To my delight, this week’s readings speak directly to my dissertation topic and in an extremely affirming way. For before Giroux, before Freire and Foucault, way before Manovich and the New London Group… there was Maria Montessori, ripping the bolted school desks from the classroom floors and tossing them to the curb. Montessori identified “the interface” of the brick and mortar classroom not only as problematic to the physical and psychological development of children (not to mention educational development), but as symbolic and real means of suppression and oppression. Her focus was on “interface”–the design and architecture of the environment, the larger classroom environment, and the “environment” of “the lesson.”
8121: Cyborg Readings
I think the order in which I read these articles definitely had an effect on how I read them. Starting with Harraway made sense, particularly as all of the other readings, save for the MOO transcript, explicitly referenced her. Ending with the MOO transcript, however, prejudiced my reading of it because I kept looking for a manifestation of some of the claims in the theoretical works in the conversation captured by the MOO, and I found them.
8121: Selber’s “Reimagining the Functional side of Literacy”: What is Useful Now
The Selber article, “Reimagining the Functional side of Literacy,” demonstrates a history of a) thinking of “computer literacy” as the purview of rhet/comp, and b) arguing for the teaching of the affordances of specific digital platforms and programs. Although Selber’s definition of “functional literacy” carefully focuses on individuals’ capabilities and needs (assuming a need to function independently within computer discourses users immerse themselves in), as opposed to some objective set of “skills” an outsider or outside group deems “necessary” to qualify as “literate.”
Notes from Feenburg’s “Critical Theory of Technology: An Overview”
Key passages and thoughts on them:
Feenburg’s “instrumentalization theory”:
(47) “To judge an action as more or less efficient is already to have determined it to be tech- nical and therefore an appropriate object of such a judgment.”