I'm really glad Mike posed this question for us since it is a basic question that must be answered by those of us who are responsible for helping WAC faculty integrate instructional technologies into their classes. It's also a fundamental question that WAC program administrators must confront when they working with their institution's computer centers to develop the technological infrastructure which will support their programs. It's a technological sine qua non – you've got to deal with it.
Unfortunately, this issue was a problem for my school because trying to come up with a programmatic, one-size-fits-all answer put me in a really awkward and ironic position. Indeed, I'm afraid I am still in that position because I can't say that a teacher should always have a completely open site or a closed one. There are compelling arguments on both sides.
Force Students to Publish
One of the reasons we distinguish the classroom learning environment from the "school of hard knocks" is because most of us try to make our classrooms into places where our students can feel safer about taking risks in their writing. Many of us use scenarios or cases that attempt to simulate the rhetorical demands of writing for the "real world" but which still avoid the devastating consequences that a rhetorical gaff on the job might have. In this way, we try to give students the space to risk experimentation.
Forcing students to publish their writing on an open, publicly accessible website can work against that goal because it reintroduces "real world" risks into the writing classroom. It also takes away our students' rights to decide how their work will be published. As faculty, how would we feel if the dean or the provost forced us to publish an article that we didn't feel was ready for prime time? Do we have the moral or, for that matter, the legal right to force students to publish their work? As authors, we have to sign consent forms before our articles get published in a journal; aren't we obligated to give our students the same rights and protections?
Plagiarism
I don't have the statistical evidence to support it, but I doubt that anyone would dispute that plagiarism is becoming a more serious problem than ever before because of the availability of downloadable papers on the web. Sites like schoolsucks.com are getting so much press that many institutions are cracking down to the point that they're not only going after the students who download the papers, they're also prosecuting the authors of the papers for their complicity in the plagiarism. And therein lies the problem because when our students' papers are available on open websites, there are plenty of webcrawler engines, frat-file collectors, and other disreputable sorts who are anxious to copy our students' papers and make them available for plagiarism. Thus, are we putting our students at risk of being prosecuted for plagiarism by failing to limit access to class websites? And are we failing our professional obligation to colleagues at other institutions by making it easier for students in their classes to plagiarize?
Colleagues Snooping and Cyberstalking
Our students are not only placed at risk when we leave our class websites open, but faculty also place themselves at risk. As Joseph Janangelo pointed out in his 1991 article "Technopower and Technoppression," faculty who leave their networked classrooms open to other faculty can become the unwitting victims of vicious interdepartmental politics. Janangelo tells the chilling story of a teacher whose so-called "colleagues" accessed her class computer files in order to collect evidence that they hoped would lead to her dismissal (53-54). Are we serving our own best interests by failing to consider the potential impact of giving personnel committees or ill-intentioned faculty unrestricted access to our class materials and online interactions? And as I have discussed elsewhere, are we serving our students' best interests when we don't take the simple precautions necessary to keep cyberstalkers from sexually harassing them (Howard, 1996, 54)? Who is at fault when our students' photos, email addresses, and/or personal narratives end up on sites like "Babes of the Web?"
Digitizing Faculty
Most of faculty work hard on their syllabi, reading lists, writing assignments, etc. Most of us are as proud of this work as we are of the conference presentations, articles, and book chapters we write. Indeed, I suspect that most of us feel that the research, scholarship, and professional expertise needed to produce our syllabi and course materials warrants the same kind of professional credit lavished on someone's publication record. So if this is a given, I have colleagues who ask why we don't take the same care with our syllabi, lecture notes, PowerPoint slides, and other course materials that we do with our pre-press publications? And they do have a point. After all, without a commitment from a book publisher, how many of us would publish our latest book prospectus on an open website?
I realize this is an extremely mercenary and politically unpopular perspective to voice, but given the peculiar "economy" of tenure and promotion at colleges and universities today, I think my colleagues are right to at least ask the question: Are we serving our individual career interests if we make it possible for others to reproduce our work without giving us some recognition that will count toward tenure and promotion? Or from a program administrator's perspective, should we be concerned about attracting students to our programs and institutions if there's no longer a need for them to come? Are open classroom websites the educational equivalent of Napster?
Yet, even some of us find this analogy a bit farfetched and feel that the benefits of an open site outweigh the risks, isn't the more important question whether colleagues who do feel this way will refuse to integrate technologies into their pedagogies if they are forced to use an open website? If they fear that "digitizing" their work is a potential job killer, and if they feel they need the protection of an authenticated webserver, then shouldn't we respect that view?
