Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Computers and Composition 27 (2010) 124–137

Supply-Side Dreams: Composition, Technology,and the Circular Logic of Class

Virginia Anderson ∗Associate Professor of English, Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, Indiana 47150

Abstract

Specialists in computers and composition have argued that literacy educators can acquire the technological expertise to makestudents critically as well as functionally literate users. But acquiring such expertise imposes costs that are not distributed evenlyamong those who are being urged to take on these roles. Composition’s revision of its mission to make compositionists players inthe fast-moving world of futuristic innovation can exacerbate class divisions, as scholars with the resources to develop technologicalexpertise define such expertise as the mark of a socially responsible educator, simultaneously naming those with fewer resourcesas less deserving others and forcing those others to live with decisions made far beyond their socioeconomic spheres. To explorethese implications for class within a technologically advanced academic environment, this article examines the shift from IndianaUniversity’s in-house course management software, Oncourse, to a new, more sophisticated version, ultimately recommending thatexperts in computers and composition resist self-identification as “pioneers” and choose instead the role of “representatives” forothers who are differently situated in the field.© 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Access; Class; Digital divide; Course management systems; Usability; Practice; Technological change; OSS

Composition scholars have often contended that literacy educators can influence the trajectory of technologicalevolution and can certainly address the prevailing inequities that constitute the “Digital Divide” (for example, Moran,1999; Payne, 2005; Selber, 2004; Selfe & Selfe, 1994). To this end, many of these scholars have argued that instructorsmust become knowledgeable enough to intervene in decisions about technology in pedagogical settings and to makestudents not just astute users but also socially aware producers of technological artifacts. Writers in the field understandthat fulfilling such goals requires addressing questions of access, and the failure of the American marketplace to provideadequate access across wide cultural and social spectra occupies much discussion of the Digital Divide.

But as Annette Harris Powell (2007) and Jeffrey T. Grabill (2003) have argued, “access” has to do with more than just“getting in” (Powell, 2007, p. 16). It concerns as well how people are equipped and enabled to use technology in day-to-day practice. Hence, as Bertram C. Bruce (1993) argued, crucial to our comprehension of the effects of technologicalinnovation is recognizing innovation as the creation of a relationship between a technology and the people whosedaily lives it intersects (p. 15). Such lives comprise a host of specific, situated factors that force a distinction betweenthe mere acquisition of a particular technological tool and the ability to make that tool function for meaningful ends.Grabill contended, quoting Howard Besser, that the true nature of the divide lies in “the gap between those who canbe active creators and distributors of information, and those who can only be consumers” (2003, p. 463). Clearly, the

∗ P. O. Box 133, New Salisbury IN 47161. Tel.: +812 347 2117/812 941 2509/812 430 6811.E-mail address: vanderso@ius.edu.

8755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2010.03.002

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ability to engage technological issues at a decision-making level, where the nature of technological change and thekinds of day-to-day practice it will serve are determined, is an important element of full access. Hence compositionscholars’ insistence on the “importance of paying attention” (Selfe, 1999), of becoming this kind of informed, evenexpert, user able to impart this level of use to students.

In this article, however, I contend that the acquisition of the kind of access that instructors need to produce functionallyand critically literate students like those envisioned by Stuart A. Selber (2004) comes at a cost that is not distributedevenly among the educators who are being urged to take on these activist roles. In fact, the relationship between techspecialists in composition and those whom they urge to follow them mirrors a conundrum that has long plagued thefield: a conundrum that arguably revolves around class. Both Grabill (2003) and Charles Moran (1999) have seen theDigital Divide itself as deeply grounded in class, which, both believed, has been inadequately explored as scholarsin composition struggle to understand what access means in users’ lives. Grabill argued that only “situated inquiries”that furnish “a detailed mapping of situated institutional complexities” (2003, p. 459) can illuminate how the materialconditions that determine class affect what kinds of activity and hence access are possible for differently situated users.

As Moran (1999) made clear, academia most certainly houses differently situated users, and to explore how themateriality of class circumscribes educators’ relationships with technology, I present just such a situated mapping asGrabill has urged, a case study of Indiana University’s shift from the original version of its in-house course managementsoftware, Oncourse, to a new, more complex version during the past five years. Unlike many discussions of access,this article does not focus on the need to make technology more available across socioeconomic boundaries. Rather,I address a central assumption of the “dominant discourse” on computers in composition (Ellen Barton, as cited inMoran, 1999, p. 208): that keeping up with and exploiting technological innovation will benefit literacy educators.I argue that a too-exuberant embrace of this assumption can blind scholars to the effects of small but meaningfuldecisions on the everyday practice of teachers. Living through the imposition of more and better technology at IndianaUniversity has made visible to me in concrete terms the impacts such blindness can have. The experience gives presenceto the material barriers to agency that many literacy educators face and the costs of surmounting those barriers. Mostimportantly, it suggests that, contrary to a thread of the dominant discourse that contends that technological change isan unstoppable train, composition as a field need not be a breathless passenger as these material challenges accumulate.This case study suggests that composition scholars on the bright side of the divide not only should, but can, addressthis inequality. Our celebration of their leadership casts such scholars as pioneers who break ground that those of uswho follow can settle and civilize. I contend that they can better serve composition, and the community of faculty andstudents it comprises, by resisting this self-identification as “pioneers” and “visionaries” to choose instead the role of“representatives” for others who are differently situated in the field.

The case study examines the change from “original Oncourse” to “Oncourse CL” (for “Collaboration and Learning”)from my viewpoint as an associate professor of English at Indiana University Southeast (IUS), one of the seven regionalcampuses of IU. Like Moran’s University of Massachusetts, IUS is a “‘poor’ institution” (1999, p. 208); it serves a localpopulation of lower-middle- to working-class students, and it serves them through a much-maligned yet ubiquitousstructure: a (diminishing) cadre of tenure-track faculty who teach three-three and produce both research and service;an (increasing) auxiliary of lecturers who teach four-four and also are expected to furnish extensive service; and anunstable and overworked army of part-timers, who in Fall 2008 taught 80% of lower-level writing courses at IUS.

