Assistant Professor of Technical Communication, Illinois Institute of Technology
Preliminary ideas on responding to the challenges and opportunities open source software presents to digital literacy and writing.
Chicago, IL—
In two weeks, I will present a talk at ATTW in New Orleans titled “Rethinking Digital Literacy in Terms of ‘Open Source.’” This talk stems from an article that I am writing about changing writing teacher’s (and student’s) attitudes towards software literacy through the vehicle of free and open source software (hereafter just “open source software").
My primary assumption is that, for all of the attention that open source software is receiving (often in “back channel” discussions on listservs and in conference bar rooms), open source software is positioned to alter the economic conditions of digital production, while leaving the literate practices behind software use unexamined.
Anyone can download OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice for free (though donations large and small are accepted); Microsoft Office, even with deeply discounted campus licensing, still costs money. Potentially lots of money. Students who can afford costly software like Microsoft Office on their own machines are, I believe, in a more advantageous position than are students dependent on campus computer labs. They are likely more exposed to the software, having it readily available for a variety of communication tasks, plus they can better control the environments in which they work. Campus computer labs are often as much a social gathering-place as they are a work area. Free, open source software would undoubtedly change this access divide (assuming that a student can afford her own personal computer to begin with).
But as important as shifting economic access is, it pales in comparison to the impact open source software could have on digital literacy. For the first time, the ability is within our reach to work on, rather than merely with, the tools and formats that support digital communication. In an open source software model, it’s not necessary, at least in theory, to wait for the software engineers at Microsoft or Adobe to deliver the Next Big Thing. Along with sites that provide downloads of open source software, numerous others have sprung up to assist communities of developers in the advancement of the software itself.
Of course, in rhetoric and composition and technical communication, we and our students are far from poised to start digging into the source code and working to advance these tools ourselves. Indeed, we’re also far from poised to begin participating meaningfully and intelligently in the communities of practice surrounding open source efforts. But I do believe such a thing is possible.
For such a thing to be possible, though, we are going to have to start changing our approaches to digital literacy. As it stands now, I think that “digital literacy” is equated with point-and-click software proficiency, complete with the tricky claims--either uttered explicitly or presented implicitly in documents like resumes--that a given person “knows” Word or Dreamweaver or Photoshop. But beyond commanding or even wrangling such software, what does such proficiency enable? Does it provide for competencies in unfamiliar software? or foundations for advancement and innovation in the digital medium beyond the built-in functionality of a given piece of software?
No one less than Alan Kay, a major figure in the development of the graphical user interface, remarked in “User Interface: A Personal View” that:
The ability to “read” a medium means you can access materials and tools created by others. The ability to “write” in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.
I’ll take a huge step away from the conventional wisdom of computers and writing’s last ten years, and possibly Kay’s intention, too, and take his use of “writing” quite literally. There is no question, of course, that pointing and clicking through a tool can create some pretty spectacular work. At the same time, there is no question that points and clicks have to translate to computer language at some point; this is easily demonstrated in software like Dreamweaver, whose code view immediately reveals the language “written” based on user choices within the graphical interface.
A key first step toward a source-level digital literacy is looking at the most basic unit of digital communication: the file format, especially simple, open source formats like HTML and CSS. Software, whether open source and free, or proprietary and expensive, matters little to the rhetorical situation of digital communication, relative to the file format. Software is marketed according to what it can do for digital producers. What matters most are the file formats that one’s audience members receive: the best software in the world is rendered useless if the file formats it produces are inaccessible across a wide range of devices.
This is the heartbreak, failure, and, to put it bluntly, stupidity of Microsoft’s new .docx format, which is completely non-compatible with previous versions of Word (unless a user downloads a patch to enable such files to be read; but for something that should be as basic as a word processor file, this is, to my mind, an unreasonable burden on an audience).
Looking at an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, like OpenOffice.org, one sees the use of the open--and now fully standardized by the ISO--Open Document Format. Open source software, unsurprisingly, makes use of open formats. Although it is possible to edit the XML code behind ODT files, the format itself is still largely in the service of software that generates the files. Not humans. This is why it is important to begin building a new source literacy with formats that are easily human writable, like HTML and CSS: not as ends in and of themselves, but as foundational literacies for producing other types of code.
A source-level digital literacy would move computers and writing and technical communication forward by leaps and bounds, simply because rather than being limited to a range of digital rhetorical action enabled by a software interface, digital writers would be able to generate new, innovative tools to support digital communication--all the while paying attention to the formats, languages, and protocols that would allow writers to reach the widest possible digital audience for a given rhetorical situation. The payoff of a source-level digital literacy, in other words, would serve nearer-term goals of successful, device-independent digital communication, and longer-term goals of building digital literacies required for working with more advanced languages and code bases.
It goes without saying that the most exciting revolutions in digital communication--from Facebook to Flickr, Drupal to Moodle--did not arise from people honing their Dreamweaver skills. Such innovations arose from closer, thoughtful and, indeed, collaborative work with the standardized languages that make up the Web, which in turn produced entirely new combinations of languages, like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) that powers Gmail, Facebook, and a growing number of so-called “rich Internet applications."
Our challenge, as individuals and as a field, is to determine how we will actively participate in these innovations, and to throw off the idea, derived as much as anything from the implicit messages in the marketing of “user-friendly” consumer software, that we are somehow inadequate or just too dumb to work with the languages that directly affect digital communication.
I’m an assistant professor of technical communication at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL. I completed my PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2007.
This fall, I am teaching graduate seminars in Information Structure and Retrieval, and Open Source in Technical Communication.
On Twitter: Christmas has come early from the mad scientists behind Gmail.
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