Digital Literacies for Human Connection: 25 Ways to Engage Students in People-Centered Digital Practices

Welcome to Digital Literacies for Human Connection, an abundantly useful cornucopia of activities and assignments you can try in your classroom, paired with clear and critical concepts that inspire those activities.

This book is full of practical suggestions and approaches for writing and literacy instructors. Each chapter focuses on an element of digital literacy and a specific classroom activity to deepen students' understanding of it. The concepts—which address generative AI, social media, and other emerging technologies—can be taught alongside the activities to help students critically reflect on technologies in meaningful and engaging ways.

Scholars have long argued for more explicit digital instruction in writing courses. This book takes those calls to action as inspiration for pedagogical ideas that instructors can implement. Whether you're new to writing and/or digital literacies instruction, or highly experienced in both, this resource will help you deepen the human side of your digital literacies teaching practices.

David T. Coad is an assistant teaching professor at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, California. As coeditor of Dynamic Activities for First-Year Composition, he has explored first-year composition and active learning pedagogies deeply. Even before his PhD work at UC Davis, digital approaches to teaching and learning were a deep part of his pedagogy and research interests. He has published his work in Kairos, Computers and Composition, and the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and serves as editor of the Writing Spaces Activities and Assignments section.

Amber M. Buck is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama, the coordinator for the Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies (CRES) program at Alabama, and a senior editor at Computers and Composition Digital Press. Her book, Writing on the Social Network: Digital Literacy Practices in the First Decade of Social Media, was published in 2023.

Anuj Gupta is an assistant professor in rhetoric and composition at the University of South Florida’s Department of English, where he researches, teaches, and designs digital writing technologies to make tools like generative AI more usable and human-centered. His contributions have earned him the CWPA’s Kenneth Bruffee Award, AAC&U’s K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award, and Kairos’s Graduate Student Research Award. Gupta’s work has been published in Computers and Composition, IEEE Proceedings, Composition Forum, Composition Studies, and the WPA journal (among others). Previously, he helped build one of India’s first college-level writing programs at Ashoka University.

Rich Shivener is an associate professor in the writing department at York University. Drawing from his background as a multimedia journalist and technical writer, his research and teaching combine industry experience with academic inquiry. He served as an editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (2016–2024). His writing has appeared in several edited collections and journals, including Communication Design Quarterly, Written Communication, Computers and Composition, and College English.