Private Literacies, Popular Culture, and Going Public: Teachers and Students as Authors of the Electronic Portfolio  

In The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, Richard Lanham suggests that perhaps those most resistant to the 'digital revolution' are members of English departments, those who are often divided between what does and what does not constitute a text. Often at the heart of this debate is the privileging of one literacy paradigm, that of print, and the marginalizing of another, primarily that devoted to the production of electronic discourse. To further complicate the issue, even when we do recognize electronic models of literacy, we tend to shape our experience, as Johnson-Eilola has so eloquently pointed out, through our nostalgia for earlier models of literacy, again, those focused on print and the printed page. It is no doubt important to teach students the ways in which rhetorical and literary texts are produced, distributed, and consumed; however, it is equally important for teachers of writing, primarily members of English departments, to acknowledge the production and consumption processes of texts external to the genres of the academy and to recognize that the essay is a printed form that admittedly for our students has little use outside the academy.

Wilferth, Joe. Kairos (2002). Academic>Portfolios>Writing