ABSTRACT
This chapter exposes interactions of students with each other, the cybercafé staff and others as they go about using computers for accomplishing school projects. It reveals activities that can be perceived as plagiarism as students go about actively cutting and pasting texts and overriding copyright, manipulating information and making it theirs, and disguising ownership through collaborative deception. The critique of 'digital literacy' as confining and reductive of learning processes, and of turning cultural practices of computing into 'compulsory consumption of curricularised and certificated learning', stem from the larger critique of traditional view of literacy as 'autonomous' and inherently 'progressive'. The politics of education sets in as teachers, publishers, government officials, private publishing houses, both local and international, and editors, work together to mass produce textbooks that they deem as necessary. Sophistication in strategizing comes to play as students learn to draw upon the multiple resources available to them, technical, human and socio-cultural and thereby, exercise their authority over the authored.
