Online digital media, especially software designed specifically for pedagogical use, presents comparable obstacles in terms of connecting to that which is outside their purview. Educational platforms like Blackboard[1] and Finalsite[2] are inward-looking systems that have a conventional relationship to content and whose interaction design tends to encourage navigators to remain within the confines of the system, directing their attention back to its many nodes, pages, plug-ins and modules. Although internally consistent and relatively comprehensive in its features, these systems tend to feel closed off. Ask anyone who uses Blackboard to describe it, and the words “sterile,” “clunky,” and “institutional” are invariably invoked. What is underlying these sentiments is the frustration that these interfaces do not participate in society, but form an enclosure from which to observe its workings from afar. (from “Crowdmapping the Classroom with Ushahidi” by Kenneth Rogers in Learning Through Digital Media Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy Edited by R. Trebor Scholz)

Based on this observation, which I consider fundamentally right, Rogers offers “ten guidelines I always try to follow to effectively select and critically employ digital tools in the classroom.” Here they are:

• Do not use digital tools gratuitously or teach them as if learning the tool is an end in itself.
• The selection of a digital tool should always be determined from an immediate social issue or local problem that is the larger concern of the class and for which the tool might have some relevant impact. Repeatedly ask the question, is this tool relevant to address the issue or problem posed to the class?
• Select digital tools that are being used by social groups other than a classroom. Always demonstrate the connections of the digital tool to spaces/environments outside of the classroom. Who uses it? What immediate social purpose does it serve?
• Illustrate the direct cultural, social, political, historical and economic context out of which a given digital tool arose. This must be understood as part of its functionality.
• Avoid digital tools that replicate classroom space; seek tools that reconfigure it.
• Dispense with the laboratory method of teaching digital tools that privileges the tool’s problem-solving capacity over and above the problem to which it is applied. Let the tool itself be reshaped by the problem.
• Wherever possible and appropriate, encourage the creative repurposing of a digital tool against its original intent.
• De-emphasize digital tools that are overly oriented around an individualized “user.”
• Emphasize digital tools that have collaborative capacity and that produce cultural situations that facilitate collective engagement.
• Identify digital tools that can help sustain participation in a project long after the class is over.