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	              |             Welcome                |
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	              | Speech Communication 454 Students! |
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Greetings, and welcome to our MOO session. This presentation is made up of "slides" which should serve as the backdrop to our discussion this afternoon. All Conversation is logged here today and will be made available on the web.

Please take a moment to introduce yourselves.

Since the last time we gathered on the MOO, we have discussed some of the positive and negative aspects of using MOOs in education. The readings for this evening focused our attention to some of the negative consequences of computerized instruction. In order to guide discussion, let's first consider the following brief summaries of each of the authors.

Postman: technology is not a solution to any real-world educational problem that exists. Because computers have a built-in individualistic bias, they will not contribute to the socializing goal of education. A school's primary purpose should be educating for socialization rather than for individual problem solving or information access.

Neill: the introduction of computers into the curriculum is simply one of the many ways that capitalism responds to economic and social crisis. The goal of the capitalist educational system is to train low- to mid-skill workers to accept menial jobs and low wages and avoid criticizing the dominant socioeconomic system. The computer facilitates only certain kinds of thinking and learning. It also alienates individual students from their social lives and their bodies. "[T]he point is to produce the human as puzzle-solver, not really as critical thinker. Puzzles can be...challenging, yet substantively mindless."

Both authors seem to assume that the computer is an inherently alienating device. But what precisely is meant by alienation in this context? Who is alienated from what?

In classical Marxist theory, "alienation" occurs because the worker is alienated from h/er product of labor. In other words, the worker built the product but now cannot reap the benefits of it since s/he cannot afford it.

Postman speaks of alienation from society and from the democratic tradition of public discourse. The student in Postman's narrative is alienated from h/er surroundings already due to economic and political circumstances of modern society. Interacting in the classroom, for Postman, allows the student to learn to become a "civilized" social creature. What does he mean by this?

For Neill, on the other hand, the issue is alienation from the individual body. The student, in his analysis, begins to live in the world of puzzles and problems, leaving behind the world of emotions and passions. "In inducing physical and social isolation," he writes, "the computer is the extension of the 'white man.' Devoid of emotion, disconnected from the body, nonnurturing and unmusical, the type of the 'white man' excludes all human traits capitalism has attached to women and people of color..... The 'white man' -- really bourgeois -- qualities are now to be extrapolated and intensified, abstracted into the computer and then used to school the child into being computerlike."

What does he mean? Do you agree? Is his characterization of "white man" alienation realistic?

It's clear that neither Postman nor Neill had MOOs in mind when they made these arguments. Do you think the structure of the MOO offers teachers and students a social realm of communication?

How does the MOO environment allow the discussion and/or processing of information?

What are the implications of the world-wide web for educational instruction? You might consider this question again after visiting one of the following web sites, or many others like it:

• http://www.stolaf.edu/network/iecc/
• http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/index.html

Do we agree with Neil Postman's fundamental assumption that the goal of the classroom is to "socialize" students to democratic culture? If so, how do we feel about Monty Neill's assumption that such socialization is really part of the exploitation of the working class by the ruling class? Is education simply a means of preparing the oppressed to give in to their oppression? How does education contribute to or challenge structures of domination? Just what exactly IS the role of education in a violently oppressive society?

Also, where do situate yourselves in this matrix of oppressor-and- oppressed? Does this concept make sense and have relevance to the ways in which you experience and understand the world?

Some people regard the internet and especially the MOO-environment as a means to erase class- race- and sex- biases of Western culture. The phenomenon of "pseudonymity," the possibility of constructing your own identity and online personality, is supposed to eliminate traditional barriers to intercultural and cross-cultural communication.

In your brief experience developing your online personalities, do you agree with this claim? Can it be problematized in a useful manner? To what degree is "identity" an individual creative performance? To what degree is it determined by society?

How would we model communication on a MOO as opposed to in a face-to-face or a mass communication situation? Julian Dibbel argues that MOO-communication must be compared to "magic" because part of the experience involves giving commands to a machine that carries them out. In what ways is this description significant?

Well, that's it....