Public Writing and Digital Literacies
Writing in public is the key digital literacy
Three things for context:
- For several years now, I’ve taught in a Bachelor of Communication and Media Studies program where, unsurprisingly, blogging is a big part of the curriculum.
- In that time, a colleague has been slowly but surely marching our terminology away from “blogging” and toward the idea of public writing instead.
- I’ve also been facilitating digital literacy workshops, at the same university, across three campuses and half a dozen topics.
We’ve reached a moment now where it is rather silly to even bother observing that our practices and adoption of the internet have changed writing. Instead, it is time to consider the pedagogical imperative of networked public writing (that is, public writing on networks like Medium, Wordpress and Twitter).
The outcome of helping students to be networked public writers is that they leave our programs equipped to engage in public conversations, civic life, and work.
In writing in public, students are forced to confront ideas and positions that contradict their own as others comment on, challenge, and respond to their work. They develop technological skills by using platforms and tools they might not have otherwise engaged in. These capacities are as important as their ability to write, as they also encourage students to listen and think; the act of communicating is not merely about speaking.
Just as the human ability to communicate and coordinate was the key skill that allowed human societies to develop, the ability to communicate in the increasingly networked and yet ever more fractious public spaces of the internet is the one which will underpin how we move forward.
It is, however, necessary to be aware of the ways in which people are excluded from participation in these spaces. Lack of digital literacies, access to the open internet, and various methods of social exclusion and repulsion are all matters of concern. Internet companies, governments and civil groups appear to be starting to respond to these problems.
One thing I find interesting is that those teaching these skills often appear to operate under the cover of ignorance. Despite the benefits of public writing, argued above, many still seem to hold that student work should not be placed in public — that the only audience for an essay or report ought to be the tutor.
In response to these positions, David Leonard, for example, contends
Public writing and scholarly writing do not stand in binary opposition to one another nor are they mutually exclusive.
Jay Rosen also argues that blogging is about doing work in public, in such a way that the whole activity is visible and rigorous, by virtue of the fact it is much more findable and able to be challenged than in previous decades.
Blogging is not the post I wrote that appears at PressThink or on LinkedIn — or Atlantic.com if they pick me up. “Blogging” is the whole thing: accepting the invitation, tweeting the questions, creating a clip by asking what is good to blog about later, publishing the step-back explainer, crafting a distribution plan and negotiating for a make-shift guest shot at AVC.com, participating in the comment section at Fred Wilson’s site
Taking these approaches to learning is also a method of insurance for modern higher education. Talking of online courses, Clay Shirky says
In the same way online dating went from “Eww, weird” to being as ordinary as two tickets to a movie, online education has stopped being “The Future” and has become a perfectly routine way to learn.
The same has happened to most reasonable ‘offline’ courses too. By opening ourselves and our students to public viewing and scrutiny, we’re developing new routines of learning with many benefits, not least of which are the new literacies necessary for thriving in a networked world.
