I’m currently in the process of setting up Drupal sites for my classes, and I’ve run into a dilemma. Should I use a wysiwyg editor or not? I personally don’t care for them, but would students feel more comfortable composing blog entries in an environment that looks a bit more like a word processor?

In the past, I’ve argued that a plain text editor really leaves more control in the hands of the author, and control is what it’s all about. When a student wants to emphasize text in a blog entry, the path through learning how to properly write an <em> tag pulls them through a thought process that encourage reflection on why and how some text is emphasized. It also gives the student a glimpse under the hood, which — in a day when HTML skills are increasingly less a gateway to web literacy — starts to reveal the layers of software and platform underlying the Internet Explorer / Facebook concept of the web that might otherwise be the default.

With this blog entry, I launch a new version of zachwhalen.net, switching from my old, SHTML-powered site (using a template technique I was quite fond of) to a shiny new Drupal site. That in itself probably doesn’t seem very significant, since I use Drupal for everything, but with this change, all of the sites I’ve built or otherwise keep an eye on are running some kind of blog engine or CMS. I confess a feeling of loss at the notion no longer starting a site build with a text editor.

This shift is also something I’m trying to come to terms with in my teaching as well. The concept of what constitutes New Media writing, for example, is one that necessarily changes, and as I start designing a writing intensive New Media course for next spring, I’ve decided, finally, to leave out my standard unit on crafting web pages “by hand.” So will I replace that unit with one on building sites out of Drupal? Perhaps.

For now, though, I want to inaugurate this space by reflecting on why this space exists as it now does and what I hope to accomplish with it.