As its name implies, Blackboard, like the web, is structured as a metaphor. But to take the metaphor literally is to imagine an Alice-in-Wonderland world in which the blackboard is larger than the rooms it contains, in which dropboxes shrink and expand to fit their contents, in which a bunny hole of a link can lead to a dizzying expanse of hypermedia. Alternatively, we can read the metaphor as hopelessly mixed: a facile appropriation of a well-known construct (the blackboard and the classroom) into a virtual context that might be otherwise unfamiliar. On the system’s default first page template, for example, a foregrounded teacher’s apple perches precariously at the base of a traditional blackboard; the slate, filled not with handwriting but with the impossibly perfect lettering of a computer font, merges into a circuit board as it gets farther away from the viewer.
Just as metaphors
of manuscript and print culture (pages, copy and paste, scrolling, etc.) familiarize
the web, so metaphors of the classroom here are used to familiarize course management
software, and if they do not comprise a coherent metaphorical whole, that lack
probably bothers few users.
After
entering through the threshold of the login screen, the user is presented with
his or her own Blackboard portal, which includes a list of personal tools (such
as calendar, tasks, grades, address book, personal information) on the left,
a list of all of the classes in which the user is enrolled (or is an instructor)
on the right, and course announcements or institutional events in the middle.
The screen may also provide personal task reminders for the day, if the
user has entered them in advance. Upon
choosing a specific course, the user usually sees a course announcements page
with a set of option buttons on the left: announcements, course information,
course documents, assignments, communication, virtual classroom, external links,
and tools. Instructors see three
more rather utilitarian looking buttons below the general menu: resources, course
map, control panel. While these
categories and icons are formulaic and standard, the instructor has the ability
to hide some of them or to alter the appearance of buttons and banners. Barring
more advanced instructor intervention, standard formatting applies once users
enter specific spaces within the course, as well, though the number of groups
or discussion forums (both under the communications section), documents, or
assignments will of course change according to the class.
Only one space, the tools section, provides the opportunity for a student
to write privately. There the user can post and send documents, keep a calendar
and an address book, and even brainstorm on a small notepad, called an “electronic
blackboard.”
The
immediate metaphorical impact of this virtual space, with its straightforward
categories and easy navigation, seems rather flat.
The headings are functional and straightforward, using the language of
the course syllabus and the office organizer. As Cynthia and Richard Selfe (1994)
have pointed out, though, no computer interface is ideologically neutral. Whether
through an implicit promotion of corporate culture evidenced in images (desktops,
files, and folders as opposed to the organizational tools of a workbench or
a kitchen), or in a pervasive use of American English as the default language
in text and keystrokes, computer systems can have a subtle message to convey
to its users about normative culture (pp. 486-91). Today, even more than just
a few years ago, the standardization of interfaces has rendered their ideologies
almost invisible. Generally, Blackboard reinforces these same ideologies; at
the same time, its conventional metaphors of the classroom also embody distinctive
messages about education and authority.
Accordingly,
once we have entered Blackboard, we are in an institutional place that
holds few surprises or fanciful images. This
immediate familiarity is of course one of Blackboard’s strengths; users should
not be confused or put off by an electronic workspace they may have to depend
on. What is not obvious, even given
Blackboard’s apparent transparency, is the overall division of space and how
it will be used during a semester. What
are the hotspots for this course? Its
rarely used sections? How and when
will the student user be evaluated? What
Blackboard presents visually is a template without apparent inflection (except
for the buttons that may have been hidden from the left column). Only
once a course begins to be used by a community of instructor and students does
the space become dynamic and individualized. Without
its users, it is like a classroom filled with furniture and equipment, empty
and expectant.
The potential for this virtual space is nonetheless not infinite, and within Blackboard’s spaces students will doubtless encounter dead ends and dark alleys. It is not enough to analyze the discrete technologies that are named in Blackboard’s buttons; instead, we need to attend to the architecture of the broader course management system. In the remainder of this essay, three theorists of space and language—Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Michel de Certeau—help us analyze this space with an eye to both its limitations and its promises.