorics: Kairos, the journal it was published on, is an example of digital literacy in and of itself. Anderson's (article? Video? Digital essay? Do we even have a word for what he did yet?) work of art can be used to teach digital literacy to teachers, to students, it is an impressive example of what we can do with the written word in a digital atmosphere. I am excited about the possibilities! Far from being the death of the book, I think that the Internet will change the way we tell stories.

What else comes to mind? The crimes of virtual rape, or of imaginary economies that surpass those of developing nations? The new forms of literacy emerging on the web? The rhetorical strategies behind those literacies? How to write for the web, or how publish on the web? Are we becoming cyborgs, is the Internet taking over? Is every move we make on the Internet being monitored? Is there such a thing as privacy on the Web? Is digital culture jamming a crime? What is the future of the Internet- strictly controlled marketplace or revolutionary democratic forum? We have explored these topics and more in this class- my head is still spinning... hopefully I will remember everything we've done, read, discussed! I do know, though, that I will be perusing your syllabus for a long time after class ends- revisiting articles, looking for readings for my class, doing some inspired web-surfing...

I've really enjoyed the ride! Thanks for teaching this class- I have learned a ton!

Samantha