Scott, 'BEHAVIOR SETTINGS OF NETWORK LITERACY: A FRAMEWORK FOR GENERALIZATION FROM ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH ABOUT COMPUTER- MEDIATED COMMUNICATION?', Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture v1n07 (November 30, 1993) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/aejvc/aejvc-v1n07-scott-behavior The Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture __________________________________________________________________ ISSN 1068-5723 November 30, 1993 Volume 1 Issue 7 SCOTT V1N7 THE BEHAVIOR SETTINGS OF NETWORK LITERACY: A FRAMEWORK FOR GENERALIZATION FROM ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH ABOUT COMPUTER- MEDIATED COMMUNICATION? Tony Scott The Ohio State University Abstract Much of the qualitative research into computer-mediated communication systems attempts to adduce evidence from a single or limited number of case studies. In so far as many such studies also draw on environmental analogies to describe human behavior in virtual cultures (the "virtual classroom", the "global village", the multi-user "dungeon"), research on actual environment-behavior systems may be appropriable. The approach to looking at environment-behavior systems as "behavior settings," developed by Barker & Schoggen, is described and applied to some sample virtual settings. Its potential as a basis for generalization from otherwise anecdotal collections of case studies is evaluated. Research Strategies in Educational CMCS Research into CMCS outside the educational context can be viewed as being of two kinds, ergonomic or sociological. Ergonomic research is concerned with constructing and assessing ever more complex and sophisticated software. Much of the work in conferencing systems research is of this "human factors" type. Sociological research has been largely in the form of impact studies of innovation in organizations and social life. This characterizes some of the very earliest research into CMCS, as well as some of the most recent. Another characteristic of general CMCS research has been the sheer optimism with which researchers have viewed the potential of their medium (this is exemplified by Hiltz & Turoff's early "textbook" for students, The Network Nation, first published in 1978.). To some extent, this is a recapitulation of the optimism which first accompanied the growth of computerization per se and has equally been followed by at least a partial turn toward an awareness of the problems preventing the most efficient uses of CMCS. Even though research into the educational applications of telecommunications is still in its infancy, this area has also developed a number of research "traditions" that are established or in the process of growing. Three of these approaches can be labelled as "evaluation," "collaboration," and "participation." Evaluative approaches are largely based on the question of whether the use of CMCS is "feasible" for educational purposes. Collaborative approaches are concerned with examining and enhancing team building and group dynamics through the use of CMCS. Participative approaches are concerned with what it means to the individual respondent to be an actor in the network. We can include here discourse analysis in both the sense of "conversation analysis" and the wider sense of "discourse" as a study of the power relations and affordances shaping conversational exchange. An early example of research into the collaborative potential of CMCS in the classroom was the joint production of a newspaper "The Computer Chronicles", which involved linking children in Alaska and those in San Diego County to work together on the production of a newspaper. Riel (1985) reports on the impact on children of their acting as co-editors at-a-distance on the writing process. This research was generalized and taken up in a number of ways: a) Riel and her colleagues created an InterCultural Network which linked schools in Japan, Alaska, San Diego, Italy and Israel; b) Malcolm Beazley in Sidney and Jim Erwin in Fairbanks created the Australaskan Writing Project, which later became Computer Pals Across the World; and c) the Australian- owned Times newspaper in London, UK took up and refined the telemediated newspaper production theme as a prominent component in its TTNS service (The Times Network for Schools - now "Campus 2000"). An example of the participative approach is research into the use of telecommunications in bilingual classrooms (DeVillar & Faltis, 1991) which has shown that it can be an effective medium for empowering minority children. Hispanic students experience, maybe for the first time, the power of being an expert in relation to their Anglo contemporaries, when messages, the content of which is important to the Anglo children, arrive from Spain or Latin America via the network, and have to be translated to English for the benefit of the non- Spanish-speaking children. The creation, through telecommunications, of balanced bilingual activities in the classroom context leads not only to improvements in mother-tongue skills, but also to marked improvements in the Hispanic children's command of English. This may be significant when considering the potential of telecommunications media to provide these children with an authentic voice in the second-language classroom. Other research which could be quoted to illustrate these three research traditions is Denis Newman's work on tele-mediated collaborative approaches to school science, (Newman, 1988), which involve several small-scale evaluation exercises in many school districts in the USA, Canada, Australia and Europe. Behavior Settings One factor which may have impaired the development of more sophisticated research strategies for looking at CMCS in complex educational settings is the lack of powerful theoretical tools to describe and interpret those settings. With this in mind, we can turn to the idea of the "behavior setting" as a potential conceptual and theoretical tool. The environmental psychology which was pursued by Roger Barker at the University of Kansas in the early 60's was concerned with identifying the systematicities and regularities of the contexts in which (social) human behavior takes place, in contrast to much work in social psychology where people interact with one another, performing their given and ascribed roles in something of a vacuum. To this end he conducted surveys of small towns, beaches, national parks, city squares and social gatherings both to establish an inventory of the settings through which a person might pass in the daily rhythm of his or her life, and to identify the salient characteristics of the behavior-pattern-in-its-setting. In order that they might make generalizations from their surveys of such "behavior settings", Barker and Schoggen (Schoggen, 1989, Chapter 3) employed quite a restricted version of the concept. By no means does every social interaction that takes place in the environment constitute a behavior setting. There must be regularity, structure, and constancy of a "community" part, and some constancy of the "environmental" part within which the community part is realized. To qualify as a behavior setting a "community part" must survive two multipart tests: a test for structure and a test for dynamic interdependence (Schoggen, 1989, p.50ff). The structure test requires that a behavior-milieu "synomorph" (i.e., synomorphic - having the same shape as, or fitting with...) displays all of the following characteristics: 1) a standing pattern or complex of patterns of behavior (bounded patterns in the behavior of persons en masse that occur independently of the particular persons involved at any one time) that is: 2) anchored to a particular milieu complex 3) at particular time-space locii 4) with behavior and milieu synomorphic 5) and with milieu circumjacent to behavior. Barker and Schoggen's second test is one of articulation and dynamic independence. A behavior setting is not simply a setting. For instance, a community