Using templates to understand web design can open doors for our students that starting with “coding education” may not.
At a place like Stanford, a lot of people (and this includes both people outside of and inside the university) believe that the students are naturally gifted tech whizzes. Maybe it has to do with the fact that Stanford is located in the heart of Silicon Valley and tends to be a bit of an incubator for interns at, well, any of the major tech companies in the area. Maybe it has to do with being an elite, private institution where the expectation is that all of the students attending have had the substantial privileges to have exposure to all kinds of gadgets and devices in high school. That’s not completely wrong, of course; many students do, indeed, come to the university with immensely sophisticated backgrounds in and exposure to high school programming classes and other such resources.
But a lot don’t. So, when we have students entering college with varying levels of exposure to digital learning, how do we level the playing field?
The first thing we have to tackle, of course, is what digital learning is. That’s a huge field to define, and I’m going to do the most superficial brush in this post (as a side note, I’m using this post as a bit of an exploratory moment for a longer concept I want to dig into in the future, so any thoughts/questions you have in response would be helpful for developing my thoughts on this!). When I think of digital learning, I think of both consuming and producing content in digital spaces. That might take the form of computer science education, like coding/programming, where students are producing content that exists only in digital spaces. It also might take the form of reading articles online and understanding the source, context, and meaning of the articles. It could just as equally take the form of producing multimedia, creating graphics or videos. In short, digital learning involves engagement in online spaces and being able to both learn from and contribute to those spaces.
In rhetoric and composition, my academic background, a debate that a lot of scholars have when considering what digital literacy education should look like in writing studies in particular is how much students should learn to code in order to be able to write in digital spaces. The question of whether a coding education should become a part of a writing education is a provocative one, as it conflates the role of writer and designer. A web writer should, in this line of argumentation, be able not just to write linear, alphabetic text, but also to be able to write the code on the back end to impact what those words will look like on the front end.
I am sympathetic to this perspective, as it is grounded in the fact that so much of our writing is distributed in online channels. Indeed, the design of that writing has a tremendous impact on how that writing is read, understood, and circulated thereafter. Plus, in online spaces, writing itself is often read in multimedia environments, where text appears alongside images, videos, and sounds. Dynamic media is an inevitable part of our reading and writing landscape, and, from an educational perspective, we should aim to help our students navigate these spaces rather than to avoid them.
Yet I’ve never found myself fully convinced that every student needs to be able to become a full-stack developer in order to become an effective writer. After all, given the proliferation of blogging and website development tools, writers can almost instantly publish their writing without needing to touch the back end. I think for many writers, front-end web editing software has been a tremendous way to pay attention to visual design without needing to learn another set of functional literacies. I’ve been willing to say that inviting students to use templates or blogging platforms allows students to make choices about how to display text in online environments without having to code those environments from scratch. In other words, students can be writers and designers without needing to know how to code and without needing to understand web databases.
But is using a template a digital literacy skill? By asking students to create websites with front-end, WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get; e.g. “drag-and-drop”) tools, are we actually preventing them from learning important and critical skills?
Right now, on December 14th, 2018, I’m putting my stake in this debate by saying… “no!” I’m not sure we need to worry about inviting students to use templates as a hindrance to digital learning. In fact, I think we can see encouraging students to build blogs and websites with “drag-and-drop-tools” as a kind of gateway to digital learning. Not all drag-and-drop tools are even necessarily easy to learn either, and require their own sets of literacies to understand. Users need to know what certain buttons mean, for example, and even need to be able to understand some key terms, like “padding” for setting the amount of space around an image. Using templates, in other words, starts to give students a vocabulary for interacting in a web development environment without all of the overhead of an entirely new language and logic.
The beauty of templates to me is that students gain some exposure to thinking about what Web design spaces look like and can gain some interest in the process too. Inevitably, users become frustrated by the eventual limitations of a template and are then motivated authentically to learn more. If we don’t offer the gateway into teaching in these spaces, students may themselves never discover any authentic interest in learning more.
In other words, when we encourage the use of templates, we actually create more equitable opportunities for students to enter into the conversation about web design in the first place.