What does it mean to “center ethical challenges” in the work of teaching writing to college students?
This is part of the provocation at this year’s Computers and Writing Conference, where the theme is “Mission Critical: Centering Ethical Challenges in Computers and Writing.” As I think about this theme, I keep mulling over the tensions in our responsibilities as educators: to what extent does our ability to resist invasive, unethical tech hinge upon our access to the time, resources, and labor that would allow us to explore alternatives to exploitative corporate solutions? To what extent do conditions of precarity make it more challenging for us to access the platforms, the infrastructures, and the spaces that would open up options for engaging with our tech ethically?
I’ll be giving a presentation at Computers & Writing this week that is in part precisely in response to some of my own questions. A couple of my colleagues at Stanford and I have been engaged in multi-year research on students’ uses of and perceptions of Google Docs as an individual and collaborative writing platform. On the surface, this study doesn’t sound particularly sexy; Google Docs, like other word processing technology, is practically invisible in our everyday technological interchanges and experiences. It is lightweight and functional and essentially replicates all of the affordances of reading and writing on paper. In that sense, it’s a technology that can’t necessarily transform our students into understanding the true affordances of living and writing online: of hyperlinking, of curating content, of crunching and interpreting large data sets.
And yet, I’ve consistently found spaces like Google Docs and Drive to be fascinating areas of study precisely because they are so ubiquitous and invisible and, indeed, what our primary research in the forms of interviews and focus groups with undergraduate students, has shown is that the platform itself becomes an opportunity to discuss all of the latent, unspoken inequities at the heart of digital composing: without getting too much into the weeds of the research (we plan to publish our results more formally), I will say that Google Docs often becomes a space for students to ask questions about authority and power online, about the material affordances and limitations of screens and keyboards for engaging in acts of deep and sustained thought, about ownership of intellectual work and about the extent to which work in Google Docs is, in fact, truly and really their own.
In examining the assumptions within a platform that we may otherwise dismiss as merely replicating the logics of print, it brings to the fore concerns with creating and sharing work with audiences of all kinds. It’s a platform that invites conversations about some of the core issues that may inform the development of web literacies in applications that more fully take advantage of the Web’s capabilities. In other words, asking students to work in Google Docs (as opposed to other document composing platforms like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice) may not inherently seem like a particularly radical act (and let me be clear here: it’s not), but it has the potential to bring important conversations around power and ownership directly to the fore.
Having these conversations is, of course, predicated on an instructors’ ability to open these conversations up. As someone who has been studying reading and writing technologies for nearly a decade now, I’m deeply aware of the many ways in which space, time, and material may impact creative output and consumption. But anyone outside of an academic environment probably doesn’t think twice about any of these things and, in fact, it’s a popular design adage to claim that the best design is, in fact, invisible. If we want to build usable products for people (whether creatives or not), we do not want the technology getting in the way of what we do. Attention to technologies themselves can be an impediment to doing the stuff we want to do.
At the same time, when we don’t see the technologies in front of us, when they do become completely invisible, we also lose sight of what could be wrong with them. Just as many of us who are able-bodied may not notice when a wheelchair ramp is absent, a disabled individual will see the lack of access right away. Practicing good allyship means developing an awareness of these absences too, so that those of us who are in positions of power and privilege can call out when essential resources are missing.
Similarly, when it comes to infrastructures and spaces for reading and writing, those of us who understand how platforms are built or how they might impact composing, may be able to see the possibilities for inequity, for surveillance, for power differentials in ways that for others may be invisible. To that end, it’s our responsibility to help people notice what might otherwise be invisible, to crack open the gilded edges of beautiful, invisible design and ensure that what’s underneath is not just functional, but is accessible and equitable.
Allow me to be the first to say that even with all of my knowledge of this topic, this isn’t easy for me. I admittedly have a lot to learn about centering ethical conversations in digital writing, and I think I have a longer way to go yet in helping other people who aren’t academics to understand why all of this stuff matters in the first place.
Indeed, to return to Google Docs as a platform for the moment, we may recognize that Google, as a corporation, owns access to unprecedented amounts of user data, and builds in tools that encourage dangerous surveillance philosophies (a recent feature that allows users to check the analytics of how many times particular users have read a document comes to mind). At the same time, the reliable competitors to Google Docs are few and far between, and encouraging adoption of alternatives requires significant change management skills. My current job, as a technology specialist, is to encourage adoption of digital tools where and how it makes sense for our teaching, and I’m still struggling to figure out the best ways to motivate and inspire instructors and students alike to make choices – often tough ones – about what they use and when. As a consumer, I struggle to motivate myself often enough to make the right and ethical choices about what I use. It’s not easy, and it’s not unlike going out of my way to buy fair trade coffee or chocolate, for example. You know it’s the right thing, and yet it’s not always the easy thing or the possible thing.
One thing I want to note here is that we also shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we can’t always make ethical choices about the technologies that we use every single time that we use them. We can’t be perfect all the time, and punishing ourselves or engaging in punitive, self-loathing behavior probably won’t motivate ourselves to make any changes to our behaviors. But if we can continue engaging in conversations with those that we look up to, those who are experts, those who are knowledgeable and have done the research, little by little, we can make small changes to our behaviors and, little by little, become those who might motivate and inspire those around us to become critical, thoughtful consumers of the invisible writing interfaces that impact our everyday reading and writing lives.
Centering ethical challenges might also mean centering conversations with those who can make the invisible visible, to help us uncover what we may not otherwise access, and to help us reorient our respective moral compasses.