hall in a small town would not necessarily be a behavior setting if it was simply playing host to a succession of disjoint events (Town Meeting, Choir Practice, Church Service) where the events themselves would be behavior settings. As an example, let us consider what it means, at least on the part of an academic, to have a computer account accessible from the terminal at his or her desk. The setting, "scholar-working-in- office" probably would not qualify as a behavior setting under the Barker/Schoggen tests, but sitting in the same office at the same terminal participating through the terminal according to some schedule probably would qualify. Certainly participating on-line in a synchronous, scheduled conference with colleagues would qualify. It would be reasonable to assume, given that those who exhibit the fullest sense of network literacy are always extending their networks in the social sense, that all CMCS settings are interdependent. So what? one might ask, especially if the preceding sections do not fully convince that behavior settings can and do exist within CMCS. What is the use of the behavior settings model? The notion of computer-mediated behavior settings is useful for two reasons: a) to ascribe the regularities of behavior posited by ecological psychologists as wholly valid for one behavior setting or another; and b) to access the behavior setting specific notions of "manning" and "undermanning" because of their potential utility in exploring telecommunications experiences The second point listed above needs to be considered in some more detail. The theory of behavior settings advances a notion that underpopulated settings differ in some important ways from "adequately populated" settings. Specifically, the inhabitants of underpopulated settings engage in: 1) more program actions 2) more varied program actions 3) more maintenance actions 4) more varied maintenance actions 5) stronger maintenance actions 6) more deviation-countering maintenance actions 7) fewer vetoing maintenance actions, and 8) more induced happenings (Schoggen, 1987, p.202). Overcrowding will generally lead to a reverse of these actions. Whereas in the undermanned setting, there is a considerable force of obligation on "the few who are present" to carry out a variety of tasks, a crowded situation allows those present "to leave it to the others." There is a view inherent in these two approaches that an "adequately manned" situation is one in which there are exactly enough roles to give each setting-attendee sufficient satisfaction to maintain the setting. In so far as we accept the view that one can articulate behavior settings through CMCS then we are also supporting the view that networking skills are only accessible through interaction in those appropriate environments, considered as settings. One may go to the choir practice and not sing, but one will not be able to render Handel's Messiah without attendance at, and conformance with, the choir-practice-behavior-setting. The notion of behavior settings reinforces the notion of the importance of social network skills. Settings are about people interacting. Computer-mediated settings no less so than face-to-face settings. The short case studies which follow illustrate how very different physical settings and complex events can be extended into constructive virtual settings by CMCS. The first case deals with members of a virtual community acting as information resources during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake crisis. The second case compares several different existing and competing networks designed to give school children access to the virtual community. The final case deals with the development of network literacy involving the XLIT network as part of a network literacy course at the University of California at San Diego. The Loma Prieta Earthquake: Talking through a natural disaster The four messages that follow were sent to those concerned from afar by inhabitants of the Bay Area in the aftermath of the 1989 (Loma Prieta) San Francisco earthquake. They exemplify some of the social and psychological benefits of computer-mediated communication; an ability to reach out to others over great distances as well as an ability to converse reflexively, ostensibly with others but essentially with oneself, in the aftermath of a disaster. Because of damage to trunk lines, and because of telephone company policy (which switched all remaining lines to outgoing from the area), it was extremely difficult for people to phone into or to send messages into the Bay Area in the 24 hours immediately following the 'quake. Where Bay Area network users were able to gain a line "out" however, the nature of computer- mediated communication facilitated two-way communication. Many of these messages underline the difficulty of getting accurate information within the area itself. Most of these messages are drawn from the USENET group CA.EARTHQUAKES, a pre-existing newsgroup for Californians to discuss with each other issues such as earthquake preparedness. The distribution of this group is internal to Internet sites in the State of California. I will list the four messages first, with limited commentary, then discuss their implications for CMCS-as- behavior-setting: ********************************************** Thu Oct 19 15:33:43 PDT 1989 Article 335 of ca.earthquakes: Newsgroups: ca.earthquakes Subject: Re: How was it, Bay Area? Date: 18 Oct 89 20:10:14 GMT Distribution: ca Organization: Teradyne EDA Inc., Santa Clara, Calif. Feeling a bit grim, anxious, and lucky. I was at work at the time and felt a slight tremor, knew immediately what it was, dropped to my knees under my desk, and then it let rip! I was waiting for it to subside and then it got horribly stronger. False ceiling dust was falling, books fell off shelves, and I thought this could be it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my workstation was still on but then a power glitch killed it ( the power stayed on). Then the power wave was gone but the building was swaying like it was on jello for maybe 15 seconds. I was beginning to feel nauseous about the time it stopped. I was surprised when I heard the magnitude ( I thought maybe it was only a 6.0 or so) the epicenter and the amount of damage in SF and Oakland. I work in Santa Clara near Great America and 237 and was on the second floor of a two storied office building. There was the smell of gas in the parking lot and the aftershocks were frequent afterwards. Home in Mountain View things were surprisingly intact. I live in a two story apartment building supported on one side by 1.5 foot pillars, yet there was no apparent damage to the building and only one item broke when it fell from one of our bookshelves which were NOT secured and did not topple (yes I feel lucky!) We were without power until about midnight. Power outage was spotty, some never really lost power, some did not have power until this morning (18th), and some still have no power OR water. What were other people's experiences? Why are all the high tech jobs in places I don't want to live in? Sure the B(ay) A(rea) is okay, as far as crowded urban centers go, but you have to ask yourself -- do you feel lucky? ********************************************** This message reports from the Bay Area. The writer has personally suffered little discomfort or damage, but he still seeks to share his own experience and those of others. ********************************************** Thu Oct 19 15:36:10 PDT 1989 Article 355 of ca.earthquakes: Newsgroups: ca.earthquakes Subject: Re: How was it, Bay Area? Message-ID: <3171@netcom.UUCP> Date: 19 Oct 89 09:06:22 GMT Organization: NetCom- The Bay Area's Public Access Unix System (408-997-9175 guest) I was at work in Palo Alto, standing in front of my desk on the second floor when it hit. As I was under my desk I was pretty sure I wasn't going to die, but I felt sick because I knew it was going to be pretty bad elsewhere. Dust and