Twenty-two UAT students in Ellen Wolterbeek’s English 102 classes recently participated in the National Council of Teacher’s of English’s Literacy Map Project. Initially, the students were asked to map Arizona or Tempe but – in typical UAT style – the students decided they wanted to do something entirely different. Rather than select a tangible location with physical addresses and bricks and mortar buildings, they wanted to map the Internet as a virtual place and focus on literacy in a far more broad sense. They created a map that addresses the use of the “new literacies” that go beyond the traditional sense of reading and writing into the multi-modal knowledge and skills needed to thrive in an increasingly techno-driven world.

The students’ first step for the project was to draw their map in class, but soon they became far more focused on the content that would go into the map rather than the map itself. Some of the students wrote essays or short stories, while others created websites and used other alternative media to illustrate the literacies associated with the Internet.