[This is the text of a brief speech I gave at the Talkies Roundtable, aka "Collaboration as Common Ground: Transforming Professional Growth Through Online Inquiry," at the NCTE Convention in Pittsburgh, 19 November 2005.]
My task: To provide some general context for the specific conversations at this session. I won't talk long. I was recently reminded while trying to introduce my rhetoric and composition students to logical fallacies, which I think are fascinating, that I'm not exactly an inspiring and riveting speaker. Did you know that if twenty-five pairs of eyelids close at the exact same time they actually make a sound? It's like this: WHUMP! There's a bit of breeze, too. In any case, it's early and sleep still beckons some of us. There are too many good conversations to be had with some very interesting folks, and I wouldn't want to be responsible for anyone sleeping through the event.
The roundtable presenters bring to us various perspectives on how technology contributes to collaboration and professional growth. What unites them is an online community that they all belong to. I want to tell you a little about that community--it's character, it's habits (good and bad) and its history--because in a sense, the community is the fertile soil in which the ideas we're here to share germinated and were nurtured. The soil looks a bit like this:
A thousand minds, a thousand arguments; a lively intermingling of questions, problems, news of the latest happening, jokes; an inexhaustible play of language and thought, a vibrant curiosity; the changeable temper of a thousand spirits by whom every object of discussion is broken into an infinity of sense and significations--all these spring into being, and then are spent. --Richard Goodwin
His next line is "And this is the pleasure of the Florentine public" but it's a pretty good description of what I'll refer to as the Talkie Community (the name comes from a nickname for the group based on the first discussion list it called home, NCTE-Talk).
History
The Talkie Community is not as old as Florence, but we don't really know exactly how old it is. It's beginnings, even its original name, are lost at the moment in the mists of internet time, 10, maybe 12 years ago.
Sometime in the early 1990s members of NCTE began to play around with online venues for getting together, sharing ideas, commiserating, and generally hobnobbing with each other. Various things were tried. Not all survived.
One such place was on AOL, but though it was a gallant effort, it of course lacked general accessibility.
Somewhere around 1992/1993 or so Tharon Howard, who was chair of the NCTE Instructional Technology committee at the time, managed to get official blessing for an NCTE gopher site (anybody remember gopher?).
Tharon and others tried to get the organization to support discussion lists and a website, but at the time it was slow going. NCTE was not alone in being slow to hop aboard the internet band wagon. It is a bureaucracy, after all. Much as we love it, we have to face the fact. But it's members pushed the organization and proceeded to get things going on their own and by around 1995 or so several things were starting to happen. One of those things that happened was the creation of NCTE-Talk, a discussion list that initially was sponsored by NCTE and hosted at ITC.org.
When I joined the staff in August 1997, my position was website manager, but I had a half-dozen years experience managing discussion lists, and NCTE had just purchased a new server to host its website, so we moved the existing discussion lists to NCTE. ITC.org provided archives that began in April 1996, but there are rumors that the list existed before that. Nobody knows for sure. Perhaps someday some archaeology student who would rather dig through digits than dirt will uncover the secret of NCTE-Talk's origin.
But back to our history lesson. NCTE-Talk was already a thriving community when it was moved to the organization's server and had become so (and I think this is important) while the organization was looking elsewhere. That is, NCTE paid the bills but didn't provide any real oversight or control. Thank goodness! It was the essence of benign neglect. Bureaucracies, bless em, are good at many things and good for many things. Growing a community is not their forte. Communities grow themselves.
So it was a good thing that even with the discussion lists on the home server, the organization didn't pay much attention to them for several years. NCTE-Talk thrived. From 1997 through 2000, membership on the list grew to nearly 1000 subscribers and the conversation was voluminous, averaging roughly 75 messages per day, peaking at more than 100 per day. The number of people and number of messages has fluctuated over time, of course, but going with a conservative average of 50 messages per day for the past 10 years, the list has distributed approximately 182,500 messages by and to hundreds and hundreds of English teachers. Some messages are short, even one-liners, but most are longer, and some are essay-length. If we go with an average of 100 words per message, that means over the past decade, we've generated 1.8 million words.
