The first section's motion prepares us--metaphorically and intellectually--for
the second section, "Literacy Shifts," which positions the reader to think
more critically about contemporary changes in and challenges to literacy
that have been prompted by emerging communication technologies. And,
as such, the articles in this section may be a bit more directly useful
to teachers, such as . . .
- David Downing and James Sosnoski on the "rhetoric required for both talking and thinking about literacy in the electronic environment" (97),
- Terry Harpold on the "tendency" of electronic texts to "disappear," and
- Michael Joyce on "new habits of interacting with text" (98).
Indeed, Joyce’s article is particularly intriguing in its meditation, albeit brief, on how the "heterogeneity of our materials and practices suffuses us in music and conversation, breath and weave" (162). For Joyce, as well as for the other writers in this section, the new electronic environments underscore text and literacy as motion themselves--as interweavings of multiple materials, varied practices, numerous conversations. The underscore, the highlight, the emBOLDening offered by these technologies gesture to the ways in which we can bring a more complex understanding of literacy to our students through their/our movement through/in/within/without electronic texts--in their (and our) various emergences and disappearances. Yes, the thinking seems overly theoretical, but Joyce picks up on the metaphor of movement, a metaphor that will carry itself with greater force as the collection proceeds.