Authoring Programs and the Thinking Process
There are profound reasons for avoiding authoring programs and actually teaching code related to the kind of thinking the authoring program may inspire. In his study of PowerPoint, Ian Parker points out that the program (particularly in its AutoContent feature) "helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world...even the most easygoing PowerPoint template insists on a heading followed by bullet points, so that the user is shepherded toward a staccato, summarizing frame of mind" (76).
Authoring programs, particularly those that use templates (like the FrontPage "themes") do much the same thing. They provide writers with a ready-made design that enforces a particular idea of how a web page should look and function. Writers are saved from the frustration of positioning tags and layout tables, but they are also "saved" from the process of creating a more unique, individual design.
This kind of authoring program would seem to work best for those whose chief concern is paper-based text--those using the Web as a place for posting traditional student papers. In this instance, the authoring program frees student authors from the concerns of design, allowing them to concentrate on "text," and some instructors may be satisfied that it does. However, in doing so, the authoring program is divorcing the student from the real nature of Web "writing."
As Steven Johnson points out in another context, the "template world" encourages thinking that is both "user friendly" and sterile, devoid of the messy creative process that is one undeniable feature of the Web (62). It also divorces students from the results of their choices. The authoring program creates an ideal world, a prototypical browser that reproduces the student's creation exactly as specified, while the real world of multiple browsers and multiple viewing audiences remains an unpleasant, if unbroached, hidden reality. Jeffrey Veen's "postmodern nightmare"( Art and Science of Web Design 109) -- the Web in which nothing on the page can be fixed and unchangeable -- is hidden beneath a "user-friendly" façade, yet when those pages are mounted on a server, the façade may be stripped away, leaving the students with a tangle of slow-loading pages, missing images, and broken code.
Citation Format:
Batschelet, Margaret. "Learning To Love the Code: HTML As a Tool in the Writing Classroom." The Writing Instructor. 2004. http://www.writinginstructor.org/files/batschelet/
(Date Accessed).
Review Process: Margaret Batschelet's
hypertext was accepted for publication following blind, peer review.