By the term distributed virtual environments I mean in the widest possible sense all types of digitally created or technologically mediated (virtual) environments where human interactions with the virtual environment and communication with other people in the virtual environment are made possible by the design of the mediating system. More specifically in this particular context, the term "distributed" is a generic category that refers to all forms of text-, hypertext, multimedia and hypermedia based systems that exploit the communicative potential of the Internet, allowing people from many countries, cultures and social fields all over the world to communicate and collaborate with one another in ways that, superficially at least, seem to transcend institutional, local, regional and national borders. Examples of distributed systems are asynchronous text-based systems for one to many communication: e-mail discussion groups and bulletin boards, UseNet News groups, (and also the World Wide Web, which is hypermedia based); as well as synchronous text-based communication systems such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) "Chat Rooms", and distributed object-oriented, multi-user environments such as MUDD's and MOO's (see section 5.2. for a more detailed description of what these are).
Telephone conferencing systems, video conferencing systems, video-telephone conferences and cross-linked television transmissions are not included in this narrower context, mainly because they are not "open" in the same sense of allowing access to a multiplicity of communicators to some common field of cultural discourse at any given time, but restricted to more "closed" interpersonal and institututional forms of communication and areas of cultural activities. The same considerations on a somewhat larger scale apply to national systems such as the French Minitel system which at the present time is only accessible for users of the French telecommunication system. In saying this, however, I do not wish to discount the possibility of a later integration of these last-mentioned systems and technologies (or some aspects of them) with other more community-oriented, globally effective systems.
In this particular context, the concept of novice is necessarily a double one.
1. Within the wider framework of the university-based writing pedagogy research perspective of this project, novice refers to novice scientific writers, i.e. students who are writing within an academic framework. In terms of sociotextological theory (see section 6) a novice scientific writer is any participant or actor in a goal-specifically defined social field tied to the more general culturally constituted semiosphere of science who is actively taking part in the process of qualifying him- or herself as a competent producer of adequate scientific texts, that is: "articles that either create new knowledge, and/or criticise existing knowledge" (see Berge, 1996, p. 62).
2. In relation to the new technology which facilitates and realizes the kinds of distributed virtual environments mentioned above, a novice will be any person who is in the process of qualifying him- or herself in relation to the use of these technologies. This means that even experienced scientific writers who begin to explore the use of distributed virtual environments that are developing and being taken into use within their own fields of research will find themselves in a novice position to some extent.
The above seemingly dichotomic division does not of course represent two mutually exclusive spheres, since student writers will also to some extent or other be learning how to use the technology at the same time as they are qualifying themselves as scientific writers within their own particular field or discipline. The main difference between student novices and those novices who are already established as scientific writers is that the former are still in the process of qualifying themselves as scientific writers as they learn to use the technology, while the latter have presumably already previously qualified themselves as competent writers and will have considerable experience of a wide range of writing and publication processes which have not necessarily involved any "hands-on" experiences of writing and publishing in distributed virtual environments.