Electracy & Connected Ways of Knowing
Walter J. Ong is most well known for his work on Orality and Literacy wherein he describes the shifts in how we manage knowledge and social interaction during different language apparatuses. He explains how literacy didn't necessarily replace orality, but it did shift it; thereby creating new spaces for meaning-making, language, and social interaction.
With the dependence and lifestyles inherent with the proliferation of electronic media, Gregory L. Ulmer named a new apparatus for the digital age. Ulmer has named this epochal shift "electracy" and describes it as "already buzzing all around us." Electracy operates as a networked, multivocal, traced, and participatory apparatus. Building on Ulmer's work, Sarah J. Arroyo (who also uses Wix) applies electracy to the classroom and describes the need for "participatory composition." She calls for a "post-post-pedagogy" where:
"any pedagogical situation should be considered as a scene for inventions to come into appearance by creating the conditions for participation, We relinquish the discourse of mastery. We place value on the aspect of chance and emerging networks. We access a choric space for understanding." (Arroyo, pg. 111)
I believe that Wix offers this space for participatory composition and learning. Students are able to comment on each other's blog posts, works-in-progress, research, and to offer ways to design their site along the way. We often workshop our pieces in class in order to get another reader's eye on both content as well as design. Wix also provides this space for choric invention. Students revel in the chaotic messiness of learning how to set up a digital piece, but they learn more from learning-on-the-go than following step-by-step directions.
Wix also shifts my position as a teacher and I begin to operate in the post-post-pedagogy world that Arroyo describes. It's not that the teacher has become obsolete or unnecessary, but that I become a co-producer of knowledge, a coach, and a guide. I work with my students through all of their projects and I model my pedagogy by using Wix for my work as much as possible.
Arroyo, Sarah J. Participatory Composition: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. Print.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy:The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York: Longman, 2003. Web.