Technology & Learning
Community

From the Facilitator

June 1998

Confessions of a Cyber-Learner, or Carol's Adventures in Cyberland
by Carol Cross, Web Facilitator, Technology and Learning Community (TLC),  League for Innovation in the Community College 

In the spring, I had the tables turned on me a bit, for I participated in my first totally online or virtual conference. This unique learning opportunity not only provided me with rich informational resources for my work, but gave me a renewed first-hand experience of what it is like to actually try to learn something from these new educational technologies we are always promoting.  

This great learning experience was provided for me thanks to Jim Shimabukuro and Bert Kimura of Kapiolani Community College and their colleagues at Hawaii Community College, sponsors of the annual Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference, an Internet-only conference dealing with teaching issues facing community college professionals who are attempting to teach online. The conference, which ran for over five days including pre-conference sessions, allowed participants such as myself to read and comment on over 100 presentations on online instruction, join in open forums, visit with presenters, discuss keynotes with colleagues, take virtual web tours to visit Hawaii, and relax and chat at the real-time Coconut Cafe, using exclusively email, the Web, MOOs, and other Internet technologies. (For more information, see the March 1998 From the Field article, Online Learning about Online Teaching).  

This was my first experience of an entirely online conference,  and I found it to be significantly different than my usual conference experience. For one thing, while there was easily as much content as a traditional conference, there wasn't that annoying experience of having to choose between two compelling (based on the conference brochure thumbnail description, at least) sessions at the same time, since the papers were posted and available for reading at any point during the 72 hours of the formal conference. Although there were competing “chat sessions” in which to discuss the presentations in real-time via computer conferencing, at least I could choose which to attend AFTER having read the substance of their presentation. Furthermore, I could allegedly read a transcript of any chat session I missed (although I don't think I ever discovered quite HOW to do that), and could send a relevant question or comment via e-mail directly to the presenter at any time, or to a number of listservs that were generating prolific e-mail discussions during the course of the conference.  

Perhaps my biggest surprise, however, was how these listservs and chat sessions drew me into being much more participatory than I typically am at, using the hip abbreviation of the online crowd, f2f (for “face to face”) conferences. I relied primarily on the listservs, but found that questions I raised or comments I made were generating responses from others for days afterward, usually burrowing much deeper into the topic at hand than I had ever suspected from my original posting. In my experience, the quality of the “audience” response to the presenters was far superior to most conferences I attend, as well as being more diverse, since significant proportions of the most active conferees were from different countries. I was delighted to get perspectives from such places as Estonia, a country from which I don't think I've ever met a native, let alone one who writes English fluently and can discuss at length the issues of online and distant distance education in that part of the world.  

My most disorienting experience, on the other hand, was my first foray into the wild and woolly world of the MOO. MOO, which stands for MUD (which itself stands for Multi-User Dimension) Object Oriented, is a web technology that creates a virtual environment in which your self-selected character or “avatar” can move about and “do” things in addition to “speak” by posting text.  Of course, these enhanced possibilities come at a price--the need to, at a minimum, learn new commands and behaviors to navigate through this space, rather than simply typing and sending email messages, and perhaps even acquiring and mastering new MOO software. HCC's valiant Judi Fitzpatrick and Juli Burke generously gave up their weekend to hold training sessions prior to the conference for virgin MOOers such as myself, and I'm sure spent most the conference responding to the frequent pleas for help for MOO newbies who found themselves lost in this new flavor of cyberspace.  

I basically managed to hack myself through one of the training sessions, naively thinking it didn't seem like such a big deal. When I tried actually attending my first presenter chat session, which were all held in the MOO”s virtual Coconut Cafe, I discovered to my chagrin how little I knew about what I was doing. I “teleported” myself to the Cafe in search of the first keynote speaker, who was supposed to be holding forth in the Pearl Lagoon. However, nothing much was going on in the Coconut Cafe, and I had no clue about how to find the infamous Pearl Lagoon. I lurched through one virtual passageway to the next, running into only a few characters, none of whom seemed to be attending a virtual conference on online learning. Somehow, I eventually stumbled onto the Pearl Lagoon, where the keynote presenter, a renowned educator from Japan, had assumed the guise of a blue heron and was chatting with the only other person who seemed to have found this virtual Shangri-La. I truly felt like Alice in Wonderland, who had fallen down this cyber-hole and found herself conversing about non-Western online education with a blue heron. I'm afraid I could only make a few lame comments and then, exhausted by the thought of trying to find my way back through the cyber-maze through which I had come, took the cowards way out and rebooted my computer.   

