kVw: How does MOOniversity intersect with amphibians?
Iterations With vv: Victor Vitanza on MOOS
MOOniversity: A Guide to Online Learning Environments
11 Questions Continued
vv: Let me repeat:
--Norway and D/FW; D/FW and Norway!
--JanCyn and Cynjan!
--Fjords and FW Stockyard; FW Stockyard and Fjords!
Catch my drift? Two different, yet same, worlds. For us to situate
ourselves. In the middle of "doing" and "making" (Aristotle).
The book _MOOniversity_, though something on paper, still nonetheless is situated in that in between, be twixt, interaction, of the MOOplayers whom we would normally call the "authors" of the book. I think that when we are given ("gifted") a book like this we are invited—when reading it, trying it—to go with the very educational, play(work)ful venue of the virtual space that makes up, in this special case, both High Wired enCore (the very MOO core that is free for the downloading and is the virtual space to build [to dig] in) and enCore Xpress (the new interface that is the very virtual embodiment of be tween ness). enCore Xpress is the architecture that intersects with those of us who would be or consider ourselves to be amphibians. Any viewer or digger in High Wired enCore, "sees" the doubleness of, on the left. a MOO client and, on the right, a Web space. For me when I am in the enCore Xpress interface, I experience a double vision, if not visions, of what was and what is. In a manner of speaking, I feel cross eyed. I experience the feeling of being a MOOwriter in a client and a MOOwriter on the Web, simultaneously, and especially experience the conditions of possible writings back and forth between these two, but one, technologies. I experience the difference be tween the two. (You really have to go to LinguaMOO to see, or to intuit the re-theorEYEzation, of virtual, metaphoric space. Try it! And you, too, will see, perhaps theorEYEze cross-eyed. T/Hereafter!)
kVw: Holmevik and Haynes organized MOOniversity so as to direct students and instructors towards creating their own MOOspace and then nurturing a community. The authors envision not just being MOO-consumers, but MOO producers. In other words, the text moves readers from viewing themselves as newbie status to MOO citizens to a programmers or wizards. Why is it important for instructors of MOO-use and students to take charge of design?
vv: Why is it important? These varieties of subject positions that you mention are perhaps the spice of virtual, postmodern living. But politically, it is important, for it allows for a shift in power from One to Many. If you tend to identify with the Left, as I do, then this dispersal of power (by which I mean building-digging your own MOOhut or whatever and not dwelling in someone's prefab virtual hut) is potentially good. I say "potentially," for simply giving ("gifting") something is no guarantee of anything. We can but offer the opportunities of a new space for education. In many ways, as I've experienced MOO for the purpose of education, there is an unbearable lightness in the opportunities of this new space. At any moment while teaching in this space, the activity of teaching is about to fly apart in a state of virtual anarchy. But YES! This is the point, as I see it. The "teaching" or I would rather say "facilitating" becomes decentered. One of the opportunities, therefore, becomes potentially everyone helping everyone. A person who is a so-called newbie can be a great teacher of technology, for s/he teaches from a state of perpetual ignorance and learning, which is a natural state comparable to anarchy. Without an/archy, NO learning.
Speaking of anarchy, let us see that the architecture of enCore Xpress is always beckoning "users" to anarchy. The architecture has incipiently present in it a statelessness and therefore should be renamed anarchitexture. What this anarchitexture can do, way beyond any simple Leftist split of One and Many, is remarkable. But I would take us too, too far into a territory that is far Left of being political as we, in any case, think What it means to be "political." We will have to "just see" what the future holds after the users have experienced this statelessness in this latest Beta version of enCore Xpress educational space.
kVw: As Editor of the Writing and Technology Series, where would you like the _MOOniversity_ and upcoming texts to take readers literally and virtually?
vv: I would hope the books in the series would take "readers" (users) to uncanny places. Strange places. Educational spaces are usually boring, nonpromising or nonprompting or nonconducive to learning. Educational space should not be the site of the return of the same old same.
