Michelle Trim, a lecturer in the Department of English, gave the presentation, "Resisting Automatic Adoption and Uncritical Use of Technology in Student Research," at this past weekend's Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy in Savannah, Ga.
This presentation synthesized scholarship with references to a CATL funded focus group study to argue that educators have a responsibility to resist enacting a “rhetoric of inevitability” (Nardi and O’Day 2000) where the use of new electronic technologies are concerned.
In particular, Trim urged writing teachers to adopt a critical theory of technology, especially towards those technologies involved in promoting and teaching information literacy. She shared two assignments used in English 110 that are based on this concept.