ceiling tiles fell from the ceiling, and plants were knocked off bookcases. As soon as the shaking stopped, we all got up and ran the hell out of the building. One thing I remember was that it was loud when it was happening, like a freight train was running through the building, but that may have been my heart pounding. About 1/2 hour later we went back inside to clean up a little before leaving. On the way out the 5:41PM aftershock hit. I ducked into a doorway with someone else, then ran outside. AM radio was my only source of information last night. For a while they were saying the epicenter was in Holister, and halfway between Santa Cruz and San Jose in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Those two places are nowhere near each other, Holister is east-southeast of Santa Cruz. Now they are just saying halfway between Santa Cruz and San Jose. I was on the phone with my brother-in-law in Sacramento. He was describing the pictures of the Cypress Structure which were on TV. I couldn't believe what he was telling me. I've (I'm sure many of us have) been on that part of I-880 many times and it was sickening to think of the upper deck slamming onto the lower deck. San Francisco sounded like a war zone on the radio. In the Marina area buildings were flattened, on fire, there was no power, and you could hear sirens from police cars and ambulances. Looting wasn't reported to be a problem, the San Francisco D.A. was on the radio saying there would be no bail and maximum penalties for anyone caught and convicted of looting. A freelance photographer was on the bridge when a section of the upper deck fell to the lower deck, and got videotape and interviews immediately after the collapse. She said that a person on a motorcycle turned around and headed back the wrong way, honking his horn and flashing his lights. This caused everyone to slow down, which prevented more cars from falling into the gap, which was impossible to see until it was too late. There is a small gap in the lower deck too, but my understanding is that only one car went into the Bay, and that the car went over the side, rather than through the gap. From the news reports, it sounds like they are going to do a long- term repair on the bridge, which will close it for three weeks. BART combined with flex-time is hoped to pick up the load, otherwise the San Mateo and Golden Gate and San Rafael bridge will have to absorb the traffic. Driving home on I-280, traffic was slow because of buckling in the road. At home (west San Jose, near De Anza College), the structure was sound but the inside was a mess. The kitchen floor was covered with broken glass, from glassware that fell out of cabinets, and smashed bottles of liquor. The whole pantry was on the floor too, there were broken bottles of vinegar, soy sauce, etc. Upstairs one bookcase fell forward, dumping its contents on the floor, another one fell backwards against a sliding glass door. Power was out until about 2PM today. For the most part, San Jose fared well, most residents just spent today cleaning up their homes. They just reported that they have found a person alive (by touch) in the Cypress Structure. However, they expect to find 150 cars and 250 victims in the wreckage. From the news it sounds like 60 buildings in the Marina will be lost, and power won't be restored for 15 weeks. Estimates of the total damage are now estimated at 2 billion dollars. Early rumors said Candlestick suffered major structural damage, and the rest of the World Series would be played at the Oakland Coliseum. Then it was reported the Coliseum wasn't safe either, and rumors had the series being finished in a neutral city, either Los Angeles or San Diego. Finally the official word was both stadiums were ok, and the World Series will resume in one week (Tuesday). The 49's will play the Pats either at Candlestick, Stanford, or Foxboro, Mass. They keep saying this ain't the big one. Great. ********************************************** A second eye-witness report. Note the problem of poor and inaccurate media information, and the role of network exchanges in gaining more accurate information and in correcting errors. Note too, much of the "information" being collected on events in the Bay Area originates from well outside it. ********************************************** Article 364 of ca.earthquakes: Newsgroups: ca.earthquakes Subject: Re: How was it, Bay Area? Summary: all shook up Date: 19 Oct 89 15:04:27 GMT Distribution: ca Organization: National Semiconductor, Santa Clara The quake did very little damage, compared to what could have easily happened, in the corridor from San Jose to Palo Alto. To give you an idea, the wafter fabrication areas of most of the semiconductor makers will be back on line in only one or two days. These areas are full of quite delicate equipment. We came close to the breaking point on utilities, but the system survived the shock pretty well. Power loss was the worst, affecting something like a million people at the max. Some water systems went down but not that many. Some areas (boy was I lucky) lost nothing, not water, not power, not gas, not sewers. Traffic lights were the major casualty, but most were restored (in the southern peninsula, now, where power was lost only for brief times, if at all) within 24 hours. All in all, dodged a bullet is the best way to describe it. Except dodge an artillery shell is more like it. Personal remembrance: I was sitting at my desk. My chair has wheels, like most office chairs. Suddenly, I was away from my desk, then back, then rolling over toward my office mate, then back to the desk. All this while slowly rotating, of course. It was interesting, to see the ceiling tiles separate from the walls, then slam back together. It came in three waves. Wave one was xxx, we looked at each other and said, Earthquake. But it was minor. Then, about 3 seconds or so later, a second shake, and much harder. That widened a lot of eyes. Some few seconds after that, knuckles went white, eyes really flew open, and people turned to diving under desks, because the *BIG* shake rolled through. After that, there was some 30 to 60 eternities (read seconds) of slow rolling. I remember getting a bit seasick, but that could have been nerves, too. We are on the second floor, and (perfect timing) an aftershock came just as we were going down the emergency exit stairs to the parking lot. If I hadn't had both hands on the rails, it could have been bad. Tops of trees were swinging in 8 to 10 foot arcs outside (trees appx. 50 feet tall). Motorists had stopped all over. Many thought they had suffered multiple blowouts. ********************************************** A further, graphic, first-hand report, underlines the what-might- have been aspect, which became an increasingly significant coda to this disaster. ********************************************** Thu Oct 19 15:42:16 PDT 1989 Article 372 of ca.earthquakes: Newsgroups: ca.earthquakes,ca.news Subject: Re: Earthquake report in SF (from LA 11PM) Summary: local observations Date: 19 Oct 89 17:31:41 GMT Distribution: ca Organization: Computer Associates, San Jose. A couple of comments on the national news coverage of the earthquake: A map of the area would have helped these guys! Basically, start with San Francisco, on the Pacific coastline with the entrance to San Francisco Bay just north of it. The Golden Gate bridge connects San Francisco with the coast north of the entrance to the bay. The bay is not symmetric-- it is egg shaped, with San Francisco about 15% below the top, and most of the bay south of San Francisco. Oakland is to the east of San Francisco, connected by the bay bridge. There are two more bridges spanning the bay south of the bay bridge. San Jose is directly south of the bay, about 7 miles in land. I think it's about 50 miles south of San Francisco. Santa Cruz is on the Pacific coast, some 70 miles south of San Francisco. Monterey is south of Santa Cruz. And for my personal reaction: I had a