This account of my experiences with technological change in such a setting differs from a tradition of articles andconference presentations that depicts educators replacing trepidation and uncertainty about technology with newfoundconfidence, sometimes even becoming technology advocates in their programs (see, for example, Journet, 2007). Mytrajectory has been in the opposite direction. I came to IUS from the University of Texas at Austin, a backgroundthat, at the time, made me one of the more technologically savvy faculty on campus and, without a doubt, the mosttechnologically informed in my department. I enjoyed seeing my campus expand its technological capacity (IUS nowadvertises an eight-to-one student-to-computer ratio), and I became an enthusiastic user of Oncourse. In my role aswriting program administrator, I encouraged part-time writing faculty to make use of its many assets, which mirroredthose of commercial products like Blackboard and WebCT.

But the announcement in 2004 that a “new” version of Oncourse was on the way and its arrival in Fall 2005 shatteredmy belief in my own efficacy as a technology user. Somehow, I had not been “paying attention”; without my knowingit, I had been downgraded from a savvy user to a passive consumer without the agency to affect my own technologicalfate. When, trying to understand what had happened, I read Selber’s (2004) discussion of what it would take to claimmere “functional literacy” with technology, I recognized with appalling clarity that I had moved into a very different

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world from the one Selber described, a world that made remaining functionally literate on his terms not just a challengebut an effort that, to be achieved, would require an overwhelming reversal of the priorities I had established as ateacher.

What has emerged from this challenge to my status is a sense of actually living the theoretical postulates about classthat have occupied composition scholarship. Locating the embodied experience of being “down-classed” in this largerdiscussion allows me to explore how changes that may seem trivial from the theoretical outside can have measurableeffects. Before this experience, I had not fully considered the implications of composition’s insistence that literacyeducators must, as a duty, enter the competitive, unstable environment in which technological innovation typicallythrives. This article attempts to highlight those implications for my technologically adept colleagues in compositionstudies, some of whom may have inadvertently exacerbated these problems through small but surprisingly meaningfuldecisions, and many of whom, if aware of the power inherent in their roles, might more effectively champion thosewhose practice they impact.

1. Matters of class

Much discussion of class seems to assume that it is about palpable differences that segregate people: what theypossess, what they achieve, how they behave, what they value (e.g., O’Dair, 2003). For Grabill (2003) and Moran(1999), education and distribution of wealth are key. But Donna LeCourt (2006) argued against assigning class sofacilely, contending that the multifaceted nature of human choice makes class fluid and therefore elusive. She offeredthe example of her own father, who despite being marked by job and income as working class nevertheless engagesin the type of intellectual discourse supposedly characteristic of a very different class. For LeCourt, representations ofclass as “static” and “inviolable” (2006, pp. 42, 37) preclude understanding it as a relational and reciprocal interactionbetween power and identity formation, with each agent in the act of formation playing a constitutive part. Powerstructures within cultures name particular behaviors as “classed”—for example, certain language uses. This namingbecomes self-fulfilling when those who manifest these behaviors accept the labels applied to them, and when they arethen denied access to agency because they engage in these coded behaviors. This reciprocity reflects a circular logicthat is theoretically open to disruption by actors who refuse to accept the imposed borders, such as LeCourt’s father,or by those who would refuse the hierarchical implications assigned to the various markers and would demand that theculture at large join in such a refusal as a moral imperative. Although minorities have pressed such demands with somesuccess over the past half-century, composition has not been as successful with markers of language use or allegianceto certain values. But, theoretically at least, within an ideological or intellectual community united by a shared will,the self-fulfilling circular logic of class by which, in LeCourt’s words, “unequal relations are learned” (2006, p. 39)could be disrupted and perhaps even halted.

Joseph Harris (2000) attempted just such a disruption on behalf of, of all things, teaching. Harris feared thatcompositionists, by aspiring to the kind of status supposedly enjoyed by literary scholars, have undermined the field’sprimary mission and have sidestepped serious questions about working conditions that create not just a two-tier classstructure within “English” but one with third and fourth tiers as well (p. 66). Here, the power of elites at self-designated“research” institutions to name class and thus create it has all too easily persuaded teachers to see teaching as differentlyvalued from research and to accept differences in working conditions, for example, in teaching loads, research leave,travel funds, and service obligations, that affect the amount of time available to any given educator for exerting the“power over the means of production” (LeCourt, 2006, p. 38) that is necessary for wide-ranging change. Harris notedironically how scholars’ abhorrence of class hierarchy “seamlessly merges” with the competitive, individualistic, andupwardly yearning drives of a status-seeking middle class (2000, p. 52). These contradictions, if left unchallenged, canlead scholars unwittingly to endorse capitalism’s supply-side insistence that benefits accruing at the top and enjoyedby elites somehow trickle down to serve the less well-positioned, and that access to power and well-being is simply amatter of paying attention and taking the time to become involved and informed. In this view, those who do not availthemselves of these opportunities for voice have only themselves to blame for their lesser access to the goods thatcapitalism so amply provides. But compositionists have long rejected such a view as a blindness to the vicissitudes ofan unexamined class structure; Moran (1999) saw the potential for a similar blindness in composition’s engagementwith “cutting-edge technology” (p. 218), which he worried may undercut the field’s larger mission if not carried outwith critical attention. My experience as a classed user of IU’s Oncourse CL supports this warning that composition’srevision of its mission to make compositionists players in the fast-moving world of futuristic innovation can too easily,

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if not undertaken with the utmost self-consciousness, serve as yet another instantiation of the class divide Harrisdescribed, an instantiation that the pioneers in the process of creating it may not fully recognize.

2. The Oncourse story

Obviously, the enthusiasm many compositionists express for technology derives from their belief that “new media”can enhance learning and make teaching easier and more effective. Certainly technology can add to a teacher’s options,and Oncourse, IU’s course management software (CMS), began in 1998 as a project to do just that. The IU website “The Oncourse Story” (2006) (<http://original-oncourse.iu.edu/news/story.html>) explained that the universityopted for this in-house product, created as a grassroots effort in a small lab at Indiana University-Purdue UniversityIndianapolis (IUPUI), over commercially available options because a proprietary product seemed more empoweringfor teachers, permitting more flexibility and superior ability to respond quickly to specific faculty needs. Early resultssuggest that Oncourse did serve its intended purpose: by 2002, it had attracted more than 65,000 faculty and studentusers.

