Dr. Jim Slevin's "Literacy, Literacy Education, and Social Justice" course asked students how literacy mediates power, and how they, as students, figure in such power schematics based on their relationships to literacy and literature. As a CNDLS Fellow, Prof. Slevin translated the central issues of the course to the world of digital communication. His project posed the question: what can students gain from looking critically at new ways of writing?

A CNDLS fellowship enabled Dr. Slevin to experiment with how basic technology can help students discover their own relationship to writing and revision, and how the medium of delivery affects the content. Exploring various forms of communication from PDAs to the Internet, his students evaluated how they revise in a digitized world. To this end, the class utilized the document compare feature in MS Word to track changes in their successive drafts. This process—as well as collaborative sessions on Blackboard—led Dr. Slevin to discover that the way in which his students revised precisely illustrated the power issues of literacy he'd been trying to uncover.

For an assignment in which students had to evaluate the difference in style between two op-eds on the same race-related issue, the class determined that what student writers deleted from their second drafts amounted to periodic self-censorship. By comparing the two versions of the same document, both professor and students realized their own participation in the power dynamics of racial identity and how the writing process may work to reify those structures. A simple feature of a word-processing program revealed important lessons about how students were thinking during the writing process; in other words, the technology made their thinking visible. The CNDLS fellowship enabled Dr. Slevin (who was also the Director of the Georgetown University Writing Center) the time and resources necessary to critically approach and reflect on writing and technology. He used the exercise repeatedly in both undergraduate and graduate courses, where it functioned as a teaching tool for future teachers of writing.