IDCE was organised in two specially designed meeting rooms at Diversity University: Conference Room North and Conference Room South. These rooms were based on a generic room type known as the "generic classroom", which has certain special verbs and functions built in for regulating communication and activity in the virtual environment. The northern room was a plenary session room, with "seating" for about 70 people and a "podium" for a panel or individual speakers. The southern room was a group room, with "tables[24]" and a "podium". Participants could sit down at different tables and either follow a presentation by someone from the podium and ask questions in plenum, or have smaller group sessions at the tables.
During the group sessions the "session" function[25] was turned on. This function is designed so that it allowed those who were seated to talk and emote only to those persons sitting at the same table. We did this by means of the "say" and emote[26] verbs normally used to communicate in the virtual environment. If we wanted to address a question or a comment to the whole room, we had to use a special "speak up" command which was only operative during sessions. In addition to these basic "public" communication functions, there was a "whisper" function, which allowed participants to whisper only to one specific person at the same table while the "session" function was turned on. In order to whisper to someone at another table, we used the "page" function, which is normally used to talk to people in other rooms than the one you are in at the time. Another kind of speech function "to <person>[27]", which normally allows participants to address another person directly outside of session-regulated rooms, became "whisper" during a session.
I joined the sessions at ICDE at various periods during the day of the conference. Unfortunately I could not take part in all the sessions I would have liked to, due to other engagements at work. But since the organizers had logged the main sessions and made the log files accessible via the Internet, I was able to fetch them and read them through afterwards. Although this is quite a different experience than actually taking part, where one has a chance to ask questions and put one's own point of view, I found a lot of interesting ideas and information in the logs which I have later made considerable use of, also here in this report.
At this point I would like to mention another kind of index to the developing sociotextual norm systems of MOO environments, and that is the increasing inclusion of e-mail, telnet MOO-addresses, gopher and World Wide Web http addresses in the discourse, allowing participants to, if they wish, follow up immediately, for example by sending e-mail, logging in to another MOO, or looking up some World Wide Web pages, as the following examples from some of the various sessions at ICDE demonstrate. In order to make the extracts easier to read, I have provided some more detailed context for each one. This context is edited from the personal and professional introductions made by presenters and others, and is based on the various session logs from ICDE, all of which are included in Appendix VI.
The first example comes from an session on uses of MOO's in education. In the first two examples below, "JimW" is Jim Walters and "Billie" is Billie Hughes, both from MariMUSE, where they run a virtual world working with children in a high at-risk school in the inner city of Phoenix. They had discovered that college students become strongly engaged by the experience of MOO-ing, and since the MOO-environment is rich with text they had decided to try it for children who could benefit by a text-rich medium. They now apparently have over 300 6th graders on-line. "Neil" is Neil Ballantyne, a lecturer in social work at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He works with children and adolescents. "Van*Faussien" is Karen McComas, a speech and language pathologist and audiologist at Marshall University in Huntington, USA. She works with minimal hearing loss, language and teaching and learning strategies and is interested in anything to do with writing. In the log snippet below, Billie and Jim are in the process of doing a collaborative interactive presentation of their work:
Example 1 (use of Gopher to allow participants to expand the context of discussion)
JimW says, "The motivating power of MUDs has kids coming to school so they can get on-line as soon as someone opens the doors, and keeps them there until someone chases them out around 7PM." Billie says, "We have found the medium is very powerful both as a literacy tool for young children (grades 3-6) and as a social development tool." JimW says, "And we are exploring ways to move more of the curriculum into the MUD." Billie says, "We have a number of different "paper" on our gopher that give more detail and have some comments by teachers who work with the children." Billie says, "It might be best to give you teh gopher address and then let you ask us questions while we are here live." Neil speaks up, "Can I just ask you to clarify the age of the children the grading sytstem is different in the UK." Neil smiles. JimW says, "to access our gopher (which is rather sparse) go to pcef.pc.maricopa.edu" JimW says, "The majority of the children are from 7 to 12" Neil speaks up, "Thank you."
Example 2 (providing a Telnet MOO address for participants to allow subsequent visits to another MOO)
Billie says, "We have our own MOO....and we have a very protected environment for the children.\" JimW says, "This is a compelling medium. Teachers are getting excited because fo what the students are doing on-line." Billie says, "WE have set up special rightand responsibilities." Van*Faussien speaks up, "May we visit your site" Billie says, "And we have email traces for all participants." Billie looks to Jim re: visiting. JimW says, "Sure, come and visit. It is kinda quiet now." Billie says, "Seeing what the kis are doing is the most exciting way to get a feel for what we are doing." JimW says, "Our MOO is pueblo.xerox.com 7777" Billie says, "We will be having a summer camp in July."
The next example comes from a session on continuing medical Education using the Internet. "Dr.Paul" is Paul di Virgilio. "Piotr" is Piotr Jasiobedzki who works in the AI and Image center at the New Pratt computing facility at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Example 3 (distributing academic references via e-mail address)
Piotr says, "and later use this model for segmenting and grading abnormalities" Dr.Paul says, "If there are no questions for Piotr, could we proceed to our next topic, Continuing Medical Education for Practicing Physicians and our speaker Dr. Alfred Tang from Hong Kong?" Piotr says, "thank you for your attention" CT_ClareS speaks up, ""Can you give us some references to your papers?"" Piotr says, "could you send me mail to piotr@vis.toronto.edu" Piotr says, "and I'll forward you the list"
The next example is from a session on disabilities and distance education using MUD's and MOO's. "LenB" is Len Burns, a family therapist as well as a programmer at Diversity University who also runs a gopher dedicated to Traumatic Brain injury information. "Van*Faussien" is the same person (Karen McComas from Marshall University ) who was at the education session in the first and second examples.
Example 4 (communicating World Wide Web references providing examples of more context for discussion)
LenB says, "what I am seeing on the web as it grows exponentially is that it is very easy to throw something up and very difficult to do it well" LenB says, "it really takes some planning, there are some excellent examples however" Van*Faussien would like lenb to visit her web stuff and provide feedback sometime LenB would be glad to LenB says, "the Mercury Center is a good example of doing it well, http://www.sjmercury.com" LenB says, "I think our site here for the brain injury project is also a pretty good example, http://www.sasquatch.com/tbi" LenB says, "one of the current concerns is the new text format that Adobe has introduced on the web" Van*Faussien notes these sites for reference later
The final example is from the log of a tour session of BioMOO, which is based in Israel, led by Dr. Peter MR (he never gave his full name) from Glaxo and Birkbeck College, USA. The other participants were unidentified conference participants. After this exchange most of the participants follwed him to BioMOO.
Example 5 (providing MOO and World Wide Web references to guide visitors in moving between combined MOO and World Wide Web environments)
After taking part in the ICDE conference, and after my retrospective readings of the logs from the various sessions I began to think more about developing the course I would be holding in the Fall of 1995 on uses of hypermedia technology in humanities studies. In the next section I will outline and discuss some of my experiences in this particular connection.