Real Audiences and Service Learning Projects
I started off this response to Mike's question by saying that trying to address the question put me in an awkward and ironic position. This irony is most clear to me when I juxtapose the arguments about "forcing students to publish" that I discussed above with the pedagogical benefits of writing for real audiences and participating in service learning projects. Like Charles, I want my students to write for real, public audiences on the web so they will face "squarely the interesting audience and privacy issues that come with this new writing space." Indeed, what first attracted me to the web as a teacher was its potential to help me teach students that writing is, above all, a consequential act of communication.
While it is true that there are times when teachers need to protect our students from the consequences of their writing in order to encourage them to experiment and grow, it is also the case that protecting them from the risks of publication means that we also deny them the benefits of publishing. By preventing students from writing for open websites, we keep them from experiencing the intense satisfaction of knowing that they made a contribution that might have changed someone's life. Disallowing open websites means that we prevent students from experiencing the very exigencies that motivate writing in the first place. Students working on a health communication website, for example, learn what it really means to help disadvantaged children learn about proper nutrition. They learn that the dry, abstract content they covered in their nursing courses really does matter beyond the final exam. They learn about adapting that content to the needs of their clients and their audiences. But more importantly, they have the opportunity to experience the payback that comes from seeing the site go live and knowing that something they wrote met an unfulfilled need. They learn that writing matters to somebody besides the teacher, that writing has consequence.
As a teacher, I can pretend to read students' writing the way I think a real audience would read it, and I can pretend to have the responses that I think the audience will have. But students always know that I'm pretending and that I'm playing a role just as they are. Thus, I never truly have the credibility needed to drive home the lessons I want students to learn. These are lessons that are almost impossible to fake – and they require that teachers have access to open websites.
Learning Communities
In her article "Webbing the Universe of Science Fiction," Elisa Sparks describes the process she has gone through in having her students create a web database of science fiction literature. She writes:
To my surprise and delight, this experiment with introducing computers into my course actually transformed my classrooms in ways I never expected or intended. It decentered the learning experience so that the focus was no longer on the podium at the front of the room. Now, learning spread out to the desktops students worked at in the lab or at home and even to the point of engagement with a whole world of other people pursing passions and doing research on the Internet. The class became a collaborative workshop, and learning became active rather than receptive. The students produced work for themselves and their audience on the Web and only incidentally for me. (94-5)
Elisa goes on in her article to describe how her Science Fiction Literature website (http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/sfindex.html) evolved into an international learning community – something similar to Michael's "living database."
Introducing students to these learning communities on the Internet is one of the ways to achieve the goals Christine outlined in her "Citizen-Scholar" program. It encourages students to become the "life-long learners" who have the skills necessary to effect change and contribute substantively as members of a participatory democracy. Denying students access to open websites mitigates against these goals. The arguments here are analogous to the 19th-Century argument that women needed to be protected because they were the "fairer, weaker sex." And just as that argument was used to deny women the right to vote, it could be argued that protecting students from the dangers of open websites is an excuse to disempower and control them.
So where do I stand in relation to the continuum represented by password-protected class Web sites and completely open sites given that I acknowledge the validity of the arguments on both sides? I guess I would try to escape the two "horns" of the dilemma by introducing a third position. I believe that the network infrastructure WAC programs build to support this kind of instruction should be flexible enough to allow the teacher to decide whether his or her webbed course will be open or not, and the teacher's decision should be contingent on the pedagogical goals behind the website. If the teacher is trying to help students learn about writing for real audiences, about entering learning communities, and about writing as an act of social consequence, then that teacher should have the ability to use a publicly-accessible web server. However, if the teacher's goal is to create a safe learning environment where students have the protection they need to experiment and create, then that teacher should have access to a password-protected web server.
Of course, some people will see this as an expensive cop-out. After all, having to support both types of web servers makes the computer support staff's job more difficult and complex. They certainly brought pressure on our program and tried to force us to choose one simple, centralized approach. However, the technology shouldn't get in the way of teachers' pedagogical goals; it must always be subordinated to them. When technology isn't a matter of choice for a teacher, when it doesn't support what we do and doesn't provide some measure of success, then teachers will abandon it like rats leaving a sinking ship. All the money invested in the technology and the jobs that are created to support that technology will be wasted if teachers don't use it. So even though supporting both ends of the continuum might be more expensive in the short term, the long-term and more pragmatic view is to accept the dilemma and leave the choice to the individual teachers.
Howard, Tharon (1996). "Mapping the Minefield of Electronic Ethics." The Nearness of You. Eds. Christopher Edgar and Susan Wood. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative. 48-68.
Janangelo, Joseph (1991). "Technopower and Technoppression." Computers and Composition 9.1, 45-64.
Sparks, Elisa (1999). "Webbing the Universe of Science Fiction." Electronic Networks: Crossing Boundaries/Creating Communities. Eds. Tharon Howard and Chris Benson. New York: Boyton/Cook. 94-111.
– Tharon Howard
tharon@hubcap.clemson.edu