But in November 2004, subscribers to the OCADMIN listserv, a forum for faculty who needed administrative accessin order to manage multiple sections or serve as campus resources, received what seemed at the time an innocuousmessage:

Find out how you can use the next generation of Oncourse to collaborate and learnThe next generation of Oncourse, called Oncourse Collaboration and Learning, or Oncourse CL, will be intro-duced at Indiana University beginning in 2005. Instructors, researchers, collaborators, and administrative staffcan find out more about Oncourse CL right now.Click on “Oncourse CL Info” from the Oncourse home page at http://oncourse.iu.edu. This resource providesinformation to help you prepare for transitioning to Oncourse CL. From this page, you can view an interactivePreview of the Oncourse CL environment, view tutorials on tools in Oncourse CL, or find answers to frequentlyasked questions in the IU Knowledge Base.If you are interested in creating a practice site in Oncourse CL in spring 2005 for your course or collabora-tive project, contact your local teaching and learning center. . .. Look for an announcement coming soon withinstructions on signing up for an Oncourse CL site online.

At our campus’s learning center, the Institute for Learning and Teaching Excellence (ILTE), Katherine (Katy) Wigley1

recalls a similar campus-wide notice going out in the ILTE newsletter. A search of my email archive, from which I havedeleted almost nothing since our campus’s switch to Microsoft Outlook in 2000, produced a second announcement,this time from our own ILTE to all IUS faculty, in June of 2005:

Important Oncourse Information

As you are aware, Oncourse is changing. Effective for the fall 2005 semester, all courses will load in OncourseCL (the “new Oncourse”) by default, but faculty may opt out of teaching in CL and go back to Classic. WhileCL will bring some nice new features and tools, not all are in place now and will not be for the fall semester. Itis important to know that using CL for fall classes is not for everyone.

A list of features that would not be available followed, features that many of us relied upon, such as group spaces,in which students could download each others’ work, and other collaborative functions like forums and email.

Hindsight reveals that neither of these announcements invited user input into the new system. Moreover, the cel-ebratory tone of the first reflects what Bruce (1993) called “innovation-focused discourse,” which constructs thetechnological change itself as the means by which improvements in practice come about. This discourse positions the

1 Wigley and her colleague in the ILTE, David Rainbolt, do heroic duty in helping faculty with Oncourse issues, as well as solving a host of othertechnological conundrums. I thank Katy, Anastasia Morrone, and Christian E. Bjornson for their generosity in talking with me about Oncourse.I also thank Morrone and Wigley for their review of this paper for factual accuracy. Finally, I appreciate Susan Romano’s insightful reading of avery rough draft of this paper, and the clear and helpful comments of the anonymous reviewers, who helped me broaden my understanding of thetheoretical issues involved.

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recipient as a passive medium on which the technology does its transformative work. The more cautionary tone of thesecond reflects Wigley’s recognition that the new CMS was going to be an uneasy fit with entrenched practice on hercampus; she spoke with the voice of Bruce’s “social-system-focused discourse,” which understands effective changeas a tenuous negotiation between people’s own perceived needs and priorities and whatever promise of improvementthe proposed change can make (1993, pp. 11-13).

The tone of the paragraph on the web site “The Oncourse Story” describing the 2002 decision to stick with anin-house instrument when replacing original Oncourse is even more powerfully “innovation-focused,” and suggestsfurther reasons for the university’s exuberance about the new “CL,” despite the muted concerns of people like Wigley.“[K]eep[ing] [IU’s] core teaching and learning systems within its control” (para. 10) involved a heady decision topartner with the University of Michigan, Stanford, and MIT to develop an open-source community that, powered by a$2.4-million Andrew W. Mellon grant, would link the universities with a number of corporate partners to “creat[e] newand innovative tools for improved pedagogy and research support” (para. 16). This collaboration came to be knownas the Sakai Project. Sakai promotes “the Community Source model” of generating open-source software (OSS) that“would be made available to all others” who “may download, use, modify, or even sell the Sakai software withoutfee” (para. 12). The 2010 Sakai web site (<www.sakaiproject.org/community-overview>) now announces that “[o]verone-third of the top 100 universities in the world participate in Sakai, providing a system now in use at over 200 otheruniversities, colleges, and schools.”

Thus, as an offshoot of the Sakai project, CL was developed by the best technological minds in the IU system.According to Anastasia Morrone, Associate Dean for Learning Technologies at Indiana University, IU informationtechnology services consulted with “tech groups” and “some faculty groups.” Specifically, these groups included theIT Roundtable in Indianapolis, the Faculty Council technology committees in Bloomington and Indianapolis, and the“tech deans” on the system campuses. This collaboration offered the possibility of “streamlining” code, in Wigley’sterminology, so that it could provide more stable service, as well as the chance to push the CMS in new directionsthat the technologically engaged faculty who were consulted envisioned. Paper documents laid out the basic plan;developers coded for the functions, and then Quality Assurance testing took place.

Morrone stated in a phone interview what appears to be the consensus among CL’s developers: that the softwarerepresents a major improvement over the original Oncourse. Certainly it provides new options such as wiki andpodcasting functions. Faculty can format announcements and assignments with much greater freedom, pasting inURLs, videos, and graphics with abandon, and students can be notified via their regular email of new materials witha single click. A selling point is that users can customize their CL interfaces, for example, by choosing which tabsto make visible. In general, there is a lot more “stuff”—separate spaces for syllabi, resources, and assignments, andthree different ways to communicate with students. CL follows current design standards, with tabs at the top and apermanent navigation pane at the left side of the screen to which faculty can add tools at will.2

Thus, CL evolved as part of a larger “aspiration,” laid out in the new IU Strategic Plan for Information Technology(2009), to sustain and enhance IU’s role “as a clear leader in creating and deploying innovative applications of IT inseveral key areas of research and instruction” (Empowering people, 2009, p. 4). But the concrete realization of theseaspirations, not least as a result of their innovative energy, created challenges for daily classroom practice. As becameimmediately apparent, these challenges would have unexpected ramifications for the success of CL. Computers andwriting specialists paying attention to such interaction between technology and practice were versed in rich socialsystem-focused critique and might have been uniquely positioned to speak to these implications. Such criticallyinformed input might have benefited everyone.

