Some initial considerations
On the basis of some of the experiences gained during last year's
course of migrating together with a group of students back and
forward between face-to-face and DMCE meetings, I had decided to
adopt a predominantly conversational approach to the face-to-face
teaching situation from the outset, and to start building a
contextual framework for a conversationally oriented seminar
environment with the students right from the beginning of the
semester. In the next section I shall attempt to reconstruct the
process in some detail so as to illustrate some of the ways in which
we worked towards this particular goal.
Before I do that however, one point that I think it is important and useful to make in this particular connection is that no tape or video recordings - or written transcripts of these - were actually made from our face-to-face sessions in the group, and that what is reported here are some subsequent reconstructions of what went on. These reconstructions are based on my own notes, materials that we used, and my own recollections of what happened. Now, the fact that no recordings or transcripts were made may sound like an unnecessary, or even rather strange thing to explicitly point out, since it is of course not normal practice in most university seminar rooms to record what actually goes on there - unless of course this is done over some limited period of time specifically for research or other kinds of documentation purposes. The same is admittedly true for on-line seminars in for instance a DMCE as well: here it will also be the case that unless one specifically arranges in advance for what happens there to be recorded, it will not happen. However, since we have over the last two years collected rather extensive documentation in the form of conversational logs from our interactions in the textual spaces that we have used for our seminars and meetings in various DMC environments, it seems to be emerging as a quite serious lack that what went on in the face-to-face situation at the physical, "non-virtual" university was not recorded in some way too. This is an issue that will obviously need to be seriously addressed in any subsequent follow-up work.
The main problem in this connection is the lack of possibilities for making direct comparisons between the two situations. This would not of course necessarily be alleviated completely by having made tape- or video-recordings from our face-to-face interactions, since the situation of production of the various discourses in question will obviously differ considerably between face-to-face interactions and those that occur in a distributed textual environment such as that of a DMCE. The main, and most obvious difference between these two situations is in fact representational in character, since no process of transcription will be necessary between the events that are actually recorded in the interaction log from DMCE conversations and their subsequent use, such as for example in the context of this present report.
An interaction log from a DMCE conversation appears for better or for worse exactly as it was actually written, or "performed", so to say, by those who took part, whereas a transcription made from a tape-recording will of necessity come to introduce at least one additional level of representation and interpretation during the physical process of transcription. When making transcriptions from audio tape-recordings, choices will amongst other things need to me made with regard to which system of transcription is to be used; to what actually is to be considered relevant data for transcription (does one for instance include coughing, clearings of the throat, laughter, tone of voice, externally generated potentially contextually relevant noise or sounds etc.); to what extent during the transcription process one must take account of more specific phonetic or phonological aspects of the discourse, both at the segmental and at the suprasegmental level (cf. e.g. tone of voice above), and so on.
With video-recordings, the situation becomes even more complicated, since all the various and tightly interacting aspects of non-verbal communication also become an important factor that needs to be taken into account, as does - to an even greater degree than with a tape-recording - other forms of behaviour on the part of conversational participants and other people who may be present without actually speaking; peoples' attitudes and postures, their various comings and goings, and participants' positions and movements relative to one another within the room etc.
In an interactional log made during a DMCE conversation the problem is rather one of extreme minimality or sparseness of information, rather than overabundence. One of the most common problems that may be encountered with these kinds of materials is the subsequent interpretation of the log after the event, since it can often be quite difficult for someone who has not actually taken part in the discourse to establish clear referential or inferential relationships between the different conversational threads in the on-going discourse, even though these may well have appeared obvious to the participants themselves at the time as quite obviously linked to one another. This is however not necessarily always the case, as the following excerpt from one of our logs demonstrates:
Emerald_Guest says, "was that the first or second undergrad course?"
Onyx_Guest says, "so to Tone: first course. The next will (hopefully) be film science."
Emerald_Guest says, "impressive! "
Onyx_Guest says, "Sarcastic??"
patcop likes bjoerns devil-may-care style towards "big names", not a lack of respect, but an active critical attutude
Emerald_Guest says, "no, I mean it, you got a laud on that paper didn't you?"
Onyx_Guest says, "I got 2.0 in the theory exam..."
Emerald_Guest says, "gen. litt. isn't recommended as a first undergrad course"
Emerald_Guest says, "it's well over the average at gen.litt"
patcop says, "why did you say that bjoern?"
Onyx_Guest says, "...but for various reasons I got 2.6 for the home exam."
Emerald_Guest says, "I agree patcop"
Onyx_Guest says, "Patrick, because she asked."
patcop smiles
patcop says, "OK, that's fine..."
patcop says, "here there can obviously be problems with reference..."
Emerald_Guest says, "that was what I meant by your humor. But one thing I wonder about, it was tough to call some of these guys militant structuralists, mayb not very tactical in relation to the examiner, or maybe just thaat?
Emerald_Guest says, "a little misunderstanding"
Emerald_Guest says, "you're logging this?"
patcop nods
patcop is letting everything go into the blue cassette
(In this particular session Bjørn appears as Onyx_Guest and Tone as Emerald_Guest since they had had password problems logging in with the character names that they had as members of the VSPO group that we had set up at the beginning of the semester, and had had to log in using the open system for guest characters.)
At the time the group was engaged in a discussion of one of Bjørn's literary science papers which was a discussion of poststructuralism, or, as he had called it: "the decapitation of the referent". We had all read the paper in advance, and were subsequently using the DMCE to air and discuss some of our more immediate reactions and comments to it with him.
