Every semester, thousands of faculty members create course websites on a learning-management system such as Blackboard or Canvas. Colleges purchase these platforms, which allow professors to post readings, send messages, and facilitate discussions among students. And yet these expensive, proprietary systems are rarely used outside of classrooms. Alternatively, teaching with free, open-source software, including the software upon which many of the world’s websites are actually built, creates a tremendous opportunity for students to develop transferable skills, actively shape their learning, and improve their digital literacy.
In my English classes, these discussions of digital learning spaces begin with an index card. One of my favorite classroom activities is called think-pair-share. It’s simple, and I use it to begin nearly every class. Each student is given an index card; they then have 90 seconds to respond to a prompt and 90 seconds to share their response with a partner. Then we go around the room, and students report back while I transcribe their remarks on a screen. The prompts are open-ended: Describe a transformative moment you experienced in the classroom. Or, What was the most important takeaway from the assigned reading? Students’ answers then become the material through which I teach the course, connecting their responses to key concepts and lessons.
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Think-pair-share works 100 percent of the time because of the material constraints it imposes. An index card is small; the most you can write is several sentences. Students have only 90 seconds, lowering levels of expectation and anxiety. Think-pair-share requires no bandwidth, no laptops, no software, and yet it offers a useful perspective on the technologies that educators incorporate in the classroom. In short, the index card is not neutral; it shapes how and what we write. That is point one of digital literacy.
Blackboard and other proprietary systems have their benefits. Using such systems means that students’ projects will not be visible in search results, which shields their identities and prevents them from publishing work that could otherwise be available to potential employers, internet trolls, or immigration and law-enforcement officials. Using a platform vetted by your college will probably not expose students or faculty members to violations of federal privacy laws. For those prohibited from using alternatives, discussing the advantages and shortcomings of these proprietary platforms can help students increase their digital literacy.
However, many such platforms confine learning within a walled garden that maintains a hierarchical, unilateral relationship between teacher and students and reinforces the classroom’s isolation from the outside world. Using the sheltered, default institutional space means that students aren’t learning to think critically and carefully about how they present their identity online. They aren’t learning to assess the risks and rewards of different tools in order to select the right one for the task they want to achieve. And they certainly aren’t learning how to build websites. Instead, students become trained, through the Blackboard interface, to see the course as a standardized, reproducible, institutional product, rather than a creative project in which they play an active role designing and shaping.
In my experience, digital literacy can best be taught when faculty members are allowed to teach with free, open-source, and customizable content-management systems, including those that allow students to build websites and write for a larger public. While the institutions where I’ve worked have had Blackboard contracts, I have always opted instead to teach with WordPress, because so many websites are built using that software. When I teach students to use WordPress, they are acquiring knowledge they can take into the world and use beyond the classroom. After teaching them to navigate our course website, I then take them into the administrative dashboard of WordPress so they can see how the platform works. Often I allow students to build their own WordPress sites for their final projects.
Through these scaffolded interactions, students learn that, much like an index card, platforms like WordPress structure how we compose, organize, and encounter information.
In addition to making students familiar with a widely used content-management system, I also teach with Hastac, a nonprofit, academic social network and blogging platform that connects student writers to 16,000 network members. Hastac describes itself as “an interdisciplinary community of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and technologists” working to make the world more equitable by improving pedagogy through critical explorations of digital technologies. I currently serve on the steering committee of Hastac, which was founded in 2002 by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg. It has transformed my teaching by providing a digital space for my students to publish their writing.
Unlike many other free digital platforms, Hastac is committed to never sharing users’ data with third parties. It offers a crucial platform for safely reading new perspectives, exchanging writing, and conversing beyond the silos of our classrooms, disciplines, and institutions.
Learning with Hastac allows students to gain experience with writing not only for a professor, but also for an audience beyond the classroom. It helps them understand that they are participants in continuing conversations, and that learning offers an opportunity to contribute to the public and social good.
But we have to be careful in encouraging students to join these conversations: careful because they are capable but still learning, because public writing always entails the risk of exposure, because students have complicated lives that may require the cover of confidentiality, and because digital interactions leave traces everywhere. The risks inherent in public work are real, and in many contexts an instructor may decide that those risks outweigh the benefits. To mitigate the risks, I always give students the option to publish anonymously or with a pseudonym, or to opt out of public writing altogether.
Teaching with WordPress and Hastac creates opportunities for students to think about the implications of the myriad digital platforms that have come to structure so much of our daily lives. We have important conversations about website organization, data, privacy, navigation, user-experience design, accessibility, the differences between proprietary and open-source software, and the potential benefits and risks of learning and writing in public.
If colleges want to make good on their promises to prepare students for the world beyond the classroom, they should invest in alternatives that allow educators to teach digital skills safely and ethically. Like the index card, our course websites are not neutral. They shape how and what we learn.
