"Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Douglas Eyman"

Download PDF

About the Interviewee

Douglas Eyman is Associate Professor of English and the Director of graduate
programs in Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
His latest books are Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice and Play/Write:
Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games. Dr. Eyman is also the senior editor and
publisher of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, one of the longest running, continuously published digital scholarly journals in the world.

About the Interviewer

Elizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing. 

Contents

Digital Rhetoric: Expanding Definitions

The Human in the Machine

Digital Rhetoric In the Classroom

Sustainability in the Digital Realm

Authorship & Audience in A Digital Age

Future Work: A Theory of Digital Rhetoric

Xchanges: You are a digital scholar, a professor of classical, contemporary, and digital rhetoric, a web author, and a digital publisher. In your book, you discuss the necessary prerequisite of digital literacy to the more complicated understanding and study of digital rhetoric.

What do you see as our obligations to students in the 21^st century in terms of teaching communication and composition skills and understanding? What place does digital rhetoric have in the college composition classroom today?

DE: I think we're seeing a large rise in teaching digital literacy practices to students starting in elementary and middle schools, teaching kids programming, teaching kids about algorithms, teaching kids about digital literacy practices. We don't see this yet hitting us at the college level. But in the next five to seven years, as soon as these children are in first-year writing classes, we will see college students who are much better versed in using software but not always with a critical understanding of how the technology works. Sure, students can use cell phones to do all sorts of amazing things, but they don't always think through why they should or should not do those things or what data is being collected about them as they do those things, and why that is even a problem. We're definitely seeing a willingness to share personal lives and personal details from younger students in ways that we had not seen before. That's really fascinating and also frightening stuff. This is also something that we're paying attention to in the realm of digital rhetoric.

[video:youtube:v-yW-bfkFWg]

When I teach composition, I teach some critical digital literacies, but I don't make it a central focus. I'm starting to rethink how that might operate. I really like the work of folks who are doing multimodal composition, but even those aren't always focusing on digital literacy practices. When I'm talking about literacy practices, I'm thinking about basic functional literacy like how to use the thing, but then you also have to develop these critical literacies or the hows-and-whys and the moral imperatives and the ethics. These things all need to be layered in. You can't just teach how to use Excel. We have to understand how and why you would use it, and we have to understand what it's good for and how you can use and misuse it.

Thinking about this kind of focus on literacy too, thinking about how we have to understand digital literacies as we continue thinking about teaching writing, I highly recommend Annette Vee's book, Coding Literacy: How Programming is Changing Writing (https://books.google.com/books/about/Coding_Literacy.html?id=YXQsDwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description) She's done an amazing in-depth analysis.