particularly interesting afternoon/evening. I left work early to pick up my parents at San Jose International Airport, where they arrived at 2pm from Syracuse, New York. Their luggage missed a connection, and we were assured it would arrive at the airport around 4:30 and be delivered around 5:30pm. "We'll call first to make sure that someone is home." Shortly after 5, the house shook. I headed for a doorway, and grabbed a floor lamp that was swaying, and watched in horror as the two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves waved back and forth across the room from me. The bookshelves stood. All we lost were a few knick-knacks; the power went out but the gas didn't leak, so we followed the emergency instructions in the telephone book and didn't turn it off. That left us with hot water and heat. Our jacuzzi in the back yard sloshed about 4 inches of water out. I did have a wire-rack shelf which has two supports anchored to the wall and two front legs on the floor. The wall anchors pulled out of the drywall. All traffic signals were out. We kept having noticeable aftershocks. One of my kids (12 years old) cried with each aftershock; we went out on the lawn to sit because she was so hyper about it. The 15 year old just sat in the doorway and enjoyed the ride. Neighbors (3 blocks away ) had power and telephone -- you just had to wait for the dial tone, and a friend called after about 15 minutes (maybe 30?) and said that the bay bridge collapsed. Looking at the map later, we were no more than 15 miles from the epicenter. Our house is a one story, stucco covered wood frame, 24 years old, and did just fine. Nearby stores had extensive damage of their contents, but not their structures. Glass items and lamps fell and broke; soft drinks spilled; liquors fell. Power was restored gradually -- we had it back in 2 hours; an area about 2 miles away, towards Los Gatos, still didn't have power last night. By the way, the mayor of Santa Cruz was at the World Series game. He was interviewed and asked "Did you keep your ticket stub?" He announced that he's not going back for the game. It'll be interesting to see how the attendance is. It was apparently pretty scary up there; it wasn't clear whether the mayor doesn't want to be there or is just too busy with Santa Cruz's problems. ********************************************** A final eyewitness report. What is the significance of these four messages? A reading of them reveals that the geographical skills of the media, in presenting a locational analysis of the epicentre, were somewhat lacking, leading to a good deal of misinformation about the size and scope of the damage, especially in the southern hinterland of the Bay Area. Each of these messages provides some therapeutic purpose to the author. Common advice from disaster relief specialists is to talk such things through. Each contributor to Ca.Earthquakes has in fact addressed a large audience of interested readers. There is also the benefit to the recipient: this is what it was like; it was survivable on the whole, not as bad as it could have been. What is difficult to describe here is the timeliness of the messages. The first tremor of the quake was on Tuesday evening, just as the World Series Baseball final was about to commence. In that sense, the entire sports television audience of the United States knew that something had gone wrong, immediately as it happened. But one of the first results of the 'quake was to "take out" the television broadcasting facilities themselves, concentrated as they were at Candlestick Park. Some e-mail messages were propagated from the area within two hours of the quake commencing, though local Bay Area leased line connections were soon broken down to accommodate higher priority traffic. Even though several West Coast Internet propagation sites went off the air, connection through some of the public-access Unix systems was more definite, more secure, and more informative than radio (which was histrionic and misinformed) or television (which was trying to recover from the loss of the Candlestick Park facilities). There were three interesting outcomes from a computer-mediated communications perspective: a more general Quake-List than the original ca.earthquake list was set up within one week (one which reported the Philippine earthquake of Sunday/Monday July 15/16 1990 within two minutes of the first tremor); a group of network users are actively investigating the possibility of radio-teletype (RTTY) facilities to set up a help-network analogous to those provided by CB enthusiasts or radio hams as a way of staying "on air" during disasters; the San Francisco Office of Emergency Services (very much a part of establishment San Francisco) approached the WELL [The Whole-Earth eLectronic Link] (an activist-volunteer networking group which published the anti-establishment Whole Earth catalog) to make appeals to network readers to direct help via the Red Cross. The SFOES use was quite significant: although they were merely broadcasting "appeals" - direct help here, stay away from there- they were prepared to turn to an "amateur" net to spread that message. The ongoing interest in how to use networking to assist in disasters, to follow the example of the San Francisco groups, is of course, tinged with a cruel irony: many of those who assisted in the aftermath of the earthquake to make the best use of telecommunications to assist the rescue services were of a generation, and a political disposition, that had vehemently protested the Vietnam war, and the continuing militarization of the USA. Yet, these same people were now making use of what had originally been developed as battlefield technology in close to battlefield conditions. CMCS-in-behavior settings How does this example of the value of CMCS stand up to the tests of admission to the category "behavior setting"? It is non-traditional in various ways, compared to the kinds of settings Barker and colleagues investigated in Oskaloosa, Kansas, and Yorkshire, England. The example may be problematic: disasters, almost by definition, are not recurrent, at least, hopefully, not regularly recurrent in the sense of standing patterns! But in California, at least, earthquakes are in a sense "virtually" recurrent. Earthquake drills are regularly carried out in schools and offices; building regulations require that earthquakes be akin into account; motorists are expected to carry 'earthquake kits" in the boots of their cars. And minor tremors are frequent enough to remind people that these precautions should be taken seriously. Research into various disasters has shown, too, that there is a certain predictability in people's behavior during disasters, even though for the "participant" in any one disaster it might be their first (hopefully, only) such experience (Quaranteli, 1957). David Canter, an environmental psychologist concerned primarily with architecture, who draws extensively on Barker's approach, has found particular regularities in the case of behavior during fires (Canter 1980; Canter, Coomber & Uzzell, 1989). Given that we can find such regularities in such diverse situations, and that in these diverse situations, computer- mediated communication systems has something of value to contribute, it seems likely that they have something to contribute, also, to the extension of traditional settings. That they have such value, of course, is implicit in the argument that educational institutions should be attempting to convey network literacy, and germane to the notion that, if such is attempted, it should go beyond mechanical hard mastery. It is in this context that we now turn to some examples of "the virtual classroom". Affordances, ecology, and virtual educational environments In order to talk about virtual classroom environments, we first need to address another important theoretical concept: the notion of affordances. Affordances are what the environment "furnishes" or "provides" the animal, and they are "measured" and