Zeb's Class

Over the course of two semesters, two deaf designated sections of Developmental English Composition ( English 097 and English 098, respectively) were taught online: classes were held in a computer lab, with the teacher and all students connected via their computer terminals to an online classroom. All class sessions were logged: all text produced during each class period was recorded and preserved in the data base and later transferred to computers files as transcripts. These transcripts serve as a record of student writing and class discussion which took place in the interactive environment. As such, these transcripts will be studied for language acquisition in the target language, standard written English. This linguistic analysis is part of an ongoing collaborative projext proposed for the 1997 CCCC's.

Studies of the MOO transcripts will show how this online environment not only enabled these deaf students to gain the necessary writing skills and fluency to succeed at the freshman composition writing level, but also was essential for daily classroom communication. The four students from the fall 1995 semester English 097 section passed and proceeded, the next semester, to the next course level, English 098. One of the students failed to return for the second semester due to personal difficulties, having nothing to do with his university experience. The other three students were joined by three more students in the spring semester. All six passed the course and will proceed to the next level, English 155.

All students were fully aware and cognizant that all text from each class was recorded and saved as transcripts to be used for further study and examples. The computer environment allowed each student, and the teacher, to choose an "alias," or alternate name for use when connected to provide a level of anonymity. These aliases are known only to the participants and this observer. Additionally, the aliases they assumed can be changed in cited areas of the transcripts, thereby providing yet another level of anonymity, if the students should so desire. All participants were adults.

The research will add to the scant but growing body of literature on the use of multi-user, synchronous environments for education, not only in language acquisition of deaf students, but also in general. The research will show that this Internet environment, essential in this particular case for basic, daily communication among class members, can benefit other university students in composition. It is also the intention of this study to develop and provide a model for faculty to enable them to provide online instruction across the curriculum in order to enhance writing and communication skill. Since the environment is "online" these models would also apply for collaborative effort between faculty at the university level, community college level, and indeed k-12.

This document, in large part and at this point in time, is a narrative, defining the need and use of the MOO for one particular class. This narrative will offer a qualitative evaluation only, based on the limited number of students. This more closely resembles an "ethnographic" study of several small classes I was able to observe and with whom I was able to interact. Further analysis, as indicated above, will obtain from the storage and retrieval of archived logs of the texts.

  1. There is a real need for the MOO environment, not limited to the needs of this particular class.
  2. How the MOO met the needs of this particular class, and how it may w the needs of other classes.
  3. I hope to evaluate some of the features particular to MOO space, what they offer to teachers and students, what the limits are.
  4. Extrapolate from this experience in order to help teachers who wish to use this space: IE. Provide MOO training for teachers to lessen the "steep learning curve" and enable them to use the MOO for a variety of educational goals based upon their pedagogical concerns and needs.

As more and more universities move toward "distance education," exploring ways and means of offering online classes, the demand to facilitate "real time" components into a "distance" curriculum increases. There is a great need to not only explore the capabilities of the MOO environment, but also implement a training program in order to enable instructors to retain control of their pedagogy. The features of the MOO I will delineate have the capacity to foster almost any pedagogical bent, be it a "panoptical" control, on one extreme, or a pedagogy of liberation a la Freire on the other. What a teacher does on a MOO, is driven by the pedagogical underpinnings of the individual. I would like to demystify the MOO, turning control of the space over to teachers and students alike.

My own agenda includes a hope that this space will in turn help teachers demystify power structures inherent in the university structure, help teachers foster critical thinking skills and responsibility in their students by helping students take control of this one small piece of educational space. We often speak of helping students "authorize" themselves, helping students "write" their way into the university discourse community. The MOO offers a real, virtual way of so doing. Not only might students write their way into the university, but the larger world as well; the world contained in this small bit of virtual university real estate, embodied in a data base and served up on a university server is only a starting place, much as we have long envisioned our classrooms as starting places from which our students could carry over some skills into the "greater world." The need to assist students in becoming "computer literate" presses daily, and even more clearly perhaps than ever before.