Do You Really Want a Revolution? CyberTheory Meets Real-Life Pedagogical Practice in FrankenMOO and the Conventional Literature Classroom

College Literature, Summer 2006 by Sonstroem, Eric

A little over a decade ago David Bennahum could write confidently about the revolutionary potential of immersive, interactive, electronic spaces like Object Oriented Multi-User Dimensions (or "MOOs") for the classroom: "Unlike other information-dispensing innovations such as the photocopier and the videocassette, networked virtual spaces are likely to fundamentally change academia, since as a mode of information distribution, MOOs may well prove as revolutionary as the movable-type press" (1994, 36).1 Such enthusiastic rhetoric about the revolutionary potential inherent in these new technologies was not uncommon at their advent; indeed, such rhetoric is not uncommon today. N. Katherine Hayles, for example, makes essentially the same point when she argues that, since their advent, "electronic media operated in fundamentally different ways than print media and required new critical frameworks to assess its reading and writing practices"(2002,37). Cynthia Brantley Johnson uses equally revolutionary language when she talks about teaching with MOOs: "A MOO, then, can be seen not just [as] an online equivalent of a traditional academic setting, but as an exciting new world or challenging new expressive medium"(2002) .Judy Breck argues that the revolution is already well underway. With the advent of interactive electronic networks in the classroom, "education woes are dissipating into enlightenment. . . . Elitism of classroom knowledge will end as the mind of each citizen of Earth can freely learn from a common stock of everything known by humankind"(2002, 1).2

After a decade of hindsight, after we have experienced firsthand the invasion of our classrooms by computers and then the internet with its networked virtual spaces, many of us may feel that we are still waiting for the revolution. D. Diane Davis argues that "Educational MOOs invite connections between [real life] and [virtual reality] that leave our understanding of both profoundly altered"(1998, 268). I must confess that subjectively, as someone who uses MOOs, I feel that Davis's, Hayles's, Johnson's and Bennahum's arguments should be absolutely true; these new media should embody tremendous revolutionary potential. But those of us who also teach with MOOs may find it frustratingly difficult to actually point to this deep, revolutionary alteration when we compare real undergraduate students in a networked classroom with their counterparts in a more traditional setting. Why should this be? Other new communication technologies have fostered large-scale cultural change and disruption. Why should networked virtual spaces be any less than revolutionary? After all, they do offer a strange new method of textual practice that fluently blurs the lines between global and individual communication, and the lines between transient and permanent textual objects; they can be radically and efficiently interactive in ways that printed text cannot; they can provide instantaneous two-way, multi-way, or truly dialogical communication. Faced with such new, promising, and largely unexplored theoretical territory, it is easy to understand why practitioners of some of the more emancipatory literary theories should feel right at home in the interactive and immersive worlds of the internet. Bakhtin, Barthes, and the more liberation-oriented reader-response theorists have been enthusiastically co-opted by cybertext theory, sometimes so completely that it is easy to forget that these pre-hypertext writers were entirely theorizing printed, not electronic, text.3 Perhaps scrutinizing cybertext theory's roots in emancipatory, revolutionary textual theory can help us understand the nature of virtual textuality's long-promised revolution, and why some of us feel that we are still waiting.

In a skeptical yet somewhat optimistic mode, this paper will interrogate cybertext theory's relationship with older reader-response theory as a basis for exploring the ways current theoretical approaches to interactive electronic hypertext environments succeed or fail to revolutionize pedagogy and actual classroom practice in a discussion-based undergraduate literature class. I will focus on the technology of MOOs, which offer real-time textual interaction between multiple users/readers/writers.4 MOOs offer the freewheeling interactivity of a connected set of chat rooms, but they frame this unstructured interaction within a relatively fixed and hierarchical textual landscape, a MOO's architexture. As a case study, I will examine my experience teaching within FmnkenMOO, an electronic textual space carefully designed to test the difference between an undergraduate student's learning experience with printed text and his or her experience with interactive hypertext; in short, designed to test the claims of interactive electronic textual theory as they apply to pedagogy. The paper is divided into three basic parts: "What It Is" is a description of educational, literary MOOs and of FmnkenMOO in particular. "What It Could Be" is an overview of hypertext theory as it applies to MOOs and as it attempts to predict their pedagogical consequences. I survey the origins of cybertext theory, which I locate primarily in reader-response criticism, in an attempt to understand the precise nature of cybertext theory's revolutionary claims. "Where They Come Together" is a survey of what I have found is actually possible in the college literature classroom.