Real-time environments such as IRC and MOOs have been criticized as fancy playthings, a waste of time. Like any medium for communication, they can be used for mindless chat. But they do have possibilities for invention and collaboration when participants actively set up goals for each session and do their best to abide by those goals.
Further, the graphical interface, with comments scrolling by at odd speeds and questions distant from their answers, can be highly unnerving to some. However, academics can get used to it if they give it a chance; it is just as valuable (or more) as a roundtable discussion at a national conference, in terms of the wealth of ideas exchanged and explored. In terms of overcoming the geographic isolation of places such as Rapid City, South Dakota, or Muncie, Indiana, or Columbia, Missouri, the real-time globally networked environment daily provides many of the features of a face-to-face meeting or conference, with none of the associated costs of travel.
Electronic conferences such as these should never completely replace face--to--face meetings. Indeed, nothing can replace the spontaneity and interaction of oral exchange. Amy Bruckman notes that "Embodied experience has features the virtual can not and should not try to replace. It's not a substitute --- it's something different" (Roush, 1993). Yet virtual environments have features embodied experience cannot match. The real-time networked environment can allow us to stay better connected with colleagues with similar interests around the world, and this feature is especially important to scholars who reside in geographically isolated places. They can stay in touch with the latest developments and collaborate on projects day-by-day instead of waiting for the postal services to deliver correspondence and print journals.
But the value of these environments is not limited to collegial interaction. They are already being used in some schools to connect writing classes across the country for group work.
Some writing teachers hope that students will receive valuable feedback and a sense of purpose to their writing through a combination of real-time and e-mail exchanges with their peers in other locations. These real-time written exchanges have proven their worth on local area networks as invention and dialogic tools for writing classes, but the challenge now is to find ways to allow students from different geographic locations to work together in MOO-like environments. Some researchers have noted that not only does the MOO provide a place for interaction in writing, it also constitutes an environment that can be manipulated only in text. In the hands of capable teachers who set up writing-curriculum oriented goals for their students, interaction on the MOO may indeed help students become more confident and versatile writers. Indeed, as Fred Kemp (1993) and Michael Day (1993) have suggested, we may be able to harness some of the energy young people put into Nintendo, and use their urge to manipulate their environment on the computer screen as a way to get them involved in writing and interacting with others.
Many have claimed that the advent of computer-mediated communication has brought about a paradigm shift in the nature of communication itself. In the workplace, the instantaneous nature of e-mail and the possibility of collaborative projects across great distances has changed the way people work. If communication and work have changed to some degree, and will continue to change, do we not owe it to our students to reflect those changes in what we teach and how we teach it?
We are not arguing that real-time network environments supplant oral and paper-based communications. We wish to provide alternative avenues for our students to succeed, but we will continue to teach using the more familiar oral discussions and paper-based reports in order to prepare students for a wide range of communicative tasks. In terms of its ability to stimulate invention, feedback, and discovery of audience, we think that real-time networked environments should be added to our list of writing tools.