understood relative to the animal. (Gibson, 1979, p.127). As well as surfaces, objects, and substances providing affordances (e.g. the ground surface "affording" standing), events also provide affordances (Gibson, 1979, p.36, ). The affordance of an object resides in the interaction of man (or other animal) and the object, rather than in the physical characteristics of the object. Affordances exist at a level of organization commensurate with animate ways of life. Though the structural and compositional support may be complex, it exists at a finer level of organization. The affordance, existing at a more global level, may be relatively simple in comparison to its constituted support. Consider how simple the affordance of "writability" is for a pencil or pen in comparison to the complexity of factors that make up a pencil or pen. First, there is no one set of complex, constituent factors that is necessary: they can be made of wood, plastic or metal, or be short, fat, thin, long, green, blue, heavy, light, and so forth. Second, one can analyze pens or pencils into a series of finer and finer levels of organization down to its atoms, protons, and quarks. Must we perceive the parts before the whole? At what point to we stop. (Lombardo, 1987, p.347) As Lombardo goes on to point out, two significant "facts of the environment" relevant to the notion of affordances are tool use/design, and other human beings. Tools have "affordances constructed into the tools"; human beings are understood in terms of reciprocity. Affordances are "about" "structure" and "function" but they are not just structure and function. They exist as opportunities, and time plays an important part in the dynamic relationships between man and environment. The Affordances of Network Environments Two pairs of educational networks are compared, as a way of pointing up the affordances of the technology inherent in each. Each pair of networks provides an environment with different implementations of the same network technology, allowing a comparison of affordance- strategies within technologies. Each pair has the same "technology of access" - a dial-up phone line to a "mainframe" computer, via a modem attached to the userUs "personal" computer. This section is based on personal observation of the four networks between 1989 and 1992. It does not take into account more recent developments, but concentrates on a time when the pairwise analysis of the four networks was most appropriate. Computer Pals Across the World/Campus 2000 Campus 2000 is the amalgamation of two previously competing services: the British Telecom "Telecom Gold"/ "Prestel Education" services and News International's "The Times Network for Schools" service. Telecom Gold/Prestel Education began with a wholly domestic perspective, but News International conceived TTNS from the start both as a marketing strategy towards the British school system and as means of promoting interaction between British and Australian schools. TTNS always had at least one executive officer responsible for promoting international links. Though TTNS offices are in London, the international officer operates by modem from Cairns, Australia. The TTNS project was conceived as one of putting into both the Australian and British school systems the potential of electronic communications as used on a daily basis by News International journalists. It was closely related, also, to the establishment for the (London) Times of the UK's first wholly-electronic newspaper production system. Industrial relations arising from the manner of introduction of this innovation nearly prevented the national coverage of all the UK local education authorities (school districts) by TTNS, such coverage being the backbone of the TTNS marketing strategy at the time. Computer Pals Across the World also had its roots in Australia, though its inspiration was in the US. It was originally called "The Australaskan Writing Project." Malcolm Beazley, head of English at Turramurra School in an upper class suburb of north Sydney, visited the USA on a Fulbright scholarship in 1982/3 to look at American initiatives in the teaching of English, reading, and writing. On his travels he visited the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of San Diego, where, at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, Mike Cole, Peg Griffin, Jim Levin and others were developing reading programs at "Field College", and at the Interactive Technology Laboratory, Levin and Margaret Riel were developing the InterCultural Learning Network, with the help of Naomi Mikaye in Tokyo and Moshe Cohen in Israel. Beazley observed the early telecommunication efforts to link with Levin's contacts in Wainwright, Alaska. Subsequently, Beazley met with Jim Erwin, then computer co-ordinator of the North Slope school district in Alaska, and set up regular telecommunications between Turramurra and Wainwright. Beazley's project was sponsored by Epson Australia Pty and involves concentrations of schools in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the USA, the UK and Germany. Because of Beazley's contacts with private education (Turramurra is a private school), many international schools, International Baccalaureate schools, and overseas military schools participated in the project. I've stressed the provenance of these two networks at some length because I want to highlight the "accidental" nature of them: they arise respectively from one Australian's desire to be the chief executive of a global organization, and another AustralianUs desire to be able to network with the teachers and children he had met with on his travels in search of knowledge about effective teaching strategies. The characteristics of each network are colored by these provenances, even though they use the same telecommunications technology. Computer Pals across the World starts, as its name implies, from a basis of pen-pal transactions. When it joins Computer Pals, a school nominates one of its teachers and one of its classes (most pals schools are elementary schools) and requests a corresponding partner in a designated country. There follows some delay whilst national co-ordinators identify a school they believe to be a suitable partner. This match-making entry is also used by De Orilla a Orilla: From Shore to Shore, an avowedly multi-lingual networking project which has a number of resonances with the Computer Pals project. But apart from that instance, this concern for partnership is fairly rare. It is certainly considered by the organizers of Computer Pals to be of fundamental importance to its success. Schools joining Computer pals undertake, together with their partners, who obviously must join at about the same time, to work their way through a six-stage sequence of writing activities, which begins with penpals, goes through exchanges of narrative stories and essays on social issues to a final stage where children are expected to write collaboratively with their partners abroad. The context of "writing" is maintained throughout, as is the one-to-one correspondence and the concept of "partnership". Global perspective is brought in through an awareness of what other school-pairs are doing in parallel through a regular newsletter and yearly face-to-face meetings of the co-ordinators. Occasionally, there is a global-scope competition or project, but this is always viewed as supplementary to the main thrust of the Computer pals project. Perhaps arising from the close co-operation of partner schools, computer-based communications links in Computer Pals have been shown to have a significant influence on the travel plans of corresponding members, leading to a number of face-to-face meetings at the child/parent/teacher level. Campus 2000/TTNS by contrast rarely works through such direct partnership but more often through a series of ad-hoc groups. In part, this arises from the marketing strategy of the component organizations which is oriented to the school district, not