Selber and the Practitioner

One of the things that I appreciate about Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age is that he has the practitioner in mind throughout the text, referencing several times how he himself has applied notions of functional, critical, and rhetorical literacy to technology within the classroom, but I wonder if parts of the text are just another example of “lore” being passed off as research. Granted, Selber points out several times and in various contexts that he wants teachers to view his suggestions “...as an imperfect heuristic rather than as a rigid prescription for action” (183), so perhaps it is a rather moot and arbitrary point I’m trying to put forth (since the majority of the treatise is really attempting to contextualize how the approaches of written and oral communication – i.e. literacy – also apply to digital mediums). Nevertheless, I can’t help but think of how I might utilize some of Selber’s approaches in my ENG 103 classrooms, though (as Nikki mentioned in her post) I feel as though what Selber describes is somewhat ambitious, if not unrealistic (and I doubt the examples he provides occurred in a freshmen composition classroom). It’s hard enough to get freshmen to question, well, anything, let alone the political implications of interface design, yet I understand (and value) why such problem-posing questions are pedagogically necessary.