I will never forget the first time that I went to a MOO. How strange it was. The bodily experience of it a/we. And how(l) strange it still is. And I remember the first time that I used the new tech to create a Web page, a graphic file, an audio file, and a video file, etc. Do you remember when you first heard your "recorded" voice? I do, and like most people, I remember thinking, How strange I sound. This voice is not my voice! I would hope that the books in the series would take students and facilitators out of the everydayness and place them in and allow them to re-experience this strangeness. Or if you wish, newness. Learning should be about encounters with new, strange things and linking them to supposedly old, no longer strange things.
I like to watch students create something with technology for the very first time. Second time. Third time. After all, it's never a one-time thing, is it? The technology keeps changing so rapidly that we are constantly in, let's say, a Beta state of versions. A Beta Version of Life or Beta Lives. I like to see that expression in their eyes and body posture when caught in and shaped by Beta time.
Going and experiencing strange Beings and Times can but lead to an endless educational experience par excellence! This new technology can de-familiarize the habituated world in which we live. "Live?" Returning to so-called reality is a discovering of the very strangeness within our own country, so to speak. (Ethnographers speak of this experience when they return "home.") I cannot imagine that the FW Stockyards would look the same after seeing a fjord! Real or virtual!
So I would hope that the textbooks forthcoming from the Writing and Technology series would provide us, our community and the broader community, the occasions for such opportunities. Provide opportune moments! Kairotic (KaiErotic, pleasurable) moments! ?
kVw: How does the new MOO core (high-wired enCore) radically democratize MOOs? What does this mean to instructors? Students? Direction of MOOs?
vv: Well, as I said previously, JanCyn is (are) giving away virtual land. FREE. You can download the core free and then start shaping it to your desires. (There is, of course, nothing new in the act of giving away a MOO core, but what is given is new!)
Let's say, for example, that you wanted to build a MOO based on Leibnitz's ethico-political notion of compossibility filled with incompossible worlds. Some tinkering with the code could get you and yours into a fundamentally different space, one-cum-a-radical Many, that would be so strange that it would have multiple worlds to experience. You would enter and your "avatar" would split and resplit and further schizosplit (fold, refold, enfold, unfold, and refold again) and each version would enter different, yet same worlds…. I do realize that you can this un/kind of thing with probably with any free core. And I realize that you can point to such weird, gaming places already in MOO or MUD existence. But what the interface of CynJan's enCore Xpress can do is allow you to see, theoreyeze, two fun(dah)mental worlds as the same, yet different. It is not the separate world that I am alluding to; it's, instead, the intermingling, the strange linking, of these incompossible and at times incommensurable worlds. I am referring again to the split screen of the interface. Well, Why not three split-screen worlds, four, five, etc. whirls…? The closest thing that I am alluding to in "existence" and have seen along this line is something called Pad++: Zoomable Graphical Interfaces. But what, de/based on enCore Xpress, would a hacked version of Xploadable Graphical Interfaces look and feel like to write in or by "wayes" of? (Am I suggesting that hacking enCore Xpress is okay? Yes, yEs, yeS. "enCore Xpress" is an open source project!
Writing and Digging should be Hacking and vice-versa. Am I also saying that "we" should hack teaching as a cultural activity? Of course. "Teaching" should be an open source project as well, especially because it is institutionaleyezed/oedipalEYEzed! I am sure that I am not saying anything that _Kairos_ readers and writers have not already thought or said. It is this in commonness that can make us a community on our wayes to facilitating in a Virtual PerVersity.)
Look, I am a third sophistic rhetor and therefore I am an advocate for many different, yet similar (or paradoxical) realities. And I'm an advocate, of course, for radically, unattached, not yet linked singular (only-talking-to-themselves) realities.