For the fact is that Wigley’s reservations were right. . ..

3. “Anger, hostility, and confusion”

. . . And not just about the IUS campus. Oncourse CL did not take the IU system by storm. It was met, in Wigley’swords, with “anger, hostility, and confusion.” Ironically, CL was most vigorously resisted by the people for whom it wasostensibly designed: teachers. In her interview with me, Morrone stated that Bloomington adopted CL more quickly

2 Christian E. Bjornson, the IUS representative to the Oncourse enhancements process, pointed out in an interview that a new hire found CLinviting because “it was just like Blackboard” (which may not be exactly what the developers of CL would hope to hear!).

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Fig. 1. “Original Oncourse” User Profile Page (1998–2005).

than the Indianapolis campus possibly because original Oncourse was used so extensively for teaching at IUPUI. Onthe surface, there were several straightforward reasons for teachers in particular to resist. First, as noted above, whenCL was first introduced, it lacked the functionality that faculty already had in original Oncourse. Second, compared tothe original Oncourse, which presented a clean, uncluttered interface, CL was intimidating (see Figs. 1 and 2). Its many,many options, not all of which were intuitive, promised a steep learning curve. Third, CL was persistently buggy. Morethan two years after CL’s debut and two years into the suggestion and enhancement process, OCADMIN resoundedwith reports of things that just didn’t work, or that might work one day and not the next, or that worked only if you tried

Fig. 2. “New” Oncourse (CL) User Profile Page (2005–present).

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in a certain order. This impression that the developers did not have full control over their creation was compoundedwhen, during the first hectic weeks of the forced switch in Fall 2007, the system crashed, leaving students and facultyunable to access their courses. Developers ultimately located the problem in “third-party” software that could not havebeen tested under load before classes began. While this problem was being solved, many basic functions, such as the“messages” function, were disabled, but not everyone knew about these triage decisions, with the result that facultywould attempt to access tools without knowing that they were wasting their time. The OCADMIN exchanges becamequite heated, with phrases like “piece of junk” flying around and administrators responding that they simply couldn’tdo everything at once.

Recognizing that they had a public relations problem, officials at Central Administration Services at IUPUI, fromwhich Oncourse was implemented and managed, decided to fund “dual use” of original Oncourse and Oncourse CL untilFall 2006. In fact, full migration to CL proved even harder to accomplish; only in Fall 2007 was the original Oncoursefinally retired. Meanwhile, the university implemented new outreach efforts to deal with this disaster. According toChristian E. Bjornson, my campus’s representative on the Oncourse Priorities Committee (OPC), which oversees“enhancements” to the program, the OPC, and another group called the Functional Requirements Committee (FRC)were formed to address faculty resistance. A suggestion process was built into CL; suggestions were forwarded tothe FRC, which calculated the “developer hours” needed to implement each suggestion and sent this information onto the OPC, which debated how to prioritize the requests based on the limited number of developer hours budgetedfor changes. The primary purpose of this process was to detect “blockers”: specific problems that prevented a facultymember (or in some cases entire academic units) from switching. As a result, during the two-year delay of full migration,many of the functions that had been missing in the Fall 2005 version were restored, or, in some cases, functionalitythat had been planned but deferred was reprioritized. Bjornson argued reasonably that new faculty who had notbecome accustomed to the original Oncourse will adapt easily to CL, which will be the only CMS they have used atIU.

Fortunately, the crashes and slow response times that generated so much heat during the early weeks of full use arenow much less common. Taken in isolation, they would seem to be unremarkable growing pains: any new technologyis going to have bugs. Users should be acclimated to such confusion; as members of “strong partnerships” committed totechnological progress across IU campuses (Morrone, 2008), faculty should soldier on for the sake of the improvementsthe innovation will inevitably bring. Once again, those whose knowledge gave them access to policy decisions andthose who were aware of situated material exigencies might have revealed the potentially onerous initiation that joiningthis partnership would entail. Instead, it was Katy Wigley, our learning center technology expert, who recognized thesubtle disenfranchisement underway and sought to mediate.

Literacy scholars, while possibly agreeing that temporary chaos is the price we must pay for progress, might havealso asked what kind of progress changes like CL represent and whether the price they demand is worth paying—andwhether it is equally worth paying for all of those who are asked to pony up.

4. Defining progress

Central to my argument is the contention that resistance to CL was stoked by a series of designer choices that makeCL demonstrably harder and more frustrating to use than the system it replaced. A surprising number of these choicesviolate basic usability principles. Usability, as a concept, is crucial to businesses whose customers, unable to find whatthey need or complete transactions quickly and painlessly, don’t bother to protest or complain—they just leave. What isat stake for such businesses, as Steve Krug (2006) pointed out, is the relationship they hope to establish with their users.An organization signals that it values users by minimizing cognitive loads and time spent on hard-to-follow proceduresso as not to exact an extra cost. Ultimately, refusing these signals of respect implies not just any relationship but apower relationship like that LeCourt (2006) sees as constitutive of class. Organizations can attend to usability to create a“reservoir of goodwill” (incidentally reinforcing consumers’ confidence in the competence of the organization) (Krug,2006, pp. 163-167), or they can behave like CEOs deliberately making supplicants jump through hoops, seeminglyimposing their own agenda just to show they can.

Whether intentionally or not, asserting one’s power so visibly through indifference to others’ agendas is dangerous tobusinesses whose customers can revolt, but insidious in a setting like a university. While some members of a universitycommunity may be comfortable “refus[ing] the space altogether” (Payne, 2005, p. 499), or developing and maintaining

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their own web sites, like one respondent to a faculty survey I conducted,3 there are, as Colleen A. Reilly and JosephJohn Williams (2006) noted, subtle “institutional pressures” on members of any organization to use whatever softwareis encouraged by their institutions (p. 72). Thus, for a faculty member to go elsewhere like a disgruntled customerrequires not only more time investment (and therefore de facto submission to the power relation), but also deliberateresistance—and being driven to resort to resistance to assert one’s needs is again to acknowledge the power differentialand thereby accept the naming of one’s class.

