"Embracing Digital Literacies: A Study of First-Year Students’ Digital Compositions"

Conclusion: Embracing Digital Literacies

Through listening to students discuss their digital writing practices, I have learned more about the thoughtful and often complex interactions and thought processes students undergo as they publish writings online. These students have shown how digital writing not only involves typing and publishing words on a screen, but also incorporates a host of other aspects such as timing, the use of strategic tagging, choosing the proper medium, utilizing images, and reposting or reusing other’s words in creative ways. Students are also thinking of the life span of their digital compositions – who might see this post years from now and think differently of me because of it? Beaufort’s five part schema allows the digital writings of students to be viewed in terms of writing expertise. Participants’ knowledge of audience, genre, and purpose help them to connect and engage online audiences and to achieve their personal writing goals.

Beaufort (2007) reminds “teachers, administrators, and researchers” to “look at the whole picture – the five knowledge domains in writing expertise – not one part or two when trying to help writers or to assess them” (147). While this study precluded two of Beaufort’s domains, writing process knowledge and subject matter knowledge, the study aims to provide a beginning look at the important things students are already thinking and writing about and the three knowledge domains that are most apparent in the scope of this study. Through analyzing digital compositions of students in this way, teachers can better understand how to bridge self-sponsored and school literacies for students. Digital writing necessitates “sophisticated skills of understanding concrete rhetorical situations, analyzing audiences (and their goals and inclinations), and constructing concise, information-laden texts, as a part of a dynamic, unfolding, social process” (Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2009, p. 18). Understanding students’ daily navigation of such complex writing situations can only serve to strengthen composition classrooms and provide a foundation where students can practice and gain an increased ability to apply these writing strategies to new writing situations.