the individual school. Certainly before the advent of local school management in 1988 in the UK and New Zealand, membership of TTNS in the UK, StarNet in New Zealand, and so on, was a matter of district decision. There was also a "town twinning" element in the establishment of partnerships. There are individual partnerships, of course, for instance between a school for the physically disabled in Croydon, UK and for the hearing-impaired in North Island, New Zealand. And there is something of an expectation for one school to keep other (neighboring) schools apprised of the progress of each other's links. Each school term, a different theme is chosen as the basis of primary projects (This is a mapping of "good practice" as developed in the "West Yorkshire" model of elementary school teaching in the sixties and seventies). Schools generally are required to indicate their interest and a commitment to participate through a registration process. Most notable, and most regular of these projects is the "International Newspaper Day" in which schools commit to be stringers and informants each for the others, and produce newspapers under realistic deadline constraints, selecting from the flow of exchanged material. The commercial framework, Dialcom, based in Maryland, USA, is now wholly-owned by British Telecom. Indeed, before the amalgamation of Telecom Gold and TTNS to form Campus 2000 there was considerable friction between the two organizations, as British Telecom owned both Telecom Gold and the main Dialcom franchise. They were their own franchisee and TTNS felt its competitive edge as a competing franchisee was somewhat blunted by this situation. However, that problem was eventually resolved, and the TTNS staff now manage the Campus 2000 service under contract to British Telecom. Dialcom provides a world-wide but rather patchy coverage, with franchises in several quite small countries and a number of franchises in each of the more industrially-developed nations; Campus 2000 (TTNS/Gold), Computer Pals, and the Telecommunications Co-operative Network (TCN) are three, operating respectively in the UK alone, Australia and the US, and the US alone. Before we address the full significance of Dialcom's apparently global coverage, we need to highlight some of the ramifications of franchise and PTT pricing policies as they currently exist. For instance, Australian schools which are members of Campus 2000 (rather than of Computer Pals) subscribe directly to the London computer owned by TTNS - it is cheaper to pay the packet switching costs than to subscribe directly to the Australian computer system. Also, if one were to list the school districts registered on the TTNS computer one would find prominent among them 22 schools from the school district "Sweden" - it is cheaper for the Swedish schools that way. The pricing policies of some Dialcom franchises in the United States of America are quite prohibitive for education, though . There are a few exceptions - Computer Pals schools in the western part of the USA, at least at the time of writing, were subsidized by industrial support. Also, the TCN organization provides to Dialcom facilities to "not-for-profit" organizations. The Affordances of the Address Space All Dialcom systems are inter-addressable. It is only necessary to put the system number in front of the user identifier. Inter-addressability also provides the potential, much under-used to date, for schools to communicate with the world of business. All that is necessary is to know the recipient's user identifier if they are prepared to release it for educational communication (generally, business users are ex-directory), and the system number, which is a matter of public record. Dialcom telecommunications franchisees (and their competitors) have three limitations which prevent them becoming a total educational utility: cost of access, as already mentioned; cost of storage (some Dialcom franchisees even charge users for the storage cost of "junk mail" sent to their mail boxes!); and a skewed world-wide distribution (Dialcom franchises exist only in those countries where there are "developed" markets, offshore oil industries, or "offshore banking", and only in the English-telephonic world. Interestingly enough, the world of telephoning either operates in English or in French. Technically a Polish international operator placing a call to Moscow is supposed to use French!). A common attitude of many computer manufacturers and telephone companies is to say: Here we are, come join us; use packet switching to get "here" if you have to. Nevertheless, a number of projects with a global perspective use Dialcom, despite its cost, because of the simplicity of its interconnectivity (at least, its interconnectivity within the developed world). Kidlink/KidsSphere compared An alternate approach to establishing a virtual community for school children involves the use of ListServer technology. The examples described in this section are of this type. Kidsphere is a facility provided by the University of Pittsburgh to the educational community. A "ListServer" program is run on a mainframe computer at Pittsburgh. To become a member of Kidsphere one sends an e-mail message to the ListServer program (not a human being) containing the appropriate commands. You are then automatically added to the list. Any messages sent to the list are then re-broadcast to you, and you can also use ListServer facilities to find out who else is on the list, or get archives of previous messages sent to you. The list is controlled by a moderator (All ListServer-maintained lists must have a human "owner"). Moderation, in this case, does not include the filtering of messages before they are propagated, but commentaries on them afterwards. Kidsphere exists to provide children with access to educational telecommunications via the Internet. Access is therefore limited to those who have contact with academics or university departments with close (personal) connections with schools. Most US telecommunications- in-education activists based in universities are subscribers to this list, and it is often used as a forum for debate on policy issues between this community and governmental representatives. Kids92/Kids93/Kids94 (generically, KidLink), is also accessible via the Internet, but is propagated as well through a number of gateway services to other networks. KidLink is also operated on the basis of a ListServer program. It was founded and is moderated by Odd de Presno, a Norwegian educationalist and journalist. Children participating in KidLink were asked to devise answers to four future- oriented questions about their future, and to provide a non-text interpretation to the fourth. These answers were shared with each other via the network, and then in May, 1992, a "global" conference was held across the network during which the children discussed their answers to the (future-oriented) questions. Partitioning Kidsphere employs no form of partitioning. All messages, whatever their focus on content, are propagated to all the members of the one list. In effect this is a teacher/educator discussion list in the course of which messages appear from time to time from teachers or students offering or asking for e-mail contacts to carry on "pen pal" conversations or to participate in an educational project. Those who wish to participate then reply to the sender of the message directly, and carry on a two-way conversation off the list. There is no system for recording these off-list interactions. Effectively, Kidsphere acts as a clearing house for making such contacts but, unlike Computer Pals, plays no part in maintaining them. KidLink is highly structured, and consists of about half a dozen lists, all maintained through the same ListServer program. As of June 1991, there were the following lists: RESPONSE: where children can send their responses to the four introductory questions: 1) who am I? 2) What do I want to be when I grow up? 3) How do I want the