Hi! I'm not in your class, but I understand your confusion and wanted to leave a quick comment. As I started reading your entry (and following the same double-take you experienced), I took "post-literate" to indicate an age in which electronic mediation has taken us away from print--the primary site of literacy.

But what's wonderful about the weblog for me as a teacher is that it uses one technology to draw students away from the non-literate technologies, e.g. television (bracketing for the moment that one may certainly be literate or not in this medium).

I agree with you--computers as we are actually using them are machines of uber-literacy. We read the internet. We watch it. We listen to it. And, to make it work for ourselves (however we define that rhetorically), we write it.

Perhaps Brooks, Nichols, and Priebe's thinking is along the lines of Jeff Rice's (from this post, titled "Theories I Don't Believe In"):

# Literacy: It's not that I don't believe it ever was a useful way of understanding how individuals use and create information, I just don't believe it exists anymore. Technology has altered literacy to something else (we hear new media, electracy, e-literacies...what's in a name? It ain’t literacy). Harvey Graff did a good job exposing the literacy myth in terms of its economic pay off, but even still, the literacy narrative has become a conventional trope in composition studies. Mike Rose may it popular, but others, even in technology-oriented studies, continue to believe that the individual’s work with a computer is what determines some variant of (digital) literacy. People are not empowered only by learning a tool. What we have understood as literacy is more than the ability to learn how to make information because I can write or read. What we call literacy is built in the infrastructure, the apparatus. The infrastructure has changed so much since the end of the Second World War, that literacy narratives don't explain much anymore (and neither do "sponsors" of literacy").

I don't want to speak for Brooks, Nichols, and Priebe; I just thought you might find Rice's take insightful. He's criticized the idea of literacy a lot: here, here, and here, and in other posts. Search his blog for "literacy" if you want the whole corpus.

You’ve just articulated (indirectly) a major professional frustration of mine. It has to do with how the “act” of writing is perceived by the professions, and how this perception compromises our ability to impress writing theory across disciplines (disciplines that serve these professions). I’m thinking specifically about engineering and education (funky coupling, eh?), but I’ll save that for some other time.

Two particular excerpts in the “Why Weblogs” article that dovetail with some of your comments. First, from the Kairos excerpt:

To them [students], the Internet and other forms of electronic discourse were not associated with their concept of "reading and writing" in the school sort of way. I imagine that this difference might be because one is "fun" and the other is "work." But regardless, I've come to feel that reading and writing the Web is a way for me to tap into a writing space that students already use--and more importantly, want to use.

Your point precisely! So why is so difficult to get students and professionals to understand that writing is invasive – it (arguably) the most critical activity they will perform in their academic and professional lives. Is it a matter of scale?

The second excerpt I found interesting came from Peter Ford:

Information and communication technology (ICT) prepares pupils to participate in a rapidly changing world in which work and other activities are increasingly transformed by access to varied and developing technology. Pupils use ICT tools to find, explore, analyse, exchange and present information responsibly, creatively and with discrimination. They learn how to employ ICT to enable rapid access to ideas and experiences from a wide range of people, communities and cultures. Increased capability in the use of ICT promotes initiative and independent learning, with pupils being able to make informed judgments about when and where to use ICT to best effect, and to consider its implications for home and work both now and in the future.

This comment reads like the kind of crap I have to write in white papers. Notice how the words “writing” or “write” or even “compose” or “author” appear no where in this guys lucid commentary. This, I think, is why the act of writing is so difficult to position and discussion in non-academic contexts. Who authors or puts to ether all of this information that will transform the way students rapidly create and learn while breaking down all of the traditional barriers?

Keep fighting the good fight T!