My subsequent MOO experiences were a little less clumsy and surreal, although perhaps more jarring in some ways. First, in an online equivalent of “when all else fails, read the manual,” I consulted my MOO guru, Judi, and got some specific directions about how to find these MOO sessions and how to navigate purposefully through the Coconut Cafe. The other MOO chat sessions I attended were a little more conventional, at least in that all the other participants were actually people, except for one former professional wrestler (e.g., Hulk Hogan variety) who, after getting a Ph.D or such at the Sorbonne, was teaching some very interesting-sounding Humanities courses at NYU and who participated throughout the conference as an Evergreen (she claimed to have been a Druid in a former life, I think).   These other sessions drew many more attendants, which brought a whole new set of problems to my participation. First, at least half of them were as confused as I was, so people continually wandered in (the sessions were supposed to begin at the top of the hour) and asked, “Where am I? Is this the such-and-such session?” Since many were in the wrong place, there was also considerable disruption as they asked for directions for their intended locale and people gave them suggestions or advice as to where to look, with a marked uncertainty about what was where pervading the atmosphere.  

Even more difficult for me, however, was trying to keep track of the threads of the discussion. A comment would appear on the screen, to which I might be in the middle of typing a response when something else from someone else would flash up on the screen, completely disrupting my train of thought. Because everyone was contributing their thoughts and questions simultaneously, there was no rhyme or reason to the sequencing of the comments that appeared on screen, making for a very disjointed discussion. People would attempt to respond to prior questions or comments, but so many threads of the discussion were going on at the same time, I found it difficult to untangle who was saying what about which issue. I know I shook my head during my first few sessions, declaring to myself, “I don't know how ANYBODY can teach ANYTHING using this technology. This is nothing but CHAOS!” And, indeed, the first, and really only, complaint that got widely distributed during the conference was another fed-up MOO wannabe who let his annoyance be known in his post entitled “MOO SCHMOO.”  

 Although I found my first day of MOOing extremely frustrating and made quite a few disparaging remarks about the technology to "offline" friends and colleagues of mine, I'm glad I didn't quit and give up. Over the next two days, I found myself relaxing into this previously-foreign way of communicating and finding a kind of rhythm within the chaos. I got better in both navigating and participating, in phrasing questions and responses that would point back to what had generated the comment, and in following the cacophony of discussions swirling about me.   

Most people, including me, didn't “do” much; we primarily just typed our “spoken” responses, although many would add descriptions such as “laughingly,” “meaningfully,” or “winking” as they delivered their comments. But some of the more creative or more experienced responded by action, not by words, such as responding to comments by rubbing their head (to show thought ), knitting their brows (to show confusion), or clapping (to show approval). In that way, it replicated “real” discussions, where so much is communicated without words, much better than email  and listservs ever do. Other gestures were quite poetic, as when the keynote presenter, reappearing once again as a blue heron, rose his wing and sprinkled stardust in the direction of one participant who had been in a car accident. How lovely, and how much more eloquent, is that one simple act, rather than our traditional stunted expressions of sympathy over such events in the lives  of those around us.   

That gesture alone made the entire conference worthwhile for me (not that I didn't learn an incredible amount from the excellent papers and lively discussions that suffused the entire event). But it reminded me that as we venture into the unknown, how much we try to stuff it into our past experience, into what we think we already know and have under our command. We are so busy trying to make it fit into our known, our existing paradigm, if you will, that we are not free to see the power and the beauty and the possibility that the new way presents. For who among us has not had a student who was really struggling through something and wished we could throw a little stardust in their direction?   

So I finished the conference the way I complete my best f2f conferences--invigorated by an intellectually-stimulating debate, energized by being in community with others who care and believe as I do, and inspired by experiencing the magic that some people are creating with their creative applications of educational technology. Best of all, it reminded me of the bewildering world some of our learners must encounter as they first attempt classes using these unfamiliar technologies, as well as the switch it takes for us as instructors to use these tools to their full potential. We must be like Alice, willing to try growing and shrinking and feeling curiouser and curiouser as we attempt things that we would never known in our usual life before cyberspace. And when we run into things that frustrate us or don't seem to go as smoothly as we like, we must resist the temptation to behave like the Queen of Hearts and dismiss these irritants with the declaration, “Off with their heads.”  

©1998 Carol Cross 

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