The Electronic Forum, or the Agora Reinvented

Proposal
The tradition of people gathering together to discuss and debate business is not new - the agora emerged as the center of culture in ancient Greece well over twenty five hundred years ago. With the advent of computers, yesterday's agora is today's electronic forum, a virtual space created by networked computer technology.

The reinvented agora transcends boundaries of time, space, and place, encourages the creation of discourse and the dissemination of knowledge and extends the notion of community. No longer do we meet in the city centre with neighbors. Now we can, using computers at home or work, meet in electronic forums with colleagues located thousands of miles away. Like the agora, the interactive electronic forum - made available through computer technology like Multi-User Domains, Object-Oriented environments (MOOs) - offers a meeting place for collaboration, collegiality, communication, and community-building that reaches beyond the notion of polis into the realm of cosmos, linking scholars in a way they have never been before. Thus, the electronic forum expands upon the Greek agora and confronts scholars with challenging implications.

While MOOs are not the only synchronous software systems available for conducting forums, their unique special metaphors, collaborative construction capabilities, and programmable objects provide ideal spaces for creative professional exchanges and interactive conferencing environments for distant participants. In light of the growing interest in MOOs as spaces for communi- cating ideas across large distances, this panel will discuss the organization and implications of one particular application of MOOs - the electronic forum - specifically the way in which it transforms the way we discuss issues, conduct research, publish, and teach in the Humanities.

In "The Agora Factor(y): Architecture and Assembly in / of MOOs" Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik, co-creators of Lingua MOO, an electronic learning environment located at the University of Texas at Dallas, will discuss the organization and design of electronic forums as spaces for discussion and debate. Haynes and Holmevik brought together their rhetorical and historical training to design and operate a MOO specifically for researchers and teachers working at the intersection of humanities and electronic scholarship and pedagogy. Their presentation foregrounds the care with which the MOO is designed and programmed to facilitate on-line discussion, debate, and recording of such meetings. In addition, they discuss ways in which the network of MOO researchers they have fostered provides a crucial set of links with other forums. Specifically, they will explain the genesis of and their participation in a number of research collectives that host open forums at Lingua MOO, as well as how Lingua is interconnected with other MOOs for accessibility to research archives, notices of meetings, sending and receiving mail, web interfaces, and interMOO synchronous communication.

Building upon their discussion of the planning and implementation of the MOO as a research forum, the authors will discuss future innovations in MOOs that promise to enhance the electronic "agora," and they will outline future plans for the use of MOOs in the growing trend toward blurring the boundaries between the humanities and technology in general.

In "Macrologia: Theoretical Implications of On-Line Defenses, Conferences, and Publishing," Dene Grigar and Jeff Galin speculate about the affect of electronic forums upon research and publishing. From dissertation defenses to academic conferences, electronic forums may shape scholar-ship, challenging us to rethink underlying tenets we adhere to in the academy.

On-line dissertation defenses expand the notion of "examiner," from a few committee members sitting in a classroom to a wider audience participating in the event from across the globe. Thus, electronic defenses allow for current research to reach a larger number of scholars than traditional defenses and introduce candidates into their academic fields on national and international levels. In fact, the expansiveness of the medium makes it feasible for candidates to work productively with committee members from other institutions far from degree-awarding universities. Held in MOOs, the dissertation defense can be videotaped and archived. Records of the candidate's work and ideas, as well as comments and questions posed by the audience, can be contained in electronic repositories for others to study and utilize.

Likewise, the electronic format of scholarly conferences facilitates attendance and participation at meetings. By connecting on-line, we can post research and respond to work easily from home or office. The interactiveness of these forums changes the role of the audience, encouraging more involvement in discussions, while the infinite quality of cyberspace allows for limitless amount of participants and research. Thus, competition among conferences or even for an audience at mega conferences may become fierce - with only those scholars understanding how to write for the medium being read and commented upon. And because scholarship can be posted prior to the event in a MOO or on the World Wide Web, presenters are essentially engaging in self-publishing.

Publishing on-line documents not only the research we undertake but the process we have undergone to reach our results and write up our work. The formal language that has dominated scholarship may lose ground to less orthodox styles. And because MOOs are both potential tablets and museums for this new electronic cultural artifact, individual voices of a collaborative piece of writing are documented for posterity.