Clearly, usability testing, the process of learning how web tools will work in the actual situations in which userswill employ them, is an important way designers develop their relationships with users and clarify what power dif-ferentials exist. If the description of the planning, design, and testing processes for CL discussed above is accurate,rather than developing a helpful relationship with “approximate” users (Miller-Cochran & Rodrigo, 2006, p. 96), theOncourse team acquiesced to a profound disconnect between their efforts and the needs of those their work aimed toserve.

Quite simply, in order to know what was going on with Oncourse and thus to have input as a user into the developmentprocess, one had to be a user of a very special kind. Not even the tech-savvy experts in the campus learning centerswere special enough. Much of the promotion and support of Oncourse, and indeed much of the usability testing thatwas done, had been apportioned to the campus learning centers and their staffs, but rather than finding themselveson the frontlines as early-stage choices were established, the learning centers were not given a look at CL until afterbasic decisions had been made and only tinkering around the edges could be done. On our campus, faculty who gotto participate even in such tinkering were those who happened to drop into the learning center on other tech-relatedpurposes or who had already shown an interest in doing something new and exciting with Oncourse—in other words,a cohort of faculty already unusually engaged with technological issues. As Jeffrey Rubin and Dana Chisnell (2008)pointed out, ad hoc testing such as this favors the most advanced users, who tend to “downplay” problems and evenenjoy circumventing them, so that “the product ‘tests out’ much better than it should, and provides a false sense ofconfidence to the design and marketing team” (p. 147). While “Quality Assurance” was done, exactly who did thisquality testing has been difficult to determine. Certainly none was done on my campus, beyond those who dropped inand were asked to “take a look.” Wigley lamented not being able to get more faculty stirred up about CL, but theseless-experienced faculty, with nothing more than a single notice in a newsletter that changes were coming, would havehad to be prescient and hyperalarmed to know that they needed to reprioritize their professional lives to ward off thedanger ahead.

Other rhetorical choices underscore this disconnect. For example, the “Oncourse Story” implies, in true “innovation-focused” spirit, that keeping up with and even leading the technological gold rush was a perfectly adequate reasonto impose change. The developers seem to have had no sense that somewhere out there was an audience that neededto understand why practice was about to be disrupted. Only by specifically pursuing this question with Wigley andMorrone in the course of preparing for this paper did I learn that Original Oncourse had been written with Microsoftcode that was now outdated and unable to handle the volume and that the license for this code was expiring. Facultyresponse to CL might have been at least somewhat more accepting had planners made it clearer that something had tobe done.

Thus, despite Morrone’s belief that every effort was made to involve faculty, usability testing did not heed usabil-ity scholars like Rubin and Chisnell (2008), who stressed the need for a complex, nuanced portrait of the variouscategories of users (pp. 119-125). Well-intentioned, hard-working designers and developers certainly did not setout to produce a tool that burdened its users and cost the university unanticipated time and money (for exam-ple, half a million dollars for an additional year of “dual use” of Original Oncourse and CL). But the culture inwhich they worked, a culture unmediated by scholars who also understood how material conditions can impactaccess and how these material conditions can vary across academic landscapes, did not impel designers to studythe relationship between technological change and many of the faculty who would be affected. Thus they did notknow how best to draw these users into the process. Further, limiting input is, quite simply, more efficient, and

3 This small survey of faculty, conducted in summer 2007, attracted a response rate of 35%, and of that percentage, 71% (a quarter of the totalnumber of respondents queried) had not switched to CL by Spring 2007 (and thus were generally in the position of being forced to switch rather thanchoosing to do so). Obviously, those who were disgruntled with the switch may have been more likely to return the survey, but these percentages doindicate some resistance to CL on my campus.

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the importance of efficiency as a driving value mandates a basic economy that this case study reveals. Developerhours are finite and costly. In contrast, user hours are cheap and infinite. In other words, when there is no “bot-tom line” at stake, as there would be in the businesses Krug’s work serves—few options for users to go elsewherewhen design decisions prove frustrating—it makes economic sense to create a tool in the lab, then let users findout what’s wrong with it by trial and error over time on their less inflated dime. However unintentionally, that isexactly what happened with CL. Developers created new, exciting ventures, then let users find the bugs at a cost tothemselves.

5. Usability: The view from below

This top-down planning and a testing process that assumed users shared the planners’ unequivocal commitment toinnovation predisposed CL to a rocky start. The designers, though, apparently were surprised; they surely didn’t seethemselves as oppressors. After all, to them, what others see as losses may look like the kinds of time investments anytechnology user should enjoy. But in what follows, I hope to share what the CL experience taught me: the degree towhich each minor change like those I discuss below is in fact a tax, however small, imposed by technological cultureas it asks users to invest more and more time and effort to perform necessary tasks. Each change, with the commitmentit demands, carries a message about the value of a user’s time.

As one example, I was only vaguely aware how an increase in the number of clicks needed to accomplish a task canaffect workloads. Fig. 1 shows a user profile page in the original Oncourse. On the left are links to previous courses;tools for optional use appear on the right-hand side of the screen, with major categories always visible. This screenshot shows Wigley’s profile,4 so it displays only a couple of semesters; for an actual instructor, the list of sites on theleft would have covered two years’ worth of courses and would have remained in full view at all times. Searching formaterials used three semesters previously required only a quick scroll.

In contrast, Fig. 2 shows the current profile page in CL, which opts instead for customizable tabs across thetop of the page. The figure shows the pull-down box one must open to access courses for the past two semesters.The two pathways at the bottom of the screen show the travels one must undertake to locate courses from ear-lier semesters. At the beginning of each new term, it is necessary to manually shift the new courses that havebeen posted and that one wants to view to the top of an “active sites” list, moving them up one line at atime.

Although this might seem a minuscule time investment in itself, it involves working through various screens to dowhat used to be doable through a single scroll. Small, too, would seem to be the immediate price of the new processof posting assignments. In original Oncourse, there was no separate “assignments” function. There were tabs labeled“Syllabus” and “Schedule” where one could post various class items as attachments. The procedure for posting itemswas standard: browse, select, and upload. After a “New Item” was posted, one could either stipulate a due date or checka “No due date” box. “OK” posted new items reliably at the bottom of the list, so that students quickly learned to lookthere for them.

