Indiana University of Pennsylvania Campus Visit

Digital Literacy and Technology (C&T) Candidate Matthew Vetter

Thank you for inviting me to the campus visit stage of your search. I am excited to be a candidate for the Assistant Professor position in Digital Literacy & Technology. I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University Zanesville and a section editor at K airos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy. As a scholar in digital rhetorics and humanities, I am primarily interested in the ways that technologies shape writing and writing pedagogy. I am drawn toward investigations of the the ideological and epistemological functions of specific (communicative) technologies and communities and the possibilities for human intervention and praxis within those technologies and communities. This page provides resources and additional materials to help you learn more about my qualifications and to support my scholarly presentation (job talk) during the campus visit. If you have additional questions for me, write to vetter@ohio.edu.

Download Campus Visit Flyer

Scholarly Presentation (Job Talk)

Wikipedia writing projects provide accessible opportunities for teaching procedural, social, and rhetorical writing knowledge, and for practicing specific skills related to research and digital literacy, all while working to improve a public knowledge resource. In this talk, I review some of my early research to explain how teaching with Wikipedia can help students understand and practice writing, and discuss how this approach might be understood from a service learning or community-engagement model. I then problematize this model by asserting the need for a writing pedagogy that moves beyond engagement, towards reflective action. Description of a specific case study detailing a learning project to remediate Wikipedia’s gender gap helps to articulate the need for a pedagogy that allows for what I call critical digital praxis. Following Freire’s notion of praxis as “reflection and action directed at the structures to be reformed,” I define critical digital praxis as a mode of action for teaching and scholarship that allows for writing interventions in public digital cultures in order to both better understand the writing activities of those cultures and make meaningful impressions with/in them. The talk concludes with speculation about future directions and questions for this research.