This copiousness is both a blessing and a curse. Some folks relish all that talk, all those words, but some recoil in horror at the wave of mail that engulfs them. We've created a place for those folks, because as an inclusive community, we don't want to chase people away. We want them to stay and play. On the whole, though, I count copiousness as a blessing. Volume matters because it means we are talking to each other all the time. A steady flow of discourse, some trivial, some profound, but all of it providing the social glue that keeps us connected and keeps our community thriving.
Common topics and issues:
So what do we talk about when we do all this talking?
We even started our own imaginary organization, NAIVE, which is fun and semi-serious. Folks are allowed to award themselves titles, so of course we have a disproportionate number of presidents, vice-presidents, chiefs, poobahs, queens, and princesses. No, wait, only one princess. But lots of the other stuff. Not too many janitors. I may be the only one. And anyone can define and redefine what evil we're interested in vivisecting, depending on what annoyance or outrage they've most recently encountered in real life.
One definition of a good online community: It's a place where it's possible to be serious, safe to be silly, and routine to be both.
However, all is not sweetness and light, sharing and caring. This is an open community. Anyone can join. This is an open conversation. Anyone can say what's on their mind. There is no institutional oversight, no strict father to scold us when we're bad. And you know what happens when you get a few hundred people together, people with opinions, and let them say what's on their minds. Well, John Andrew Rice put it nicely:
"There is no comfort if you really believe in liberty. You're just not going to have any comfort; you're going to have conflict."
He knew what he was talking about. He founded Black Mountain College to explore new possibilities for higher education and ended up getting the boot from his own project.
And so we have spats now and then. Disagreements. Debates. Disenchantment with our lovely colleagues. Sometimes we even use bad words! Of course, those moments are rare enough that they do not spoil our stone soup. We usually learn quite as much from our conflicts and from our congeniality. Maybe more.
Actually this may the final proof that we are a real community. We endure conflict. We weather storms. We've experienced death as well as joy. We've had our world upended several times by technical malfunctions with disastrous results. One pivotal moment came in September 2003. The server the list was on abruptly and catastrophically died. Nearly all the data on it was lost. The list evaporated. It was the virtual version of having your town wiped out by a hurricane, though of course with no risk to life and limb involved. And just as rush aid to victims of hurricanes, within hours, or maybe a day, Pat Schulze, our able co-chair today, was contacting people gathering email addresses, constructing a list made of spit and baling wire in an effort to keep the members of the community, as many as possible, in touch with each other. Within a few days we'd got a new list started at interversity.org and began spreading the word. Before long, the conversations were going again, a bit limpingly at first, but eventually things returned to normal.
I said NCTE wasn't paying attention, but to its credit, it did respond to the wishes of the community. After the server meltdown, NCTE supported the new version of the list in its new home for a year. In September 2004, the organization had new servers, new software, and was ready again to host the list. NCTE-Talk is still going at NCTE. NCTE may be a bureaucracy, but it's also a democracy, and as Charles Ferguson says in A Little Democracy is a Dangerous Thing:
"Democracy must not end with the discussion group, but it cannot begin anywhere else."
And the list at interversity.org, renamed by the community to EngTeach-Talk, is still going strong as well. As we grow, we spread. The community now uses a number of lists and other forums to carry on its conversations.
That's how I know that we're a real community and not just a collection of discussion list subscribers. Although technology allows us to create the place to meet, the community exists independently of any machine or any particular piece of software.
It exists right here, in fact, in this room at this convention. And the convention provides another analog for what happens in the Talkie Community. As Alex Babione said in a message posted to engteach-talk on Sunday, regarding the convention:
"I sometimes think I learn as much in casual conversations as I do at the sessions."
Also from Alex:
"When you engage people in conversations, they tell you what they really know, without notes and without reading from text. [Oops! --EC] You learn about them, rather than all the people that they felt they had to quote."
There you have it. It's like hanging out in the hallways and coffeeshops of convention all year round.
To close, one more quote [Sorry Alex!] that sum up the character and value of this online community:
"Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, no[r] is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure."
—Michael Oakeshott