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Global Literacy Practices? Cultural Perspectives on the World Wide Web

Cynthia L. Selfe
Michigan Technological University

Abstract

The past five years have seen enormous and far-reaching changes in the way literature, writing, and the modern languages are taught in computer-enhanced communication environments. Increasingly, we depend on the World Wide Web as a global literacy system, a technology-rich environment within which articles, documents, words and images are distributed by authors, read and received by end-users, and acted upon by individuals in universities, corporations, schools, government settings, different cultural contexts, and the public sphere.

Unfortunately, only very limited work has examined specific literacy practices on the Web. Little or no work has been done to identify culturally-determined literacy practices that constitute the Web as a communication environment. Nor have scholars systematically tested the claims that the Web forms a "global literacy environment" in which students from all over the world communicate with one another without being affected by the significant barriers posed by geopolitical location, language, culture, and everyday social practices.

Recently, for example, on American electronic discussion groups literacy instructors have documented the international connections they and students have been able to make via the Internet: a literacy teacher from west Arkansas connecting her first-year literature class with an English class in Irkutsk; a graduate student in Hawaii linking her writing class to an information technology class at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan; and a teacher in Switzerland connecting her students with high school students in Kamloops, British Columbia, and Eudora Junior High in the USA.

Like all stories, however, these stories are partial, incomplete representations of the Internet and our participation on it. A closer examination of international connections requires that we scrutinize more carefully how global our connections on the Internet really are. A closer examination reveals that there is a huge part of the world that the Internet is not touching-or at least that scholars' stories of Web connections are not bringing into our field of vision.

Dr. Gail Hawisher will begin this session by exploring the possibilities that global electronic connections offer us as scholars and teachers of the modern languages. In doing so, she will report on how colleagues from throughout the world use international connections for their teaching and their professional lives. She will document how different cultural groups represent themselves on the Web and how they shape it for their own purposes. Dr. Hawisher will also set forth a series of cautions regarding this new electronic neighborhood, cautions that argue for scholar-teachers' increased activity in the international politics of the Internet and the Web. Without such participation, she argues, there is a good chance that others may create for us a global neighborhood that suits neither our students, ourselves, nor our international colleagues.

Dr. Cynthia L. Selfe will continue the session by discussing a series of culturally-specific examinations of web literacy practices that she and Hawisher have been in the process of collecting from authors around the world. Among the projects that Selfe will describe are an exploration of the political, educational, and gendered contexts that characterize Norwegian world-wide-web literacies (Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik), a study of web efforts to establish a more active, global political identity for Palauans (Karla Kitalong and Tino Kitalong), an examination of the Web as a site for the political practices of indigenous groups in Australia (Ilana Snyder and Cathryn McConaghy), an investigation of web literacy practices among African Americans and Black South Africans (Elaine Richardson and Sean Lewis), and a discussion of Web use in Scotland in support of the recent Home Rule discussions (Sarah Sloane).