When we as writing teachers teach writing, does word processor choice make a difference? As a proponent of open source in academia, I believe that not making a choice is a choice also. There is no default word processing choice unless we make it so with unthinking use.

I am teaching English 520: Rhetoric and Composition for High School/ Junior College in the fall. It is overloaded, and is a required class for new and M.A.T.-seeking teachers. I know that the undergrads will be fanning out into a wide spectrum of poor to rich school districts in the spring when they student teach and after graduation in their new jobs as classroom teachers. The M.A.T. students tend to already be employed and are fitting in their graduate work around a full-time teaching load, usually in a high school somewhere within an hour and a half radius. At one end of of the teaching reality for these students is the community colleges, which not only get money from the state, they also get money from their county. This leads to the conundrum of some community colleges in Missouri proportionately having more money to spend on pricey writing and new media classroom than the four-year plan university down the road. K-12 schools understandably vary. As far as I know based on the widely different tech backgrounds of my first-year composition students, where the district is located (rural Ozarks vs. suburban KC or St Louis) can make a huge difference, at times between everyone having access to their own computer to the dusty 486 in the back of the classroom used for DOS-based skill and drill, the virtual version of the dreaded worksheet.

All of this is just background for the issue I am considering with some ethical trepidation: should I make Open Office Writer the word processor of choice for work produced in this class? After all, these are teachers--future or current. Any pedagogical choice for them is fodder for debate, and I do not want to take away from their freedom to choose.

At the same time, I have required Open Office in all my other classes without a qualm, but with the caveat that I didn’t care what program they use to produce their work as long as any assignment that requires files sent to me or files posted to the blog for peer review be .odt files. All the labs on campus have Open Office, so even students who don’t add Open Office to their own computer (or don’t have their own) can easily produce or convert files. Those who post other formats are not penalized, but especially those who post .docx files are in danger of getting reduced feedback from their peers because many cannot open the files on their home computers.

I also model Open Office use. When I show writing actions and examples on the screen (portable cart--I teach for the most part in desk-chairs classrooms), I use Writer  for my word processor and Impress for presentations. The result was that they loved the clean, easy interface and most added Open Office to their own computers, if only to be able to open any of the various file formats they might encounter (yes, that includes .docx). It also didn’t hurt that Open Office is free. Given the choice, most chose Open Office over the default/only word processor bundled with their computer. For these students, they chose the computer, not the word processor that came with it. Some students were especially grateful since they had low-end computers with no word processor at all--they were trying to get by with Text Edit. Others simply preferred it over the word processor that came with their computer, and that included Microsoft Office 2007, Word Perfect, and Microsoft Works.

For these students, my requirement added the element of choice where previously there had been no choice. At the end of the semester this spring, I managed to find space in a computer classroom so that the juniors and seniors in my Writing II for Graduate and Professional Schools class could have ample in-class drafting and feedback time for the APA researched paper due at the end of the semester. Although all the labs on campus have Open Office, this was a computer classroom used mainly for statistics classes and It had Microsoft Office 2007 only. They strongly resented not having a choice and those without Vista at home grudgingly made the best of it by saving their files in .rtf.

What it comes down to is that I want my all my students and especially the future teachers among them to “pay attention,” as Cindy Selfe has stressed so many times in her work. We all need to pay attention to technology choices. Not choosing is also a choice. For educators, open source is a far better choice because of its flexibility and the reduced likelihood that OSS will exclude any of our students in the way proprietary software can, either by lack of functionality for task, by overly complex interfaces intended for an enterprise end-user, or, by the most heartbreaking reason for me as a teacher, simply excluding them by cost. I‘m still thinking the details through for this course, but one thing I do know is that thinking about pedagogical choices is important and ignoring it or defaulting to no choice won’t make the issue go away.