After I arrived home from Italy we had scheduled a face to face meeting. I was excited about this prospect after our six MOO-only sessions, and wondered how the group would react to this return to the everyday "reality" of the classroom. In some ways, I felt that we knew each other better, and that I knew much more about the other members of the group as individuals than before I left. There was something about the informality, spontaneity and "flatness" of the social dynamics of the virtual environment which meant that the institutional authority of the teacher in the classroom no longer seemed operative in the same way as I experienced it in the more traditional classroom situation. I could influence what went on in the MOO by what I said there, but I noticed I had to "fight" harder there if I wanted to position myself professionally, and to maintain the same implicit kind of position of authority which the institutionalised culture of the classroom seems to more or less automatically invest the teacher or lecturer with.
When the students were together in Trondheim in the lab and I was in Bologna, they could talk to one another while they were taking part in the MOO sessions, and they could go to the grill afterwards for a talk, while I had only what was said, and what happened in the MOO to relate to. That meant that I had much less chance for exerting various forms of social control over what was going on in the situation itself. Also the possiblity that the students had of whispering to one another without me seeing what they said to one another makes the MOO very different from a classroom at school or at a university, where the teacher or lecturer can see more or less everything that is going on, and regulate activities like private conversations or note passing etc., at least to some extent, by gaze, direct reprimand or even by markedly choosing to ignore signals of this kind. In the MOO sessions I was dependent on the knowledge I already had of the group and the security of knowing that we already had some kind of interpersonal teacher-student rapport built up within the framework of the conventional classroom in order to interpret the students' utterances in a positive and constructive way.
As mentioned previously, the group had different experiences in this respect to me. In one of the examination papers I found the following description:
"It should also be mentioned that most of the eight girls in the group knew one another quite well from previously, and this most certainly had an influence on how they related to one another. They knew who they were talking to, and probably used a jargon closely related to that which they used in physical reality to one another. Personally speaking, I did not know the others in the group and to begin with I in fact perceived some of the messages that were exchanged as rather impolite. On the other hand there were utterances with implicit messages (for instance sarcasm or irony) which I did not get, but which most of the others did not have problems in understanding."
The same student went on to write:
"It is precisely [this] flat structure which is part of the potential of this medium and this can be maintained by the moderator being only a participant with an extended function as a synthesising factor in the discourse. Actors in a MOO participate on equal terms whether they are students or professors, 14or 60 years old. It is the content of what they are saying that to the greatest degree will decide whether or not they are worth listening to. Authority loses its position in the MOO, and this may be used positively. Especially in schools it could be fruitful to experiement with this. The fact that interaction is text-based creates a certain distance and can be a factor in including students who otherwise would not be active."
Back in the classroom again we spent some time discussing the difference between face to face and MOO communication, and I gave the students an article by Michael Halliday (Halliday 1984) which discussed the development of communicative metafunctions in child language, with the thought that this might arouse some theoretical reflections on the development of our MOO communication norms during the short period we were having MOO meetings. I also gave them an assignment for the following week, namely to prepare a short paper that they would present for the rest of the class with some reflections on their own experiential data, the logs and some theoretical directions among those that I had discussed at the beginning of the semester, or other theoretical approaches that they had met other places that might be useful in a beginng analysis of the ways in which our textual and interactional norms might have changed during the course of the eight MOO sessions. We also looked at a couple of pages from a log from the overhead and discussed what kind of phenomena it might be useful to take as a point of departure for the papers.