Hence, this is how I must respond to your question concerning politics. The radically, unattached realities can and would function as the anarCHIstic sites, or as the conditions for the possibilites of what J-F. Lyotard calls a _pagus_ , which he describes as a "border zone where genres of discourse enter into conflict over the mode of linking" (_Differend_ 151). Facilitators and colleagues in MOOs then would become _pagani_, that is, MOOwriters attempting to construct new idioms that would allow for the connectedness of old and new, strange things, ever building and revising something we allude to as a radical democracy. Which is really not a thing, but a "doing," a perpetual perverse practice
kVw: In your introduction
to Writing for the World Wide Web, you
state, “Researchers have learned by studying both experienced and inexperienced
writers that success or failure is greatly dependent on whether or not
writers are aware of the constraints and conventions of the genre in which
they want to speak and write and whether or not they can execute them well,”
(http://www.abacon.com/vitanza2/intro1.html).
How does
_MOOniversity_ especially assist the writing
instructor?
It teaches a new writing. Let's call it, of course, MOOwriting. Digging is writing! Each chapter is a basic introduction to Digging as Writing, Writing as Digging. And as the user reads through _MOOniversity_ and attempts the exercises, etc., s/he learns to write semiotically across the various contraints of what goes for writing (digging) in this virtual space. But more importantly, as I stated fully above, s/he will learn to write like _pagani_ write, placing at stake the very idea of "writing"! There can be no single law of genres for MOOs or MOOwriting! This is what (the agenre of) MOOwriting does. Or should do! Un/timely meditations (Nietzsche) on placing at stake the very idea of what goes for and by the proper name of a genre of (MOO) "writing"!
kVw: How do MOOs act as a rhetoric in shaping writing?
I have the distinct feeling that I am answering questions before they are asked here! And that's how it should be. With the questions arising out of the answering of them. Metalepsis.
Again, MOOs act as the container (synecdoche) that is not a container but a dispersal system! As I said in a recent article: MOOs invite me to "scribble—breaking all the rules of scrabble…. MOOs are the best and worst of electronic scrambling de-Vices." Writing has to be misshapened—folded in strange ways—to get to what Writing wants to become. Which would be something other than a mere tool for the ISA (Althusser). I do not believe that universities are a safe place for students to write! (There's a Montaignean essay that wants to be written here on this atopic!)
kVw: Derick Rhodes said, “Once a ‘voice’ is excerpted from one context and projected into another ‘for transitive purposes,’ it necessarily discusses only itself.” Is this interview of you on _MOOniversity_ discussing itself? How do MOOs move written communication to a different realm of communication?
vv: I think that I will have thought about some compossible answers—nyanzas—above. But let me add that, Yes, this excerpted voice discusses only itself but the important thing to see in its discussing its selfless or selphs, is that it is constantly looking for other selves to become linked to. This looking is irrepressible! And "we" would hope in strange, heretofore unacceptable ways, wayes irrepressible in its looking to link. (As Lyotard says: "It's necessary to link but not how to link.") Writing is about LINKING. The teaching of writing has been about HOW to link PROPERLY. We are on the verge now—as we are always on the verge but forget it—of major ethico-political break throughs in the facilitating of this practice called "writing." JUST LINKING!
kVw: _MOOniversity_ touches upon concepts in the filed of virtual literacy (65) such as workspace, research, archives (134-136), knowledge construction (146), virtual communities, and “co-laboring.” What can _Kairos_ readers look forward to in the Writing and Technology Series and companion Websites?
vv: _Kairos_ readers (writers [tinkerers]) can look forward to what they will have co-produced for the series. I invite anyone and everyone interested in doing a textbook for the series, to please contact me, sophist@utarlg.uta.edu. I invite them to rethink the whole concept of what goes for a "textbook."
kVw: What would you like readers to know about the authors, _MOOniversity_, the Allyn and Bacon technology series, or anything else that I have not asked? What have I missed?
vv: "What have I missed?" What have "we" missed? That is the question, right? Let "us"—JanCyn, _MOOniversity_, the series, the whirl of _Kairos_ and Chaos readers, etc.—continue to discover together what "we" have been dis-missing by way of the teaching of writing. Let us discover together and then disseminate our discoveries with the purpose of ever more growing numbers of "us," yet uncovering still some more, of what we will have un/found. On the wayes to MOOwriting.
Note on External Links
You links to Victor Vitanza's homepage.