Introduction

In one of the classrooms adjacent to our offices, they’ve taken down the blackboards, sturdy hold-overs that have wrapped around the walls for almost seventy years. These blackboards no doubt bear the traces of tens of thousands of classes, the writing, erasing, and rewriting that define us as classroom teachers. For those of us who have grown up and now work in classrooms, there is a familiar comfort there not unlike the creative comfort evoked by Gaston Bachelard (1958/1994) when he describes a house as “the space we love,” replete with its “images of felicitous space” (p. xxxv). In our professional lives, we teachers may well find an analogous space in the classroom, where each semester, even each class period, holds out the tantalizing prospect of creating something new, of finding a nook or cranny of thought for ourselves and our students. And maybe there’s no better anchor for that creative academic space than the blackboard, which in its constant erasures leaves open the possibility of something better in the next writing. Broken chalk, outworn erasers, hands smeared with yellow dust—each annoyance also carries its own fondness, like the niches, hinges, and old locks that Bachelard describes.

              But the composition students who matriculate this year to our small, liberal arts college will have a quite different association with the word Blackboard, for the blackboards have been taken down during the construction of a new computer lab—chalk dust, we are told, can damage the machines—and the space that the students will inhabit will be as much virtual as physical. Structuring that virtual space will be Blackboard, a course management system similar to WebCT or Nicenet. Roughly eighty percent of this college’s courses use Blackboard (Level 1, Version 5) in some capacity, of which twenty-five specific sections are Rhetoric courses. Blackboard will house most of our students’ assignments, their syllabi, their discussion lists, and their grades. They will use it to stay up-to-date between class meetings, and in this particular computer classroom, they will use Blackboard to share files as well, so that each time students meet with one another virtually, they will be doing it in the space of Blackboard. And though it may be an exaggeration to claim, as does Matt Pitinsky, the founder and president of Blackboard, that "Everything that happens in class, metaphorically, that's the breadth of what a CMS does" (Electronic, 2002), Blackboard undeniably alters our students' interaction with their classes, their teachers, and their writing. 

       Our students won’t be alone. According to the company’s press releases, by September 2001 Blackboard had been adopted by 2,700 institutions in140 countries (2001). It is impossible to quantify precisely the number of students actually using Blackboard in their courses and even more difficult to ascertain the extent of that use, but it seems safe to say that there the numbers reach quickly into the millions and are growing rapidly. In the quarter that ended September 30, 2002, total revenue at the privately owned company was $19.0 million, up 38% from the year before (November 2002). In fiscal year 2001, total revenue was $46.5 million, triple the revue of 2000 (March 2002). Recent investment by AOL-Time Warner, Microsoft, Dell, and Kaplan Ventures, and Pearson Education, combined with a fast growing E-education market outside the US, suggests that at least for the foreseeable future, Blackboard will remain the industry standard.

         As we ask our students more and more frequently to inhabit a virtual space, we would do well to investigate just what kind of space it is. After all, we’re no longer in the house that Bachelard (1958/1994) describes, the “provisional refuge or an occasional shelter” conducive to “intimate day-dreaming,” even if web navigators do supply a tiny house icon to take us to our virtual homes (p. xxxvii). Clearly, the metaphors have changed, and with them, so have our ways of negotiating space, acquiring knowledge, and interacting with communities. Along with these shifts come changes in ways of teaching. Too often, Blackboard, like other course management systems, is seen simply as a way of presenting a traditional course on-line without altering it. But if that is the only change, then the uses of new technologies may be not revolutionary but conservative, with expensive hardware and software solidifying existing pedagogies rather than prompting new ones. Cultural critic Mark Taylor (2001) argues that the shift in technology ought to have far more impact: “As new pedagogical resources emerge, it becomes clear that e-Ed is not, as many people continue to believe, merely a different way of delivering what goes on in traditional classrooms. Rather, new software transforms the educational experience” (p. 262).  

        In the case of technology's effect on student writing, that educational experience needs to be investigated as comprehensively as possible. Though individual technologies such as email, synchronous communication, listserves, and file exchanges have been studied frequently in the field of composition (see, for instance, Cooper, 1999; Warschauer,1995; Warschauer and Lepeintre, 1997; Eldred, 1991), scholars have yet to assess the effect of placing those technologies in a single course management system. What opportunities does that system afford to writing teachers? And what are the potential pitfalls or abuses that arise when instructors can modify, observe, and judge the moves that students make within that system?

To begin to understand this transformation, in this essay we investigate metaphors that can structure or describe the virtual space of Blackboard, and we offer concrete suggestions about how to account for those metaphors in our own classes. Because of our own institutional positions at a residential liberal arts college, we focus on the use of Blackboard within a traditional classroom rather than in a distance learning environment, yet we hope that our observations will prompt a reconsideration of the uses of Blackboard regardless of an instructor’s institutional setting.[i] To that end, we have also generated (and linked with a icon) a series of practical applications, concerns, and class exercises—theoretically informed tips for using Blackboard in a composition course.