In "Cybernetic Ecology: Harmonizing Student and Machine in the Humanities Classroom" John Barber starts with the notion proposed in Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" of a "cybernetic ecology" in order to suggest that mutually beneficial interactive contexts for teaching and learning Humanities promoted by networked-computer technology are currently available, and will continue to evolve. Building on the ideas of other panel members, Barber describes how a literature class utilizing networked-computer technology might transcend the time, space, and place boundaries of the traditional Humanities classroom, provide access to far-flung research resources, promote broader collaborative opportunities among students, and orient teaching toward a broad spectrum of humanistic endeavor. Although dependent on theory, his descriptions of the "cybernetic ecology" promoted by networked-computer technology provide preliminary points of praxis for Humanities teachers considering or already using it for collaboration, research, publication, and, of course, teaching. Finally, in the spirit of this conference, his thoughts are also seen as invitations for further critical yet creative thinking.

Biographies of Presenters
Cynthia Haynes is Assistant Professor in the School of Arts & Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas where she teaches both graduate and undergraduate rhetoric, composition, and electronic pedagogy. As Director of Rhetoric and Writing, she manages a networked computer classroom and directs the first-year undergraduate Rhetoric program. Her publications have appeared in Pre/Text, Composition Studies, The Writing Center Journal, and Writing Lab Newsletter. She is currently working on book chapters for collections on textual-based virtual reality, feminism and pedagogy, rhetorical theory and cyberspace, writing and ethics, keywords in composition, and writing centers and rhetoric. In addition, she is Guest Editor of a forthcoming special double issue of Pre/Text on "Virtual Rhetorics." She is a member of the Executive Committee of AEE (Alternative Education Environments) and co-founder of Lingua MOO, a textual-based virtual synchronous learning environment for UT-Dallas students and faculty.

Jan Rune Holmevik recently completed his Master's Degree in history from the University of Trondheim in Norway. In 1993/1994 he was a graduate fellowship student in the program "Research on Research" at the Institute for Studies in Research and Higher Education in Oslo where he continues to work on projects funded by the Norwegian government through the Institute. He is currently working as a researcher on science policy issues while he pursues the design of a PhD project on the history of European and international computing. His thesis, Educating the Machine: A History of Computing and the SIMULA Programming Language, has just been published by the Center for Society and Technology in Trondheim. He is co-editing a book on how to set up and manage MOOs. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of AEE (Alternative Education Environments) and a co-founder of Lingua MOO at UTD.

Dene Grigar is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas Woman's University where she teaches freshman composition in a networked computer lab, as well as upper division literature courses focusing on Greek epic and modernist poetry. She received a M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Houston and a M.A. in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. She has recently published two articles, both of which address the use of technology in teaching and conducting research. Currently she is working on a book entitled, The Penelope Trope: Homer's Penelope in Literature, Music and the Visual Arts, from the Middle Ages to the Present and is translating Sappho's poetry for musical performance. She is also collaborating on a series of dialogues, written on-line, that explores the effects of electronic technology upon academia.

Jeff Galin is a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh currently serving as Assistant Director of the University of Pittsburgh Writing Center (UPWC), co-coordinator of WAC for the Pittsburgh campus, and UPWC Technology Consultant. He has presented in over twenty conference panels and workshops, has served on a range of outreach projects in rural Alabama and Western Pennsylvania, and has spent the past five years integrating technology into teaching. He is also currently co-editing a volume of essays under contract with NCTE entitled, The Dialogic Classroom: Teachers Integrating Computer Technology, Pedagogy, and Research, and is finishing his cross-disciplinary dissertation, "Sixty Years of Multicultural Education Unmasked: A History of the Movement and an Assessment of its Current Influences on Selected University Programs of Composition."

John F. Barber is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in advanced composition, creative writing, technical writing, and electronic pedagogy in the Department of Language and Communication. His publications have appeared in Works & Days, Poetry Digest, and among other journals and often address the use of technology in teaching. His book, Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography remains a standard reference text. He is currently working on a book entitled, Talking Around the Electronic Campfire: Writing Teachers Using Computer Conferences. He has delivered over twenty conference presentations, many of them dealing with the intersection of teaching, learning, and computer technology.