"Now, please, everyone lock your wigs, let the air out of your shoes and prepare for a period of simulated exhilaration! Everybody ready? Let's get in 'sync' for our Flight To The Future!"
The tour guide's scenario might sound a bit Disneylandish, but then many portrayals of cyberspace and virtual reality in the popular media have had fabulous, futuristic, gee-whiz qualities to them. That, or they are sprinkled with fear, with nightmarish invocations of Big Brother. Or both. In our experience, however, cyberspace is neither an eternally approaching technoUtopian future nor a yawning technototalitarian pit about to swallow civilization. It is radical and exciting and ordinary. As Amy Bruckman noted during a 1993 CNN feature on virtual reality, "People talk about cyberspace as if it were the future, but cyberspace is here --- this is it. People live online in this world and make friends there, and work there, and play there."
And they are learning in it. Widely accessible real-time communication and textually-constructed virtual environments are springing up rapidly and are providing new prospects for engaging in the ongoing learning process. These social spaces --- which exist in the intricate web of wires that cuddle the planet --- represent the emergence of a new kind of learning environment. What we suspect is a new university is spreading rhizomatically and quite literally beneath the hoary brick and mortar of the ancient academy. As an institution, the university is now faced with hard choices, whether to somehow incorporate these new environments into its time-honored structures (thereby altering the old structures in unpredictable ways) or to resist the insidious encroachment of the Net. Based on our own research and early explorations of real time communication on the Internet we think the former is the better course.