Inviting Citizen Designers to Design Digital Interface for the Democratization of Web Online Environments
Web online environments are supposed to create unifying spaces where diverse societies, cultures and linguistics as well as literacies and knowledge associated with them merge together as negotiated in neutral space. However, these online environments are not culturally neutral or innocent communication landscapes. They may alienate the users from marginal/periphery social, cultural, and linguistic background and experience because of their disregard to their social, cultural, and linguistics norms and values in the digital contact zone. Acknowledging the social, cultural, and linguistic limitations of these technologies that aim to provide agency to their users in this chapter, this chapter proposes to invite citizen designers to design the interface of web online environment in general and Learning Management Systems (LMS) in particular because this process can transform online environments into democratic platforms. Citizen designers, who have democratic sentiments for the creation of a just society, are composition students in general and students with periphery cultural and linguistic experience in particular. Doing a cultural usability test of Blackboard 8, the author argues that current web interface design is not democratic and inclusive, and proposes to invite citizen designers to re/design interface of online environments for their democratization so that they would include people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and enhance writing students' writing powers.