In contrast, CL provides separate spaces for “Assignments” and “Resources,” requiring students to figure out whethera given item is a resource or an assignment and possibly to search two spaces. The new CL “Assignments” page addssix required clicks to the standard process of uploading an assignment (eight if you do not want the defaults, severalof which reset every time). For writing teachers, a required field after the due-date field called an “accept until” datecreates logistical problems. How much explaining will be required to clarify for students that the required “acceptuntil” date is really the date for the second draft and not a late version of the first one? Expressing concern about thispotential source of confusion, I was told to simply post separate assignments for first and second drafts, a solution withits own time costs.

I have responded to the demands of this page the way Bruce (1993, pp. 16-19) says users often do: I have sortedthrough the various components of CL and have abandoned those like the “Assignments” page that hinder rather thanfacilitate my daily practice. Instead, I use “Resources” much as I used the old “Schedule” space, posting all materialsas attachments so that due dates are laid out in the text of the assignment itself. However, the Resources page makesits own demands. New items posted in Resources are dropped into the extant list willy-nilly. Placing the items at the

4 Original Oncourse was dismantled in 2008, so screen shots of regular instructor profiles are no longer available.

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top of the list, where they will be seen easily, requires the instructor to manually reorder the list. This must be doneeach time a new Resource is posted.5

Making basic tasks more time-intensive is just one of the usability principles CL flouts. The title of Krug’s (2006)book highlights another such principle: Don’t Make Me Think. It is not that users want to be stupid or to be treatedas if they are. Rather, Krug (2006) reminded designers that people have many demands on their attention and thatadding to this demand not only, again, displaces energy from their own priorities, it also increases the possibility oftime- (and money-) consuming mistakes (p. 28). CL adds to users’ cognitive load by violating conventions withoutinforming users of the danger, so that pathways previously taken for granted have to be relearned. Especially egregiousis disabling the “Back” button in favor of small, unlabelled reset arrows without any notification to users. Using theBack button crashes the system, necessitating a call to the campus learning center or helpdesk. According to usabilityexpert Jakob Nielsen (2000), “[t]he Back feature is an absolutely essential safety net that gives users the confidence tonavigate freely in the knowledge that they can always get back to firm ground. . .. Breaking the Back button is no lessthan a usability catastrophe” (p. 86).

Email options in CL, instead of following conventional protocols, also demand a trial-and-error learning process.Original Oncourse supplied a straightforward email system, wherein a student could send a message to an instructor’sOncourse inbox, or to the inbox of any other student or group of students, and the recipients could respond viathe standard “reply” protocol. In contrast, CL offers two separate email options. The most obvious, the “Messages”function, can be set to deliver a message to a user’s regular inbox—but the user cannot reply! One must either log into the Oncourse interface (a very slow process with the dial-up that is still the only option in my area) or open a newmessage and type in the student’s username. The other option does allow a reply, but if students attempt to use it, theywill send to the entire class, as one of my students inadvertently did. Discovering such problems and learning how towork around them adds incremental time demands to what should be simple tasks.

Presumably the solution is for us all to peruse the ample documentation provided: for example, several pages ofinstructions on importing from old Oncourse, extensive animations, hours of learning center telephone time. But bothNielsen (2000) and Krug (2006) agree that, in Krug’s words, “Instructions must die” (p. 47). “[T]he main thing youneed to know about instructions,” wrote Krug, “is that no one is going to read them—at least not until after repeatedattempts at ‘muddling through’ have failed” (p. 47). That CL requires massive documentation suggests that it regularlyleaves its users unable to navigate without time-consuming outside help—or without the leisure to investigate thefunction of links as they might browse through a library on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

True, continued use tends to decrease wasted time. Yet both the time lost in learning and the incremental time inextra clicks and more complicated processes add up. For a business where loss of productivity has economic costs,Nielsen (2000) calculated that a company with 1000 employees could, through a redesign that saves each employeemerely one minute a week, “save time corresponding to 42 percent of a full-time worker” (p. 274). It seems diabolicalto cast instructors’ time as more available to be wasted than that of other kinds of workers and to cast their expendituresof effort as a trivial concern.

6. The technological universe

The example of CL contributes to a larger scholarship on technology and its effects by underscoring how powerimbalances set the conditions under which any user of technology labors and, further, illustrates the trade-offs involvedin paying critical attention to technology for many of us. Just as Elizabeth Ellsworth (1999) urged the critical pedagogymovement to recognize that relations of power and control are defining features of the educational infrastructure inwhich activist teachers are embedded, Jacques Ellul (1990) projected a harsh picture of the agency possible in thetechnopolis we all inhabit. For Ellul, to be caught up in the technical universe is to lose one’s ability to think criticallyabout it (pp. 93, 132). Like Ellsworth’s critical teachers, participants in a technological environment can never standaside from that environment to view it expunged of all the ways it subtly intersects daily lives. Ellul scoffed at the ideathat anyone can muster the critical acumen to master and direct the path of anything as vast and multifaceted, requiringso many levels of specialization, as technology (p 155). Ron Eglash (2004) proposed that acts of “appropriation,” in

5 In April 2008, I submitted a suggestion about changing this feature to the Oncourse staff through the proper channels. I have not had a response.Presumably, I need to call Wigley or Bjornson to press my case.

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which people turn technology to uses never intended by designers, can excavate layers of freedom within the sedimentof inevitability that Ellul describes. But for Ellul, such hopes deny the ineluctability of a system where going back isnever an option; only making “what already exists” work more efficiently is seen as progress. Efficiency as a paramountgood, Ellul insisted, means that diversity must be stifled; disruption and dissent must be delegitimized as irrational (p.169; see also Ellsworth, 1999, p. 487).

