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

as long as the printed book remains the primary medium of literature, traditional views of the author as authority and of literature as monument will remain convincing for most readers.The electronic medium ... complicates our understanding of literature as either mimesis or expression, it denies the fixity of the text, and it questions the authority of the author. (Bolter 1991, 153).

If revolutionary cybertext changes the way we understand reading and the way we understand authorship, it changes even more profoundly who we are. Virtual text promises all the radically disembodied pleasures of "posthuman" existence, to use Hayles's mostly-cautionary term. For the more enthusiastic proponents of electronic textual theory though, it may feel as though it is about time to throw caution to the winds, and good riddance to the oldfashioned, haphazardly instantiated, physically present liberal subject. In some extreme formulations, one need not learn or do anything specific inside a networked, electronic virtual space-simply experiencing the electronic textual medium is enough to liberate a conventional textual reader and to transform that reader into something revolutionarily new and strange: "Because electronic hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments," Hayles writes, "the reader necessarily is constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines. To be positioned as a cyborg is inevitably ... to become a cyborg, so electronic hypertexts, regardless of their content, tend toward cyborg subjectivity"(2000, 13). Likewise, in some formulations, one need only enter an electronic environment to begin learning. Richard Bartle surveys the educational theories of MOOing and concludes

educational virtual worlds share many characteristic with social- and gameoriented ones.... It's because all virtual world traditions have the same aim: learning. With social- and game-oriented worlds, players learn about themselves; with educational worlds, players learn whatever they're taught but also about themselves. (Bartle 2004, 618)

In Utopian configurations of revolutionary cybertext subjectivity, the reader/user/MOOer is almost always liberated from something-from repressively patriarchal and monological narrative structures; from the restrictions of gender, race, and class-based identity; from passivity and uncritical consumption; or from the authority of authors and political leaders.13 In Utopian electronic pedagogical theory, the cybertext subject is similarly liberated from rigid, out-dated, hierarchical pedagogical practices. In his School's Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education, Lewis J. Perelman writes "The essence of the coming integrated, universal, multimedia, digital network is discovery-the empowerment of human minds to learn spontaneously, without coercion, but independently and cooperatively. The focus is on learning as an action that is 'done by,' not 'done to,' the actor"(1992, 23). Landow anticipates that "Educational hypertext redefines the role of instructors by transferring some of their power and authority to students.This technology has the potential to make the teacher more a coach than a lecturer, and more an older, more experienced partner in a collaboration than an authenticated leader"(1997, 222). Jonassen and Grabiger argue that '"hypermedia learning systems . . . place more responsibility on the learner for accessing, sequencing and deriving meaning from the information.' Unlike users of'most information systems, hypermedia users must be mentally active while interacting with the information'"(Qtd. in Landow 1997, 220). Notice that in all three of these cases, it is the electronic medium itself that prompts significant change-it turns Perelman's students into spontaneous, inquisitive learners, it transforms Landow's authoritarian teachers into collaborators, and it spontaneously combusts mental activity in Jonassen and Grabiger's learners' brains. Utopian as it may be, such theory can be very compelling to those of us who work inside MOOs.14 But do any of these remarkable effects actually take place when a classroom of ral college students enters FmnkenMOO? Richard Grusin warns about falling into naive technological determinism, a fallacy that "often manifest itself in prepositional statments that ascribe agsency to technology intsef" (1994, 470). Does cybertext technology per se turn reluctant students into active learners?