world to be better when I grow up? 4) what can I do to make this happen? KIDSCAFE: for kids aged 10-15. Here, they can talk about whatever they like... (Kidsphere maintains a similar 'open discussion' area, KIDS) KIDS-ACT: for kids aged 10-15. Here, they can talk about what THEY can do NOW to achieve their future visions... KIDS-92: for teachers, coordinators, parents, social workers and others interested in KidSphere. This is where we exchange experiences, report media coverage, etc... KIDS-91: for teachers, coordinators, parents, social workers and others interested in what happened in Kids91... KIDPLAN: for those who wish to participate in the detailed planning of the project. Note that each of these lists is self-archiving. Not only is this a boon to researchers in the future, who will be able to follow the evolution of the project by downloading the read-only archives of Kids91, Kids92 and Kids93, but it enables participants to look back on previous discussions and responses. The graphic responses are maintained as a down loadable "KID-ART" gallery by Dan Wheeler, an educational psychologist at the University of Cincinnati, along with the necessary software to transfer and interpret binary files. The important point to stress here is that the ListServer programs which maintain the KidLink and KidSphere projects are identical software running on identical mainframes. The affordances of the ListServer program are equally available to all ListServer users. "Live chats" All of the networks discussed are designed for asynchronous use. Time dependence is simply a matter of sequence. Whenever a participant logs on to their account, they receive all the messages sent since previously logged on. Both the Dialcom systems (Computer Pals and Campus 2000) and the Internet facilities have a "live chat" facility, but one which only enables a synchronous conversation between users logged into the same domain. KidLink uses, in addition to this, a facility called Internet Relay Chat(IRC). IRC enables any Internet user to remotely log into an account which enables simultaneous, live conversation between all of the participants currently logged on. KidLink uses this facility to create a "live" version of KidsCafe, a kind of "text-only" teleconferencing or audioconferencing. (This is how the "global" meeting on 12 May, 1991 was conducted.) Affordances for Network Literacy Note that all of these networks, in asynchronous mode, provide facilities for the layering of responses by incorporating (parts of) the message you are replying to in your reply. All afford the capabilities of interchanging messages in both a public and private audience domain. All afford time-independent and some kind of time-dependent interaction. Yet not one of these projects utilizes these facilities in any systematic way to further the network literacy of the participants. Note the exclusive attention to the broader goals (the rhetoric of the educational discourse) at the expense of the mediational means (the semantics of network literacy). We must also consider, too, the affordances of the environment of telecommunications-in-education activities at a higher, broader level. In terms of the networks being used for T- I-E projects, none has been designed for educational purposes. Which systems are used is largely a matter of opportunity rather than rational choice determined by consideration of what would be an appropriate educational environment, and the affordances such an environment should provide. Using Network Literacy to Teach Network Literacy: The XLIT Case The following case study involves the use of telecommunications to extend the teaching process in an attempt to break the frame of the conventional lecture behavior setting. It is therefore related to a number of attempts to use networking to "extend the boundaries" of the classroom. Notice, though, that this initiative is a somewhat different setting from "the virtual classroom" of distance education as the network is used to extend, not replace, face-to-face contact. Appropriately, this class itself centered around the issue of literacy. The base project for this case study was a sequence of 40 messages from the latter part of 1989, transmitted on the mail-reflector network "XLIT", a grouping of psychologists and others interested in literacy issues, maintained by the Laboratory Of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Part of the process of the experience consisted of a message-by-message commentary of this data. This message stream arose from a variety of contexts. Undergraduate students of UCSD's Communication Department embark on a course on "literacy." They are faced with a requirement to use the network and graduate students are assigned to help. A discussion on literacy is started up by LCHC on a mail-reflector list (XLIT) which links psychologists in North America and Europe. One of the issues is, of course, the location and character of the behavior setting(s) in which the protagonists are participating. Is this debate simply an electronic equivalent of a face-to-face seminar or colloquium, assembling together a number of experts "by invitation", or is it something more, and more complex? There is a sense in which there are always "exactly enough roles" to fill a telecommunicative space. More likely, though, manning operates in CMCS through misperceptions of the size of sharing the task. For example, one could read the messages with the view that the situation was undermanned in regard to students, and perhaps overmanned with regard to academics. Only a very few students actively participated. The great majority of the students participated only as readers. The theory of behavior settings helps us to explain, perhaps, this partial failure of the Literacy course in its attempt to create a non-dominative space in which students and academics together would discuss issues of literacy. Regulatory pressures also go some way to helping understand student behavior in both real and virtual settings. In a virtual setting the situation is made complex in that it is student perception rather than actual structure which characterizes a network as either over- or under-manned. One may have a network which has many members, but without much pressure on the members to participate - a crowded situation which seems roomy. One might also have the reverse; a few members, but each perceiving the conventional demands of under-manning and trying to over-compensate for it. Students were required to gain access to computer networking as a literacy experience. >From their point of view it was sufficient to learn how to log on to the system and read messages. Very few students took the further steps of actually participating in the debate. One of the characteristics of electronic mail most often commented on is the crowded "in box." If you have many messages, and some of those messages are written in powerful voices, then you are likely to react as though you were in a real rather than a virtual setting, and become a merely disempowered member of the audience. Lurking gives rise to an impression of undermanning, the crowded in box to an impression of overmanning. CMC case studies as behavior settings How does this example, and the cases previously discussed, fit into the behavior setting framework? In terms of Barker's tests, we find a certain degree of agreement to the requirements. The Literacy class exhibits no less than three standing patterns - attendance at a face-to-face lecture (a classic setting) necessary for the student to gain entry to the virtual setting; for students, visits to a "terminal room" containing the means to participate in the virtual setting; for scholars, visits to their offices, similarly equipped. The Literacy class is an anchored milieu: The whole ethos of the Literacy class is of a research-university-in-action- through-teaching, a very particular milieu, differing in quality from a teaching-exclusive liberal arts college, for example, which