CL seems to accord with Ellul’s vision. Darin Payne (2005) critiqued Blackboard’s use of corporate imagery like thatanalyzed by Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. (1994), deploring its limitation of user options to trivial adjustmentsand its repertoire of surveillance options, both of students by teachers and of teachers by administrators. CL perpetuatesthese power imbalances. As Ellul predicted, dissent is quarantined. OCADMIN, the listserv for administrators in chargeof making sure that faculty could use CL productively as a teaching enhancement, became a forum for sharing problemsthat cropped up day to day. Such a redefinition of the purpose of OCADMIN could be characterized as an exampleof “appropriation” of a technological function as discussed by Eglash (2004). But in the summer of 2007, facultywere informed that not everyone on OCADMIN wanted to hear about problems; therefore, the list would become“announcement only.” People wanting to air problems could do so in a separate, optional enrollment space whereissues could be quickly directed to technical support.

A move like this certainly reduces the load on average users, some of whom, like me, simply avoid the more esotericand unstable features of the system. It clearly enhances efficiency. At the same time, it isolates the complainers, whonow speak mainly to each other, and dilutes whatever agency their appropriation allowed. In Ellul’s view, the powerof the technocrats to control how resources can be appropriated illuminates technology’s generation of a “proletariat”subservient to a black-box culture created by specialized language and limited access to decision-making (pp. 49-50).No doubt systems like Oncourse can be appropriated. But for a newly named member of the proletariat like myself,any meaningful appropriation would mean surrendering time I hope to devote to other options, and thus would meanthat in order to appropriate I would have to consent to be appropriated first.

For Morrone, this interpretation is unjust. It is her heartfelt belief that “Oncourse belongs to faculty.” Far fromstifling faculty, it empowers them. CL designers and developers have provided the enhancement options that allowfaculty to ask for and get the tools they need. But to a classed user like me, her response manifests, instead, a face-offbetween Bruce’s (1993) conflicting discourses, each deaf to the other. This deafness calls for intensified attention froma scholarship that hears and knows both discourses and that therefore might provide a bridging critique.

7. New, exciting, and OSS

Such a critique might recognize that participation in the Sakai open-source project, which was expected to resolvethe capacity and development problems presented by Original Oncourse, should also have functioned as a sociallyprogressive choice. As Reilly and Williams (2006) noted, open-source software (OSS) like Sakai promises to fulfillmany progressive hopes about social equality through collaboration and solutions offered free of charge to everyone.But in fact, the OSS underlying CL has deepened the chasm that tends to characterize the developer/user relationship.6

In the first place, the possibility inherent in the collaborative, open-source process has spurred numerous experimentsin functionality, as visionary faculty order up complex innovations that have been incorporated into various iterationsof Sakai-based programs like Oncourse. Unfortunately, this very explosive momentum means that many of theseinnovations are still beta versions—engines for frustration—when they are touted to faculty. In addition, it has beenthe practice for individual partners to develop specific tools. On paper, this means that when Berkeley, now one ofthe partners, invests developer time in designing a Gradebook, developers at IUPUI can focus on an Assignments orTest and Survey tool. But specific partners design tools for the specific users with whom they are in communication,not for users at very different institutions a continent away.7 Further complications are introduced even within theIU system, as representatives on the Oncourse Priorities Committee must defend requests by faculty at their owninstitutions against the competing demands of representatives from other institutions. Representatives’ success on the

6 Wigley pointed out, though, that it is the university’s commitment to OSS that makes critiques like mine possible, as such a commitment entailsan open exchange of information, even if that information is about failure as well as success. She also reminds me that such openness is far morelikely in an educational setting than it would be in most commercial environments.

7 For example, the elaborate tools incorporated into CL mean that it does not work well with satellite Internet, which may be the cheapest or evenonly option for students at a primarily commuter campus like IUS.

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OPC depends on their level of knowledge about technological possibilities and constraints as well as their specificprowess in the traditional rhetorical arts of persuasion. Moreover, their views of what is needed tend to be skewed bytheir involvement in their own unit’s experiences. Again on paper, every user has a voice via the suggestion process.In practice, of those who responded to my faculty survey, only 30 percent knew about this process.

Reilly and Williams (2006) lamented a phenomenon the CL experience illustrates: that for teachers themselves,“ease of use” regularly outweighs social values when teachers are allowed to select their own pedagogical tools (pp.72, 81). In fact, as Reilly and Williams both stated and demonstrated, OSS brings a particular set of problems into anacademic department, problems inexorably intertwined with the de facto class division that differences in resources andvalues perpetuate. Their discussion of extant OSS programs ended with the concession that “[t]he expertise requiredto install, configure, and administer a CMS, however, is considerable and, without support, beyond the capabilities ofmany instructors who teach distance-learning courses” (2006, p. 78).

Thus, making full use of any OSS requires someone in the department who already has, or has the time to develop,expertise in programming and who has the time to put such expertise to widespread use. What this means may or maynot be evident to those working toward a program like the one Selber (2004) encouraged or to those in an Englishdepartment with its own servers for technological experimentation like the one where a Reilly and Williams intervieweetaught. But to departments like mine, where every new faculty line is a hard-fought victory and where any kind ofreassigned time is a rarely granted privilege, hiring a technology expert or freeing up a department member to becomea home-grown expert is a challenge requiring major realignments of department as well as personal research priorities.

In fact, our experience confirms what Reilly and Williams amply documented: we cannot “do” OSS on our own. And,of course, it is this reliance on the expertise of others that created the CL debacle, as many faculty, from tenure-trackto part-time, found their daily practice far removed from the decision-making centers, with the effort to keep abreastof what was going on in these distant centers an intrusive demand on already over-extended lives. We in English havenonetheless worked slowly but steadily to make our students aware of the need for facility with new media. But everysuch effort competes with our efforts to ensure that our students have other necessary kinds of practical knowledge,let alone such intangible assets as a love of learning or a hunger for intellectual growth. Often, the faculty who musttake time out to learn new systems are part-time faculty working with multiple CMSs at multiple institutions. Whenthese same faculty, as is often the case, are those teaching the students who might benefit most from personal instructorattention, and when there is still so much to be learned about how much any particular innovation actually increaseslearning, there is somewhat more urgency in critically examining the differential in time devoted to learning softwareversus time devoted to other forms of teaching. It is possible that decisions meant to liberate students in fact privilegea certain kind of student; they certainly privilege a certain kind of faculty member and a certain kind of teaching. Forexample, notices on the CL portal extol faculty who create podcasts so that students who miss class can downloadclass discussion. There is no mention of the possibility that such online options devalue coming to class. The implicitdenigration of what students do miss by cutting class should not be a given; it should be a matter of debate. Andmaking extensive use of a tool like CL as grounds for faculty merit inadvertently invites class divisions. This invitationcan be subtle. For example, when Nancy Barron (2007) named a class of instructors who “are interested and excitedabout digital literacy” and who see “using technology as part of social action” (p. 92; original emphasis), it may takea moment’s raised consciousness to see that she simultaneously named a class of teachers who fail at these things. Tomake such judgments, even implicitly, is to misread class issues by casting such lapses as “the failings of individualsrather than the workings of social structures” (Harris, 2000, p. 65).

