This communication is the result of an ethnographic research about a digital device created by a French publishing house to make pupils and students write, read and print short stories: the “Cub’Edito”. I count this device as an action apparatus (Barrère, 2013), a tool made to support selected cultural practices.
Objectives
The analysis of such an apparatus by studying how it is used by teachers and students is one way to question links between written culture and information literacy in a digital era. I am trying to critique “digital dualism” (Gourlay, et al., 2015) and demonstrate that there is a practice’s and skill’s continuity between written culture and digital culture. I seek to show that digital devices are both communication and documentation machineries. Digital information literacy could be regarded as a reconfiguration and amplification of written literacy because digital devices are textualization devices (Després-Lonnet & Cotte, 2007), technologies to make, share and record documents.
Methodology
Analysis of the digital device and pupils’ works employed a semiotic approach. I observed training sessions, pedagogical projects with pupils, and evaluation meetings concerning those projects and this apparatus. Semi-structured interviews with teachers, librarians, and teenagers’ focus groups were also conducted.
Outcomes
Uses of Cub’Édito appears like a way to practice and understand computers and Internet as document technologies. The Cub’Edito interfaces set ways to access, read and publish texts: it depicts text’s visibility and readability at a digital era. This device re-enacts written culture (digital or not) by introducing terminology and injunctions about literary genres, collections, authors, indexation, editing, approval and print processes. Moreover, most of the observed pedagogical projects play with textual materialities and genres by relying on the device’s platicity. Thus, they participate in the covenant between a long-term written culture and digital textual practices and norms. They show the cultural and skills’ continuity between writing and reading, the cultural poaching (De Certeau, 1990) between ordinary written culture and school written culture, and between literacy, information literacy and digital literacy. I count this device, its uses and its escort discourses as an apparatus (Foucault, 2001) to regulate writing and reading practices.
References
- Barrère, A. (2013). Les établissements scolaires à l’heure des «dispositifs». Carrefours de l’éducation, 36, 9–13.
- De Certeau, M. (1990). L’invention du quotidien: 1. arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard.
- Després-Lonnet, M., & Cotte D. (2007). La sémiotisation d’une pratique professionnelle. L’activité de montage numérique dans l’audiovisuel. In C. Tardy, & Y. Jeanneret (Ed.), L’écriture des médias informatisés: espaces de pratiques. Paris: Hermès science.
- Foucault, M. (2001). Le jeu de Michel Foucault. In Dits et écrits II (pp. 298–329). Paris: Gallimard.
- Gourlay, L., Lanclos, D. M., & Oliver, M. (2015). Sociomaterial texts, spaces and devices: Questionning “digital dualism” in Library and Study Practices. Higher Education Quaterly, 3, 263–278.
Béatrice Micheau
GERiiCO, Université de Lille, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France
English 
French