In the sequence I have selected above I had just asked Bjørn about the temporal sequence of the handing in of two different pieces of writing (the other being his term paper with an analysis of Plato's "Symposion") relative to one another, and he had just answered me on this point - hence his management of his first turn above by using "so to Tone" in the following utterance:
Onyx_Guest says, "so to Tone: first course. The next will (hopefully) be film science."
(At this stage neither Bjørn nor Tone was familiar with the use of the "to"-command to index directly the recipient of an utterance, which would of course probably have alleviated the situation that developed above, at least to some extent.)
In any case, what then happened was that I noticed Bjørn's seemingly self-depreciating questioning reply to Tone's complementary comment:
Emerald_Guest says, "impressive! "
Onyx_Guest says, "Sarcastic??"
Prior to this exchange between Tone and Bjørn I had just added my own comment to the on-going thread, namely:
patcop likes bjoerns devil-may-care style towards "big names", not a lack of respect, but an active critical attutude
and I had been busy writing this while Bjørn and Tone had been discussing which undergraduate course he had written his paper for. For some obscure reason or other, which in fact for the moment escapes me, I then decided to ask Bjørn directly why he had chosen to answer her comment of "impressive" in this particular way.
Since Bjørn and Tone had a quite lively discussion going on about the academic level and status among students of the general literature science course going at this point, and since there was a degree of time-lag affecting my responses from Italy, I did not get my (admittedly rather pointless) question in until after they were well into this sequence, which naturally made the actual indexical reference of my utterance even more unclear, to say the least:
Emerald_Guest says, "no, I mean it, you got a laud on that paper didn't you?"
Onyx_Guest says, "I got 2.0 in the theory exam..."
Emerald_Guest says, "gen. litt. isn't recommended as a first undergrad course"
Emerald_Guest says, "it's all well over the average at gen.litt"
patcop says, "why did you say that bjoern?"
At which time, after another comment about the mark he got for his second paper, followed by an endorsement from Tone of my more general comment, Bjørn replied to my direct question, which given the context in which it actually occurred, must have seemed even more ridiculous, in his normal rather ironic style:
Onyx_Guest says, "...but for various reasons I got 2.6 for the home exam."
Emerald_Guest says, "I agree patcop"
Onyx_Guest says, "Patrick, because she asked."
To which I of course had no alternative but to laugh and give up that particular project for the time being:
patcop smiles
patcop says, "OK, that's fine..."
patcop says, "here there can obviously be problems with reference..."
Generally, however it is not difficult for participants to discern which individual utterances concern which conversational threads, especially in a situation such as we were in for most of the time with only three of us taking part in conversations.
The first institutionally scheduled orientation meeting with the students at the department was unfortunately sabotaged by my missing a connecting flight in Brussels on the way back to Norway at the beginning of the semester, so it was not until the first scheduled seminar in the course that we were able to meet one another for the first time.
We began with a short presentation round, where each member of the group gave a short presentation of themselves, their academic background and their more personal motivations for taking part in that particular course. I briefly outlined my own ideas for the structure and content of the course, underlining how I would like our classes and the DMCE-meetings to function primarily as a conversational medium. I mentioned too, that my own research was concerned with investigating how systems of norms associated with processes and practices involved in scientific writing and publishing come to change over time when such writing is increasingly carried out using various kinds of distributed writing and communication technologies, and I also spent some time defining and explaining some of the main concepts and practices associated with this particular research approach. I outlined in a general way how he hypermedia in the humanities course was being developed, its relation to the research apporach, and with some references to the experiences we had gained the previos year and some reflections on the basis of these experiences, and I also explained that I was interested in using notes and logs from the face-to-face seminars and DMCE-sessions that we would be holding during the semester, if they could agreee to this, as part of the empirical data for my research. On the basis of this I invited them to take part as participant-observers in the project during the semester. Hopefully they would gain experience and insights that might give them some ideas of their own about how the kinds of communication technologies we would be using might be useful in relation to their own specific academic or research interests.
Since my first attempt to obtain background information from the students by means of post and e-mail prior to the course had not been successful I asked them if we could do this together before we the course began, and we agreed to devote some time during our first session together to filling out the questionnaires, and to the oral presentation of the group members for one another mentioned above.
I then asked if they would be willing to submit some examples of prior academic writing, which might be used for documentational and analytic purposes in my research, as well as forming a basis for some discussions in the group on scientific writing as a specific genre. I also asked if the text and the log materials obtained during the various DMCE-sessions we would hold during the semester might later be cited by me (and also by themselves or any other of the members of the group) in any subsequent publications that would come out of this project. When they agreed to this I asked them to sign a general statement of consent setting out some ethical guidelines[10] for further use, and which also gave them as participant-observers the right to read and comment on, and to request alteration or deletion of such sections as they might not consider acceptable before they be made public, any citations or interpretations made of the texts they would submit, or of the DMCE session logs where they might be identifiable as participants and which might be used by me in any subsequent publications. They would, if they wished also have the right to use the same materials themselves in their own publications, provided they were prepared to follow the same ethical guidelines mentioned above.
In the first half of the semester our time together was divided between more conventional seminar room sessions with a focus on working together in a group-oriented conversational mode, and multimedia laboratory sessions where we acquainted ourselves with the necessary software and communication technologies we would need to use while I was in Italy in the last half of the semester. Part of the work in the lab sessions was devoted to the use of e-mail and the World Wide Web, and we also spent some time discovering how to put together a simple Home Page, while the rest of the time in the lab was devoted to gaining a basic experience of using a DMCE to communicate on-line.
