Toward Native Dwellings in Cyberspace- Michael Day, Northern Illinois State University
- A talk about online research communities and their value for keeping a community learning and growing in a field that changes on a day to day basis.
- An attempt to redefine a new form of incremental online research and differentiate it from printed research.
- An argument for changing requirements for our students in writing classes to include collaborative webbed journals and polylogues
- An outgrowth of a chapter in John Barber and Dene Grigar's new book, New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing about and in Electronic Environments.
Some basic concepts
- Online research occurs in small steps, message by message, in e-mails hours or days apart, not months or even years apart like the scholarly conversations in journals and books.
- MOO and chat conversations speed up the process and divide thoughts into smaller increments.
- We get incrementallysmallers and smaller snapshots of the process of thought as it comes into being and grows.
- Online discussions as thought DOING instead of thought BEING. Native dwellings under continuous construction, fluctuating and changing day to day.
- Like Pynchon's representation of the calculus of thought in Gravity's Rainbow.
- We are technopoets continually creating and redefining the world of our knowledge and strategies.
- Our posts are but steps on the pathway, moving forward, but never arriving, nevercrystallizingg.
- Like the many frames in a movie as opposed to a static photograph.
- Leslie Silko,fromn Ceremony: "Things which don't shift and grow are dead things."
- We want thought to do and move, and we want to share it with each other on a day-by-day basis.
Some modest recommendations:
- We need to keep trying to justify our online discussions to those who evaluate us for hiring, evaluation, promotion, and tenure.
- We don't have to call online research better than print publication, but we do need to find ways to make it count as part of our scholarly activities, for it isn't just service.
- Based on the relative success of native web based forms of writing, such as "blogs" (weblogs), scrytch, and interactive webbed journals, it may now be time to introduce at least one web-native form of composition per semester in our writing classes.
- Many of us have seen the synergy of online discussions and collaborative research, and we should try to share our excitement and our successes with our classes.
- We should try to help our students become technopoets too.
