Whereas Week 6 considered the ways in which computer science intersects broader identity categories in producing subject positions, Week 7 considers computation as a medium for literacy and identity practices. We will consider how computation mediates literacy practices at scales ranging from individual cognition to social and cultural processes.

Please read diSessa (2001), ch. 1 and Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998), ch. 2.

Week 7 Slides

Critical Computational Literacies

Dr. Chris Proctor

LAI 686, Spring 2022

Week 7: March 15, 2022

diSessa

social importance of literacy
literacy is infrastructural
material intelligence

Computers can be the technical foundation of a new and dramatically enhanced literacy, which will act in many ways like current literacy and which will have penetration and depth of influence comparable to what we have already experienced in coming to achieve a mass, text- based literacy (p. 4).

Three pillars of literacy

material
cognitive
social

The fact is that calculus has become absolutely infra- structural in the educational process of scientists, engineers, and a broad range of other technical professions (p. 10).

galileo and descartes

Literacy

Holland

views of self and identity
universalist/culturalist
critiques
practice theory of self

Sociohistorical view of self

semiotic mediation
Vygotsky, Bakhtin
activity