Teaching Writing in the Cloud: Networked Writing Communities in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classrooms

Our knowledge is constantly shifting from analog to digital literacies, industrial to information societies, paper to screen literacies, and mono-modal to multimodal literacies, for which digital technology has become a disruptive force. Whether we realize or not, we are invariably encountering digital technologies and are embracing such knowledge shift/epistemic shift in business, science, education, and engineering alike. This epistemic shift demonstrates that digital literacy has become an inescapable element in the twenty-first century’s networked communities. Based on the epistemic transformation, this article discusses potentials of teaching writing in the cloud, such as how instructors can welcome this epistemic shift in the writing classes; how instructors can engage students in cloud environment; how students can share a complex set of linguistic and cultural narratives; and how students can collaborate and cooperate to create their realities in the context of the networked first-year composition classrooms.