ABSTRACT
Some contemporary literacy educators might be startled if they were to walk into one of the hundreds of university, college, and high school classrooms where students learn literacy on-line. They would see a score of students sitting in front of personal computer monitors, their hands alternately perched over keyboards and reaching reflexively for mouses, their fingers flailing away at keyboards in a flourish, pausing intermittently to read off their monitors not only the words they are writing but those of their peers as well. The relative lack of human voices would be underscored by the clackity clack of keys. Although these students might, during certain class meetings anyway, seem mute and silent, they are anything but isolated and alone; they are linked, through their networked computers, into a literate learning community in which more of them will participate in the class’s meaningmaking discourse than they typically would in traditional classrooms, they will contribute to a textual conversation made up of more diversity in voices and perspectives than would be possible in other settings, and they will be more engaged and active learners than they might be in more traditional literacy environments.
