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.