Questions for 2/10

Cooper suggests that we "pay attention to [the] digital literacies" of our students. Through awareness of students' backgrounds and past involvement in digital literacy, we should be able to design better methods, activities, etc in the classroom. If such a practice is recommended for a writing class, (I'm not sure Cooper identifies the immediate context), what do we ignore or neflect by focusing so much attention on our students' histories with technology? Are we able to focus on their alphabetic literacy histories as well?