Teaching Web Literacy: A New Responsibility

Kajder’s Chapter 5 on navigating the web while doing research was the first of the articles of the course so far that didn’t by its subject urge me right away to think about how I teach my own classes, since I’ve never really asked students to do serious research on the web. I’ve never assigned a research paper in fact. (Sophomore English students do research when writing their essays for the persuasive speech unit, but freshman teachers aren’t encumbered with this job.) Lately, with WebQuests, I’ve been thinking about using the web for guided research, but the guided nature of the activity presumes of course that students aren’t going to asked to dive in on their own. So one question that has come up is, Should I be requiring some level of web research in my course, to strengthen students’ web resourcefulness and savvy, or should I let this area of scholarship be left to the history department (and sophomore English teachers), which yearly requires students to write research papers. (Now whether all history teachers require, or allow, web research, I don’t know, but I am sure that at least one of my colleagues has gone far enough as to disallow public web research for history papers precisely because he has found the sources’ credibility so unpredictable.) But the Kinzer and McEneaney articles suggest that the English teacher’s role in developing web literacy has less to do with skill in pursuing research needs and more to do with the evolving nature of reading itself.

It’s the responsibility for teaching this new shape of literacy that I accept as an English teacher, even if, to be frank, I don’t yet understand its distinction from normal literacy. When I’ve had trouble steering my way through, say, Hamlet websites, and found myself lost after three or four links away from the original site, or when I had known that when I stayed with the best Catcher in the Rye site after several hits, I was only stopping at the first adequate one—I just assumed that this was a reflection of lack of speed or skill and not a fundamental problem with reading the web. It takes time, I thought—I’ll get it. But there are tricks and skills of course to getting what you need more quickly—from, as Kajder’s article shows, choosing the right search engines and the best keywords to finding articles on the Deep Web—that I am beginning to see as a valuable area of study for the English classroom.

One very interesting thing that comes from the McEneany article is the presentation of various ways of reading the same article. Unfortunately, my browser did not let me see the “path” version of the article, but I could clearly envision the difference between viewing an article as a path and working one’s way through the hypertext, which is still a very confusing process for me. The hypertext method of reading still seems to be a scattered and difficult—personalized, yes—means of working through an established idea that courses through an essay or presentation. My old-fashioned preference is still for the hard-copy word document version, although, for the McEneany article, I settled for the Adobe version as a gesture to saving paper.

So where does this put me as classes begin in the fall? I think assigning some sort of small research project, either on authors or on themes related to the works studied, seems a good place to begin embracing this new teaching role. In addition, I would like to look at the availability of literary criticism on the web, not only from JSTOR on the Deep Web (which I have not used in the classroom), but from the public web itself to try to collectively distinguish respectable from specious scholarship, which to me seems at the heart of this emerging form of literacy.