ABSTRACT
This chapter is a critical discussion and approach to understanding agency in computer-mediated education. When students use computers to learn, they are simultaneously involved with various complicated processes of identity work (Luke & Luke, 2001). This identity work may be understood through the multiliteracies educational framework that has given us the notion of design as a central manner of organizing agency in learning (New London Group, 1996). However, the problem that this chapter grapples with is the socio-cultural consequences of understanding the agency of computers in education. The notion of design in multiliteracies must incorporate the formal and non-formal learning opportunities that computers facilitate (Street, 2000)—even though the “multimodality” of design when applied to contemporary text does give it emergent and multiple qualities that do go some way to account for the situation. The introduction of identity work through agency is the reason that curriculum designers and bureaucratic structures of educational systems may struggle with the non-linear and chaotic options that computer learning opens up (Cole, 2005a). To take account of the new ways in which social networks and technologically mediated desires and drives may be activated through computer use, the multiliteracies framework should be expanded to include connections to elements such as cyberpunk (Cole, 2005c)1 and techno-tribalism. The former is an imaginary and literary manner of designating agency in a digitally mediated environment. The latter is a sociological platform whereby the movement of digitally mediated approaches to social organization may be understood as emergent properties that are being activated through education. The combination of cyberpunk and technotribalism as additive aspects to the multiliteracies framework-and with the explicit intent of exploring questions of agency-does take the educational package of multiliteracies into a new dimension. This move assumes that multiliteracies is flexible and open enough in order to absorb divergent throughlines present in any sociological context of education that are also saturated and transformed by digital technology. The organization of this chapter may by represented through Figure 6.1.
