I have been supplementing courses with web-based materials for many years. Last year I tried WebCT, one of the new breed of web courseware authoring packages available to make our jobs somewhat easier. I came away from the experience impressed by many of the technical advantages of WebCT, but troubled by some of the politics which, I wish to argue, are embedded in the structure of the courseware package itself. I use WebCT as the exemplar of this family of software, but I would further argue that the embedded politics of this family of software go far beyond the specific merits or demerits of any particular version.

First, what is a web courseware authoring package? Briefly, WebCT (Web Course Tools) and its cousins, Virtual U, Blackboard and the like, are packages of tools that simplify the technical side of creating (for the instructor) and using (for the student) the vast range of teaching opportunities that the Internet affords. You can use WebCT if your university has paid for a site license, in which case you will have access to the tools on a secure server. As an instructor, you are presented with blank web page and an array of utilities for uploading and linking files. The system also includes e-mail, asynchronous conferencing and synchronous chat. Your students do not need to figure out the complexities of signing onto newsgroups or finding their way about in a MOO. They use any web browser to point and click on the page you have set up. Seamlessly (more or less) they will be in whichever virtual space you have designed for the exercise at hand. (See below for more on WebCT.)

For the instructor, panoptic surveillance is also made easy. A keystroke can tell you how many logins each student has made (though you must still read the postings to see if he or she has said anything intelligent). In other ways, though, the universe of a WebCT course is a very private one. The page can only be accessed by password. Partly this smooths the way for the posting of copyrighted materials: publishers are much more comfortable granting copyright clearance if they know that not everyone in the world will be able to access their materials. More important, students who are not used to speaking frankly in the highly public sphere of the Internet may be able to engage in much freer discussion knowing that only their classmates will be able to read their postings.

This system has a number of obvious technical advantages. However, I have a number of problems with the philosophy behind the system. All technologies are products of a particular social environment. More disturbingly, once developed they tend to reproduce the social environment in which they were developed. To borrow terminology from Russ Hunt, Internet tools, like all tools, afford certain things and certain beliefs -- make them easy -- and constrain others -- make them hard. Unless we understand these affordances and constraints, we will tend to drift, consciously or unconsciously, in the direction that the tools' winds blow.

Here are three aspects of WebCT, ranged roughly in order of importance, which seem to me to offer certain affordances and constraints that I believe should make us wary:

1. It's too tidy.

This complaint, of course, is perverse because it is the very tidiness of the system that makes it attractive. But my problem is that it's tidy not just in the sense of offering a technically simple interface. It's also tidy in the sense of offering a simplified and closed universe.

One of my goals in teaching Web-supported courses goes beyond the teaching of the content and skills specific to the course at hand. My larger goal is to expose students systematically to the world of the Internet itself: the messy, baggy, porous world of intersecting conversations and overlapping communities. When they sign onto a newsgroup or walk into a MOO, they are entering a world where their words are public and where they can listen publicly to the words of others. They can end up signing onto a dozen newsgroups other than the ones set up for the class, start exchanging e-mail with people on the other side of the world, read an infinite number of documents which may or may not be directly related to the agenda of the course. Most won't, of course: I won't pretend that many students go very far from what's going to be on the exam. But at least they see the edges of the Internet's hugely expansive universe.

But not in WebCT. This universe is closed. They can only sign onto the forums that have been set up for the class, only send e-mail to each other. They are sitting in front of a web browser, so in theory they can read anything they want, but the built-in tendency of the system presses in the direction of reading the course materials. Since the outside world cannot get past the password, they cannot even fantasize that some day someone unconnected with the course will read their words while searching for something else, and perhaps, just perhaps, find them interesting.

2. It won't let us look over each other's shoulders. . .

When I sat down to start designing a WebCT course, I realized that I had no models. I am used to spending odd moments poking around other people's course-related sites, borrowing a little bit of this idea and a little of that from people who may be close friends or perfect strangers. I try to ask permission and give credit where it's due if I reuse any chunks of text, but it's seldom chunks of text that I'm after. It's inspiration: I can see how dozens of other teachers have structured their courses and model mine after the ones I think are most successful.

WebCT won't let me do this unless someone chooses to invite me in and supplies me with a guest password. This is more than merely inconvenient. It subverts a culture of exchange that most of us who create web-supported environments depend on more than we perhaps know. We all know how much we have learned from observing each other's teaching. The Internet has afforded an environment in which the fantasy of being able to drop in on each other's classrooms has become a reality. But not in WebCT.

3. It privileges text over performance.

This last kvetch, related to the other two, is in my opinion the most troubling. The WebCT course can masquerade as just "courseware," as a packaged, protected commodity. The password stands as a symbol that what has been developed has taken considerable time and money -- often institutional money -- to develop, and that people should not expect to view it unless they have paid their money to take the course.

This offends my sense of Internet culture, a culture based on the vaguely socialistic theory that more information is better for everyone--else why put it on the web in the first place? But more important than this vague "gift culture" of the Internet is a culture of teaching as performance. According to this culture, stable texts from the textbook to class handouts make up no more than a substructure on which the real work of teaching is mounted. The real work of teaching occurs in the class, where texts, including the instructor's more or less detailed lecture notes (ideally) come alive in an unfolding day-by-day performance of knowledge, a dynamic interaction between student and teacher and student and student that is never the same twice.

This dynamic interaction can certainly be textualized. The essence of any on-line distance course is in the discussion groups in which the daily give-and-take of classroom interaction unfolds in textual form. This does not particularly bother me. What bothers me is the suspicion that the felt need for a password affords a quite different view of education, in which an unauthorized viewer of the texts is truly taking something of value. It says that the course is little more than the sum of its texts. It is a relatively short slide from this notion to the related one that the important person in the course is the course "author," who is paid for his or her expertise while the people who do the "real" work of the course, the people who manage the day to day interactions with students, can be "tutorial instructors" who are in one way or another out of the academic mainstream.

Of course it is not just web packages that cause this mindset. It has been part of education, especially in large-sectioned courses with tutorial sections, practically forever. It is accentuated in any distance-education model in which the context requires additional textualization of the daily performance of education. But the password-protected "courseware" that web packages afford carries with it the danger of sliding further and further into thinking that there is something precious about the texts around which a course is structured, as if these were really what education is.

It is this feeling that I am ultimately disturbed by. Partly I am worried about the effect of "courseware" thinking on university administrators in this era of revenue generation--always a concern, and I could tell you lots of stories about that if I had more time. But I am more worried about its effect on us as teachers, who may be quietly led by the tendencies of our medium to think that our job is to "write" a "course" which is then sold as a packaged commodity rather than as an unfolding experience.

Read me carefully here. I am by no means arguing against distance learning, in which the textualization of performance is to some extent natural and inevitable. Nor am I intending to fixate on this or that feature of a particular package--features which may just as well be different in the next release. What I am disturbed by is a package of thinking that makes passwords seem natural, closed universes worth their cost, and product more valuable than performance.

Notwithstanding the above, I don't reject web courseware authoring tools. As I write, I am already supervising the development of a new all-distance course, and we will almost certainly use WebCT for the many conveniences it provides as opposed to gluing together the usual bricolage of internet tools. If I'm a Luddite at least I know when to quit. But I also keenly aware of the degree to which technologies have politics. My advice is to keep using these tools for the conveniences they can offer. But please, please keep being disturbed.?