Abstract
As teachers who want to democratize the classroom and give as much power to students as we can, we struggle to subvert our own authority in meaningful ways. The three of us—two college-level writing teachers and a teacher/technologist—think of ourselves as resourceful academics in the underresourced world of composition studies. We appreciate how online collaborative tools, such as Google Docs, help the work of decentering by creating shared composing spaces between student and instructor. At the same time, we know that writing technology doesn’t decenter the classroom on its own and that using these powerful tools invites surveillance