might not have the connectivity the case study indicates, as part of its milieu. The earthquake case study is only anchored insofar as the participants are writing for offices or lab machines. There is no standing pattern. Particular Times and Places On this criteria, no CMCS activity could be a behavior setting; except that there is within the virtual setting nevertheless the factors of rhythm, timeliness and presence/absence. The virtual seminar setting is driven by the rhythm of the course and of the academic year. Levin and others have discussed a reflection of such rhythm in the dispatch of messages within CMCS systems (Levin, Kim & Riel, 1988, Levin, Rogers, Waugh & Smith, 1989). This certainly holds true for the four K-12 networks discussed. It is also quite possible to be at the wrong place at the wrong time within the setting - to enter a debate late, for instance, or to raise points which have already been dealt with, will certainly incur the wrath of others populating the setting. "Presence" "Presence" is more difficult to deal with. Basically, within a virtual setting created through the use of CMCS, "presence" is practically a continuous variable. One can be "in" a debate as much or as little as one likes. This is less of a problem for the teacher-driven K-12 settings than for the University seminar, though there are in the K- 12 context degrees of presence stemming from the differing enthusiasms and experiences of the participating teachers (rather than their students). Synomorphy The Literacy class debate exhibited a particularly unusual degree of synomorphy. Students were required to gain access to computer networks, a new literacy experience for them, as a deliberate way of gaining or re- gaining insight into the processes of developing literacy skills. The debate, too, was a discussion about text conducted in text. Circumjacency The direction of enclosure is not obvious in the Literacy class, or in any of the other cases discussed. One could be a participant in the online debate without being a member of the Literacy class, but not the other way around. Class participation was essential, even if it was only in the shape of referring to network traffic in the course of essays developed in the face-to-face setting. But the one or two students who made no entry to the online debate whatsoever were still graded (They received low grades but they were regarded as "having attended"). In the teacher-driven K-12 settings, the teacher is "volunteering" the students; in the earthquake setting "participation" is entirely voluntary. In general terms, educational uses of CMCS are always been within curriculum settings. The circumjacency arises from the student being within the educational setting and the instructor reconfiguring that setting through CMCS. In fact, most CMCS researchers hesitate at the suggestion of reversing the circumjacency, so that the distributed educational setting might be considered as doing the accrediting and the institutions as accreditees. Conclusion By analogy, one can find equivalent degrees of fit between the other cases discussed and the behavior settings framework. To the degree that there is such a fit, one can employ some of the generalizations of behavior setting theory about CMC behaviors. This might apply particularly to some of those phenomena seen as "problems" by some network practitioners and researchers, such as lurking and overfull mailboxes as perceptions of crowding and overcrowding. It might also be possible to extend some of the observations of how people share real spaces, either deserted beaches or crowded tenements, to the dynamics of behavior in virtual cultures. It should be pointed out that behavior settings theory went out of fashion (at least for a while) as it was seen as overly positivist in approach, in that researchers attempted to quantify the qualities of behavior settings. I am suggesting merely that, along with a number of other tools used by environmental and ecological psychologists, behavior settings theory might provide a framework, a regularity, which could be helpful in making generalizations from the many emerging anecdotal case studies which characterize current qualitative research in computer-mediated communication systems. References Canter, D. V. (1980). Fire and human behavior. New York, NY: J. Wiley. Canter, D. V., Comber, M., & Uzzell, D. L. (1989). Football in its place: An environmental psychology of football grounds. London, UK: Routledge. DeVillar, R.A. & Faltis, C. J. (1991). Computers and cultural diversity: Restructuring for school success. New York: State University of New York Press. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Hiltz, S. R., & Turoff, M. (1978). The network nation: Human communication via computer. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Hiltz, S. R., & Meinke, R. (1989). Teaching sociology in a Rvirtual classroom,S Teaching Sociology, 17, 431-446. Levin, J. A., Kim, H. & Riel, M. (1988) Analysis of instructional electronic message interactions. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans. Levin, J., Rogers, A., Waugh, M.,& Smith, K. (1989). Observations on electronic networks: The importance of appropriate activities for learning. The Computing Teacher, 16, 17-21. Lombardi, T. J. (1987). The reciprocity of perceiver and environment: The evolution of James J. GibsonUs ecological psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates. Newman, D. (1986) Local and long-distance computer networking for science classrooms. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco. Riel, M. (1985). The computer chronicle newswire: A functional learning environment for acquiring literacy skills. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 1(3), 317-337. _____ Articles and Sections of this issue of the _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_ may be retrieved via anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu or via e-mail message addressed to LISTSERV@KENTVM or LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU (instructions below) Papers may be submitted at anytime by email or send/file to: Ermel Stepp - Editor-in-Chief, _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_ M034050@MARSHALL.WVNET.EDU _________________________________ *Copyright Declaration* Copyright of articles published by Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture is held by the author of a given article. If an article is re-published elsewhere it must include a statement that it was originally published by Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture. The EJVC Editors reserve the right to maintain permanent archival copies of all submissions and to provide print copies to appropriate indexing services for for indexing and microforming. _________________________________ _________________________________ _THE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL ON VIRTUAL CULTURE_ ISSN 1068-5327 Ermel Stepp, Marshall University, Editor-in-Chief M034050@Marshall.wvnet.edu Diane (Di) Kovacs, Kent State University, Co-Editor DKOVACS@Kentvm.Kent.edu ____________________________ GOPHER Instructions ____________________________ GOPHER to gopher.cic.net 70 ____________________________ Anonymous FTP Instructions ____________________________ ftp byrd.mu.wvnet.edu login anonymous password: users' electronic address cd /pub/ejvc type EJVC.INDEX.FTP get filename (where filename = exact name of file in INDEX) quit LISTSERV Retrieval Instructions _______________________________ Send e-mail addressed to LISTSERV@KENTVM (Bitnet) or LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU Leave the subject line empty. The message must read: GET EJVCV1N7 CONTENTS Use this file to identify particular articles or sections then send e-mail to LISTSERV@KENTVM or LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU with the command: GET where is the name of the article or section (e.g., author name) and is the V#N# of that issue of EJVC