Before I left for to Italy I had made contact via the Internet with some helpful people at CINECA[32] in Bologna and arranged for a dial-up Internet commection there so that I could join the students in Diversity University MOO from where I was staying using a portable computer with a modem[33]. Our MOO meetings were coordinated in relation to the course plan I had set up in advance, with regular meeting times for the group each week. In the event it turned out that we had to make some adjustments to this plan, due to collisions with other activities that the students were involved in (other courses where lecture times or dates were changed, the student festival UKA etc.). This turned out to be quite easy, either by reaching a consensus on the new time for our next meeting while we were together in the MOO-environment, or by means of e-mail messages which I distributed in advance to the whole group, or exchanged with the students on a more individual basis. I also had some individual counselling and discussion exchanges with individual students related to course matters and other things via e-mail during the whole semester.
As mentioned previously, before I left I made a more detailed plan for all the MOO sessions, which I put onto World Wide Web, and two Web pages with some points for discussion for the first two sessions. I also made a link from these pages into the virtual space in which we would be meeting, so that we could look at the discussion points from inside the MOO from the Web Slate[34]. Since the MOO is a text only environment and the MOO Web interface was not yet operative, I had to make do with simple ascii text lists of points for discussion.
The general agenda for our six MOO meetings was as follows:
Course materials:
**NOTE: More detailed materials for the group work to appear soon......
*** NOTE: All virtual seminars and workshops will be held at Diversity University MOO. See here for more information on how to get there.
Tuesday 17.10.95 (10.15-12) Virtual seminar I
Theme: Potentials and limitations of using virtual environments to collaborate in science
Wednesday 18.10.95 (10.15-12) MOO group work I
Theme: What can we use virtual environments for? Brainstorming session
Tuesday 24.10.95 (10.15-12) Virtual seminar II
Theme: Structured vs. more open forms of collaboration in virtual environments. What sort of communication norms (if any) do we need?
Wednesday 25.10.95 (10.15-12) MOO group work II
Theme: How can virtual environments be used in education?
Tuesday 31.10.95 (10.15-12) Virtual seminar III
Theme: Integration of other hypermedia environments with MOO's.
Wednesday 01.11.95 (10.15-12) MOO group work III
Theme: Do we see a future for collaborative scientific work in virtual environments?
I asked the students to access these World Wide Web pages in advance, both the detailed plan for the MOO sessions, and the two pages with discussion points for the first two meetings so that they would have time to think through the issues we would be discussing in advance.
The discussion points for the first session were as follows:
- AVS-6: Hypermedia: a tool for humanities studies?
- Discussion themes for virtual seminar I, Tuesday 17.10.95
- Place: Diversity University MOO, ICDE seminar room north
- Time: 10.15-12.00
- Theme: Potential and limitations of virtual environments for scientific collaboration
- Some potentials/ limitations(are there any more?)
- * time- and space limitations are mainly removed
- * spontanity, discussion and conversations preferable to pure lectures?
- * access to other tools e.g.:
- * gopher
- * e-mail - from "inside" MOO-environment
- * WWW
- * one can construct ones' own environment and try it out
- * one can make discussion/ teaching tools like 'video-cassettes', MOO TV-'films' and leave them or others to see
- * one can 'log' what goes on and reflect on/ discuss it later
- * 'immersion' creates a closeness to the subject matter
- * one can take part 'anonymously' to begin with: things like appearance, gender etc become less `visible'
- * ?
- * ?
- * ?
- Some limitations (are there more?)
- * one has to (at present) communicate solely through written language
- * those who write quickly get more `speaking time' than those who are slower
- * simple ASCII, does not allow e.g. Norwegian characters
- * dependent on the traffic on the rest of the Net for `fluency' (cf 'lag')
- * to get an overview is hard, e.g. you cannot see who is sitting where
- * the command language is not always functional (e.g. too many repetitions of commands necessary)
- * integrated tools (e.g. WWW) are less functional than usual
- * the chances of 'misrepresentation' of oneself to others increase
- * ?
- * ?
- * ?
And for the second session, as follows:
- AVS-6: Hypermedia: a tool in humanities studies?
- Discussion topics for virtual seminar II, Wednesday 18.10.95
- Place: Diversity University MOO, ICDE seminar room north
- Time: 10.15-12.00
- Theme: What can we use virtual environments for? Brainstorming session...
- You have limited experiences as yet of MOO-collaboration, but some few ideas and thoughts you have surely had by now?
- Divide into groups (there are several tables: red, blue etc) and discuss what you think MOO-environments might be good for in academic contexts.
- Some ideas:
- * teaching?
- * research?
- * administration?
- * social contact?
- * other things?
- After the groupwork each group should present some main points from their discussion for the other groups. Use some time to discuss what these points might be.
All the MOO-meetings were logged, both in the MOO, using a generic text-recording device already available there which I put into the seminar room that we were using, and by some of the students who wanted to keep a record of their own individual "perspectives" on the group sessions[35]. During group sessions I turned on the generic recording device on each of the tables that we used, so that both the "public" group discussions which everyone in the room could hear, and the smaller group discussions at each of the tables was recorded. In connection with this recording of the activities that went on in all our group sessions. I considered it very important that the students were fully aware that this would be happening right from the outset, and that they had given their express permission that this could happen before it was done. In our case it was not at all difficult to achieve a consensus on this point, as I had already decided in advance to use the class log from each class as a source of discussion for the next class, and I made a point of distributing the logs to all the students by e-mail after each meeting we had had.
The logging was an important activity for the whole group, since the agenda of the sessions in the MOO was amongst other things to discuss the how text and interaction norm systems develop and change as a result of collaborating there (see the course plan in Appendix VIII for details of the agenda for each MOO session). In this way the students could take an active part in studying and reflecting on the logs, commenting on interesting phenomena that they had noticed there from their own particular point of view, and this process provided me with a lot of very useful ideas for my subsequent post analyses of these particular materials.
It also allowed me to consider tentative topics for discussion for coming sessions in the group, although I also tried to get the students to suggest themes for discussion themselves, in order to involve them more actively in the process of developing the group discussion culture and observing possible micro-level changes in their own textual and interactional norm systems over time[36]. This particular approach has both advantages and disadvantages, since it was also an unexpected way of working for many of the students and it took quite some time before they fully understood my intentions, and learnt to adapt to this way of working. Some felt for instance that the class structure was too "flat", and felt they needed more leadership from my side in the discussions, while others found it stimulating and challenging to work in this way.