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

Where They Come Together (In the Classroom)

Of course not. I would propose that in the setting of an undergraduate literature classroom full of students who are already web-savvy and computer literate, there is no profound or revolutionary distinction between an engaged individual reader with a print book and an interactive MOOer in an electronic environment. The interactive experience of collectively and critically reading any literary object in a discussion classroom is really its own experience, drawing from both print text and electronic text models of reading. However, I have found that using FrankenMOO in the classroom can make the "writerly" aspects of any text (print-based, hyper-, or cyber-) more apparent and more teachable to an undergraduate student. More surprisingly perhaps, I have also found that experience in the MOO can make a student more comfortable with and aware of the types of learning that happens (or should happen) in a traditional discussion-based classroom. I will demonstrate this where appropriate with samples of student responses garnered from a questionnaire I administered after students experienced FmnkenMOO in a discussion-based undergraduate literature class.15

To begin, I would like to point out that the format of a discussion-based literature classroom already itself anticipates many if not all of the revolutionary claims made for cybertext. For example, Epsen Aarseth draws a dichotomy between spectator and player to illustrate the de facto differences between reading print media and using electronic media. "The reader's pleasure is the pleasure of a voyeur. Safe, but impotent. . .. The cybertext reader . . . is not safe, and therefore, it can be argued, she is not a reader. The cybertext puts its would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection"(1997, 4). While this element of perceived risk may certainly be true of a cybertextual "player," it is equally true of a textual reader in a classroom, because such a reader is never entirely a "spectator." In any discussion classroom, regardless of how the discussed literature is mediated, an undergraduate reader/critic puts him or herself at risk of rejection every time he or she ventures a critical interpretation, because there always might be a classroom participant with a different interpretation. Student responses to discussion in the MOO seem to indicate that students actually felt safer in the virtual environment to explore and express their opinions than they did in the conventional classroom. One student writes "Online, we just tried things out. We explored and just said whatever came into our minds. In classroom this wouldn't happen like this, because everybody would worry more about what others think." Another comments on the perception of anonymity as an aid to freer discussion:"! think there is an element of anonymity online within the MOO that one can't fully get in class.You're more likely to discuss things that you'd normally be too shy to talk about." This is a curious response, since the students assumed screen names and roles that were known to each other; but the perception that they were more anonymous to each other apparently aided in fostering the type of communication that we would hope a traditional discussion classroom would cultivate. Student responses indicate at least two reasons why this might be the case. First, when everyone's response is presented as plain text in the same font, the quieter students appear just as prominently as the more aggressive ones. One student writes "I would characterize the difference by freedom. In the classroom we are not only restricted by the words of the text but by the ideas of the more vocal classmates. In the MOO we are restricted by words but in a different atmosphere. We are not so restricted since we can use our own words and it's more individual." second, when typing a response at a keyboard, a student has more time to thoughtfully formulate his or her contribution to the discussion. A student admits "it was difficult to manage speaking with others, though I imagine [communicating in the MOO] would be easier than speaking in class because written words (for me) are better thought out."