As a new teacher many years ago, I remember relishing the moments when I wrote on the blackboard. There was something satisfying about exerting my consciousness on that hazy, gray writing space. I loved the grainy, imperfect surface and the powdery residue that floated around my laboring hand. I found something of myself as I wrote on the blackboard.

Today I work with my students on a different kind of blackboard, one stored on a mysterious server somewhere. There is no grainy surface and no powdery residue. My writing space has changed. Can my students and I learn to comfortably assert our conscious selves onto this electronic writing space?

What is this space? How do we define it?

Our electronic writing space is a multi-dimensional environment that facilitates our ways of knowing. The asynchronous virtual community, powered by software tools such as Blackboard, raises old questions about the nature of discourse. In this virtual environment, from a rhetorical theoretical perspective, we observe an intersection of oral and written communication assuming the guise of oral group communication. The technology lurks large in the background, shaping the nature of the message. The technology not only shapes the learning space; it is the learning space.

By technologizing the word, we shape the writing space, creating a secondary orality (Ong Orality 123). Like the script of a TV sitcom delivered under the guise of spontaneous orality, our electronic discourse is dependent on print for existence. Our asynchronous blackboard, in true postmodern fashion, wraps and warps the dimensions of writing, reading, oral communication, technology, and time as we persist in our efforts to teach and learn in our virtual community.

Lester Faigley identifies the Blackboard discussion as a "hybrid form of discourse, something between oral and written, where the conventions of turn-taking and topical coherence are altered" (168). The complexity of our writing space is our slippery slope. Writes Faigley, "Because the subject is the locus of overlapping and competing discourses, it is a temporary stitching together of a series of often contradictory subject positions" (9). Ambiguity, in this virtual space, is present because of the everchanging self. Our multi-dimensional space provides us with different ways of examining the world. How inviting does the adult student find our electronic writing space as it masquerades as oral group communication?

The tension between oral and written communication is no better expressed than by Plato in the Phaedrus, when he rejects writing as a worthwhile pursuit, bemoaning the demise of memory accompanied by a greater reliance on the written word and a fading oral culture. We note that ironically it is only through written discourse that we today contemplate Plato’s excursion into this debate. How would Plato receive our Blackboard where we write under the pretense of being oral?

Our electronic writing space is also a place where we learn to know our context and ourselves. Basic to our discussion are the foundation of language and the power of the word. Symbolic language provides a way for knowing the world. "Postmodern theory decisively rejects the primacy of consciousness and instead has consciousness originating in language," writes Faigley (9). "Whenever language is the principal medium of communication," comments Neil Postman, "—especially language controlled by the rigors of print—an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result. . . . language is the instrument guiding one’s thought" (Amusing Ourselves 50). One student comments, "I know what I know by what I write." Another says, "I write who I am." Still another observes, "Language is my way of knowing the world." We do, as Ong says, write our consciousness (178).

In a broader sense, writing shapes culture, allowing us to express over time our relationships to the past, present and future. Writing in our electronic writing space is further complicated by the interrelationship of language and technology. Postman continues, "The clearest way to see a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation" (Amusing Ourselves 8). From more than thirty years ago, Marshall McLuhan’s voice in The Medium is the Massage reminds us, "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication" (McLuhen and Fiore 8). Postman concludes, "Each medium, like language itself, classifies the world for us, sequences it, frames it, enlarges it, reduces it, argues a case for what the world is like" (Conscientious Objections 33)

Our electronic writing space is a place where the reader-speaker-writer relationship blurs. The writer has the difficult task of attempting to replicate the subtleties of the spoken word. The spoken word has the clear advantage of conveying meaning within a context. The whole situation contributes meaning in oral communication. It is an existential process. The writer is not so fortunate and must labor to only approach the same precision. In the purest sense, the writer imagines the audience and writes to that audience. In a virtual environment, the writer may have significantly more information available about audience than the writer of a book, let’s say. But the gap is still present. The quest for establishing a substantially shared meaning is complicated by the reader-writer relationship and is further complicated by the underlying technology. Ong reminds us that readers and writers are both "masked," more so than the oral communicator and their audience. "Writing," says Ong, "is itself an indirection. Direct communication by script is impossible. . . . Writing, alone, however, will never bring us truly beneath to the actuality" ("Writer’s Audience" 74)

There is, Ede and Lunsford remind us, an audience addressed whose values, beliefs, and expectations can be approached. Ede and Lunsford further identify an "audience invoked," essentially a fiction of the writer. They argue that Ong may distinguish speaking and writing too much, affirming that both are rhetorical acts. In the online discourse community, the distinction between the two is even more blurred. Clearly fellow students in an online discussion group assume the roles of the addressed audience. Ede and Lundsford remind us of a "dynamic duality of the process of reading and writing, whereby writers create readers and readers create writers. In the meeting of these two lies meaning, lies communication" (92). The reader is not passive but a participant, imposing will on the dimensions of time and technology, and our adult students in this dialogue become writer, speaker, and reader, actively engaged with others in the making of consciousness.

How do we work in our electronic writing space?

Let us return to the multi-dimentional aspects of the asynchronous online discourse community; the dimensions of writing, oral communication, technology, and time. The writing dimension presents itself as a written group discussion. To be effective it requires many of the same theoretical concepts as faceto- face oral group discussion; community building, norming, conflict management, and valid decisionmaking practices. Practicing the technology of writing, however, allows students to wrestle with ideas, to shape them and query them more completely before sharing them with the community. Thus the response is shaped by the technology and may be somewhat different from what it would be in oral group discussion. Once written and the reply button engaged, the offering enters the realm of oral group discussion, often warped by a time delay and certainly imprinted by the technology.

As in all symbolic communication, there is never perfection of thought. All communication requires the symbolic encoding and decoding with the ever-present gap between the two. The picture in the virtual community is further clouded as encoding and decoding takes place in an electronic environment. There is no perfect way of knowing the symbols. We can only approximate. The virtual discourse community offers every opportunity for miscommunication—the imprecision of symbolic language, the absence of nonverbal communication, the fragility of the technology, and the potential aberration introduced by the passage of time.

And what are the nuts and bolts for engaging students?

The online community is a social environment. We teachers must learn to facilitate an interpersonal arena rich with humor while focusing on the task of knowledge construction. Students should have opportunities to socialize and should recognize and be able to embrace essentials skills required for learning.

We need to fully develop our virtual coaching skills to engage students in the process of knowing self, knowing others, and making meaning. In the cyber- environment, it is our responsibility to facilitate as students learn to navigate the technology. We must also focus on writing as a way of knowing, helping students to better understand the mechanism of writing, going beyond mastery of fundamental writing skills.

Finally, our students in our virtual community require a fundamental knowledge of group communication theory and practice. Despite the fact that they don’t see each other face to face, their virtual team will require that they function as a group. Skill-building is essential to attaining success as a virtual team.

This presenter’s session incorporates a number of exercises to help attendees explore what happens to discourse when oral and written discourse communities merge in cyberspace. The presenter will also facilitate a practical discussion of the skill-building necessary to generate cohesion, precision, and productivity within the framework of an asynchronous, online group discussion. Questions for exploration include: How should expectations of adult students in an online environment be addressed? What is the role of the teacher when discussions digress but remain productive? Is the online discourse community different when the students are adults? The presenter will share a collection of narratives from adult students who discuss their online discussion experiences.

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