Indeed, as I write this, I find myself anticipating the charge that I am just whining about an inevitable (and increasinglynaturalized) process that, taken with the right attitude, would yield as much pleasure as pain. But such quietismgalls when I think about the degree to which the very promise of OSS is freedom from coercion, and the veryhope of innovative software is that it will make teaching and learning easier and more exciting, and when I thinkabout the 1993 statement of “core values” in computers and composition that posited computers as “a potentiallyequalizing force” (Lisa Gerrard, cited in Grabill, 2003, p. 452). The ethos of composition, and of humanities studies ingeneral, does call for a critical examination like the one composition scholars promote, in which students and facultyalike examine the social, economic, and cultural implications of the technology they use—but not the examinationthat is usually intended, one that uncritically relies on every department’s getting someone “out there,” ready torecognize what’s coming down the pike and sound the alarm if things go wrong. There seems to be little recognitionof the material realities that mean that not every department in every institution of higher learning can meet thisdemand.

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8. Access again

Usability experts like Krug (2006) and Nielsen (2000) suggested that designers sensitive to their relationshipswith users can often discover simple ways to provide new functionality if the goal is truly that of serving usersrather than “jazz[ing] up” sites (Nielsen, 2000, p. 33). But to think like this, designers must be able to hear callsfor such needs. Making designers hear when it is likely to matter is just plain hard, and it is all too often extantsocial structures that determine how easily the necessary yelling and arm-waving can get done. Ellul (1990) andEllsworth (1999) would probably contend that we cannot realistically hope for a collapse of the power structuresthat separate designers and visionaries from the users who depend on them. My own sense of the conflict betweendiscourses, again, is that some pessimism is well-founded. On OCADMIN, concerns about the pace of change wereseen as “not helpful” and a challenge to those “strong partnerships” behind CL (Morrone, 2008); for Morrone, myconcerns were examples of disappointing “negativity” rather than a representation of a legitimate point of view (A.S. Morrone, personal communication, May 7, 2008). So I am not writing to designers. It is my colleagues in rhetoricand composition itself who, I believe, are our best hope for bridging this class-constitutive divide. This field is well-supplied with people who can command attention in technological venues or even achieve the kind of appropriationthat Eglash (2004) commended. But having people in the field on the cutting edge, their research and practice devotedto promoting technological innovation, can exacerbate rather than ameliorate the class divide if these scholars’ embraceof technology ends up forcing many of their colleagues to work harder for less.

I do not argue that we need to restrict or rein in our experts. Someone has to keep whacking at Ellul’s black box. I dosuggest attention to the rhetorical framing of these leaders’ roles in the field. Payne (2005) noted the pervasiveness ofthe pioneer metaphor that, as I have suggested, attracts tech experts in rhetoric and composition, and he also remarkedon its affinity with “dominant cultural interests”—never more so than when compositionists’ embrace of new media“return[s] writing instruction to Frontierland” (p. 492). Such metaphors assign to the pioneer and explorer the primaryduty of opening new territory with the goal of seeing what’s there. The explorer’s task is not to hold the hands ofthose who follow but to give them somewhere to follow to. Such entailments are not necessarily bad in themselves.But uncritical allegiance to the metaphor can—and in the case I have presented here, did—devalue those who stayedbehind to do the unglamorous work of home. To see this devaluation as meaningless is, indeed, to subscribe to thesupply-side belief that the benefits created by leaders will inevitably trickle down to everyone. There have indeed beentrickle-down improvements. But compositionists have traditionally championed not just the vanguard but also thoseothers whose lives are disrupted by forces imposed on them from above. Why should this not be the case when theothers in question are colleagues (and their students)? Are these people less visible because of an assumption imposedfrom above that it is their duty to shut up and cope?

I suggest that among our pioneers must be at least some who, at least some of the time, trade a sense of themselvesas trailblazers for a sense of themselves as representatives or ambassadors. Such a person does not hack through thewilderness toward grand vistas; she sits at the table and asks those crucial questions our critical scholars tally: Howdoes what we are promoting affect material realities back at home? Has everyone really had a voice, and if not, howcan we make sure more people are heard? How can the possibilities of this wonderful innovation be made accessible tothose who do not have the kind of time we do to explore and experiment?8 The need to be well-versed in the languageof the negotiations is what makes only a few of us fully qualified for the role. It is just because there are so few of uswith this level of expertise that those who possess it have a duty that someone caught up in a pioneer persona may notcompletely recognize.

This representation by technology specialists in the composition community may never fully bridge the clas-sist divide, any more than representative government ever ensures that every constituency is fully served. True,representative government imposes certain obligations on ordinary citizens, but these are only manageable if therepresentatives see themselves as listeners and conveyors of needs and concerns, if they help to impress on thedesigners with whom they can so ably communicate the need for mechanisms that make input visible as, not after,decisions are being made. It has been this experience as a witness to a disruptive, damaging, and expensive techno-logical decision-making process that has brought this need home to me, and that makes me hope that our pioneerswill slow down to sit at the table sometimes and conduct the boring talks and tedious persuasion that could make

8 For a similar set of questions, see Payne (2005), p. 503.

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critical intervention by literacy specialists more than an intellectual exercise—that could render it meaningful andreal.

Virginia Anderson is an associate professor of English at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, Indiana. Her work has appeared in JAC: AJournal of Advanced Composition, College English, College Composition and Communication, and Rhetoric Review. With Susan Romano, she isco-editor of Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric and Composition (Hampton Press, 2005).

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