What ultimately matters in any writing classroom’s incorporation of
Blackboard is not the visual design or the systemic structure, but rather the
way that this space is really being used by our students. Throughout this essay
we have indicated possible spots of tension between Blackboard’s projected
expectations and students’ actual behavior. In order to turn these tensions to
productive use, we move finally to Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the space
of the city. De Certeau’s city is already connected to issues of writing and
composition, in that he examines this image as it relates to formal language and
its common rhetorical uses. In general, de Certeau’s insistence on an
understanding of the consumer’s actual experience, over and against the
producer’s intentions, seems especially helpful for considering the
student’s interaction with Blackboard. The consumer’s experience is itself a
creative engagement with social structures, so that when we interrogate a
cultural representation, “we must first analyze its manipulation by users who
are not its makers. Only then can we gauge the difference or similarity between
the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in the process
of its utilization” (de Certeau, 1984, p. xiii).
What, then, might be some patterns of secondary production that emerge
when an individual student or an entire class encounters Blackboard? Any
statistics page, viewed at a glance, can tell us something about areas that are
heavily visited and areas that are largely ignored, though as we have suggested,
this information can be misleading insofar as it fails to tell us why our
students went to a certain spot, how they got there, how long they stayed, or
what they did once they arrived. In de Certeau’s (1984) terms, we can identify the
“strategies” of the system but not the “tactics” of the individual
users: strategies are rational, proper, indicative of an external reality, and
thus associated with institutions; tactics are fragmentary, temporary,
localized, and thus connected to the individual “other” (p. xix). In
Blackboard, as in the spaces he discusses, any real user will improvise coping
tactics for creating a personal trajectory through the system. Though they are
vital for understanding how we relate to the system, tactics are ordinarily
invisible.
If we understand Blackboard as a space that is comparable to a city, then
what we are looking for is not a map of that city so much as a story of how a
student moves through it. In other words, to understand someone’s real
relation to any space, we have to inject a sense of time. To focus on the user
of an urban space, de Certeau (1984) turns to the image of walking, which implies an
unpredictable but important narrative: “The long poem of walking manipulates
spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign
to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it
does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities
within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them
(social models, cultural mores, personal factors)….These diverse aspects
provide the basis of a rhetoric” (p. 101).
Blackboard’s organization does take time into account within a given
page or screen, for instance in a file exchange or in a single thread of a
discussion forum, but only in the narrowest sense does this capture the
narrative of an individual using the space. Instead we might find the “shadows
and ambiguities” of the walker in a connection between one day’s discussion
forum and a paragraph in a paper that is being peer reviewed a week later. Since
it does not have a search engine, Blackboard gives us no way to trace or encourage such connections, even if they
constitute some of its more fruitful moments for both students and instructors.
In addition to the missed paths between its own discrete spaces, the
Blackboard system ignores the “multitudinous references,” or the social,
cultural, and personal contexts, that the walker brings to and through the
space. As we have already suggested in our discussion of Blackboard as a space
for dialogue, this omission could constitute a blind spot for the teaching of
composition, and it challenges us to encourage our students to assert their full
individuality.
De Certeau points out that “the place of writing is
‘constantly altered by the inaccessible (t)exterior [hors-texte]
which authorizes that writing’ (quoted in Crang, 2000, p. 143). Blackboard carries with
it the full weight of its own hors-texte,
namely the educational structures that enable it: notions of authority and
hierarchy, assumptions about textuality and originality, drives towards
surveillance and evaluation, all
of which lead to “non-innocent borders” in the map of the computer system (Selfe
& Selfe, 1994, p. 495). Each student brings to that institutional structure
his or her own inaccessible exterior, however, and the combination that results
will impact the student’s ability to write in this space. We would suggest,
then, that students need to feel comfortable with this electronic space, not
only by knowing its obvious monuments and street names, but by finding
shortcuts, personal landmarks, and momentary places to rest and
reflect—looking over a personal calendar, for instance, or using the
electronic blackboard to make some private notes.
Walking through
this virtual cityscape, students are not alone. To the extent that we or our
students activate the topography of Blackboard as we use it individually, we are
also activating that same space collectively as we add to it all semester.
Here de Certeau’s focus on an urban space rather than a more isolated one is
significant. Whether in a city or in Blackboard, the overall patterns that
develop and emerge across spaces are never under any one person’s control or
influence. Certainly, like an urban planner, the instructor directs the flow of
information from the start, both by tailoring the page to the course and through
specific assignments as the term progresses. So, for instance, one professor
could disable the virtual classroom function while another might require weekly
peer review exercises in group folders.