Syed Javed ran a workshop for people from adult literacy providers on using the internet as part of the NRLLNV's Information Technology project. It was an introduction to net "surfing" and using email. I spent a couple of hours, along with about half a dozen others, sitting in front of a computer feeling alternately intrigued, exasperated and surprised at this supposedly state-of-the-art phenomenon which took so long to do its thing. 

I remember feeling out of my depth a lot of the time. I think some of the other people there had a reasonable amount of experience already, and I had none. I didn't really have a clear idea of what electronic mail was, or why you'd use it rather than conventional mail, with phone or fax for things that had to be done immediately. It seemed to be something people were doing basically because they could, rather than because it answered any particular need.

As for the surfing bit - well I thought the analogy left something to be desired. Maybe paddling in treacle? I derived a certain amount of satisfaction from *not* being able to find anything on the entire internet about hydrangeas. And I honestly could not believe that anything that was supposed to be so clever and marvellous could possibly be so slow! I'd got used to the idea that CD ROMs took a while to load compared with using things on my computer's hard disk, but this .....! Waiting three minutes for one page to load and then discovering that it wasn't useful anyway, or that it was an advertisement for vacuum cleaner repairs in Seattle. Sheesh!

Despite all this, I was fascinated. Here was a thing that would let me find out about .... well maybe not about hydrangeas, but about a lot of things. I wasn't quite sure what I'd do with what I found, but hey, I was surfing! And emailing too! Syed had organised a bunch of email addresses for us, as well as some months free net access.. We practiced sending each other email while we were there, and subscribed to a mailing list that was basically for us and our students. It was a great beginning.

Back at work, I had an interesting time working out how to configure the software. What a nightmare! The first time is so confusing. Nothing meant anything, but every dot and slash counted. It took me a few frantic phone calls before I had the system sorted out and working. Fortunately it was just a process of persevering, not getting phased by the complications and copying religiously what it said to do in the notes. There always seems to be some complication - something that isn't exactly the same as what they tell you to do. But this is where I started getting a sense of there being a community out there. Even just on the phone I got some very generous help, much more than I thought was fair enough.

For the next few months, I went net surfing whenever I could. I found the NASA home page, "The Age", the ABC, the Why-Files ( a science education site), a vegetarian recipes place, a home page for people to send their cat photos and of course the sites of Syed, Dale Pobega and Bill Daly, all colleagues in the adult literacy field. I stumbled through thousands of pages of utter codswallop trying to find something I couldn't just as easily have got off my own bookshelves or down at the local 7-11.

Since at that stage there was no computer lab where I was working, it was pretty tricky working out ways to use the facilities with groups of students. The students' mailing list was quite helpful with this. I'd print out a letter from the students at, say Duke Street or Yarraville, photocopy it for my students, and hassle them into writing something in reply.

The subjects of these mails were pretty varied, but mostly fell into the domain of public debate: things like gun control legislation and drink driving penalties. They gave rise to some very interesting classroom discussions, some heated (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). A few of the discussions had a life of their own for a little while, generating posts and reposts. It was pretty hard work though. Getting adult literacy students excited about writing anything can be challenging, and when it's writing to people they've never met about somewhat abstract topics .... Well it can be difficult for people who write fluently and with enjoyment to keep things rolling on a list. 

One day while browsing on the web, I found this thing called "chat". It meant that I could talk to people anywhere around the world in real time. I typed something in on my computer, hit return and waited for a few seconds, then hit the "post" button, and someone's reply would be there in front of me. I loved it! Amazing, to think that somewhere on the other side of the planet there was someone who was sitting in front of their computer, doing the same as I was doing.

I spent a few weeks chatting obsessively. The only trouble was that I seemed to have the same conversation over and over again .... hello, where are you from, oh where's that, what do you do, no thanks I don't want sex ..... same ole same ole.

Around this time I hit a bit of a plateau. I just seemed to be doing the same things, going to the same sites, chatting to the same amorphous North American adolescent about absolutely nothing interesting. I got depressed. I worked in the garden. Probably a darn good thing.

Over Christmas I had a break from the whole internet business. When work started again in February, I'd hardly clicked on a link for six weeks. The garden looked great. But it was about then that Liz Suda at Flemington asked me if I wanted to teach the Multimedia course for adult literacy students. I said yes of course, then went away and thought about what this would mean.

Dusting off the modem, I tried to think what would be really useful for an adult literacy student to learn about the internet. Since the Multimedia project was to be done in conjunction with the Duke Street people, I got in touch with Dale Pobega, cleared the 437 emails that I hadn't read and started reading joining some professional mailing lists - TESL-L (Teachers of English as a Second Language) and SLART-L (Second Language Acquisition Research and Teaching), both based in the states. This was great as a pick me up. It got me back into the sense of being part of an academic community, and every now and then I'd see a famous name on the list land feel like I was right out there where things were happening.

I knew that Dale had been doing HTML with his students - that is, teaching them how to use the tags that turn an ordinary word processed document into something that can be read and viewed on the internet using a browser program like Netscape Navigator or MS Internet Explorer. I was pretty impressed at what they were doing and started to feel very uncomfortable because I didn't already know how to do it.

Before the first classes began, my colleague Chris Smith and I started planning how to split the workload. At first I thought that HTML would be beyond the average run of the mill adult lit student, and that learning to browse and send emails would be challenging enough. Wrong! The students we got all turned out to be fascinated by the whole thing and, though not prolific producers of web documents, they want to know all about how to do it. I had to dive for the books again.

It's not the easy way to learn, starting cold with a manual, but that was what I had to do this time. The first bit was hardest - maybe the first couple of hours. But the results were so spectacular that it was easy to persevere. Wow - full colour pages with nice headings and pictures and tables and stuff! I think the hardest thing really was just conceptualising the connection between something that looks like this:

<FONT SIZE=5 color="#FF00FF">Welcome!</FONT>

 and this:

Welcome!

I had to take learning HTML very much one step at a time. I'd put in the very most basic tags that you need to have any sort of page at all, then swap over to the browser and see how it looked. Then I'd go back and add one thing, then look at it in the browser again. It was slow, but it made the effect of what I was doing very clear. 

I did pretty much everything that way - one bit at a time, working through the books I'd bought, looking at the source for other people's pages and using some of the online teach-yourself HTML sites. I've still got a lot more to learn about it, and they powers that be keep changing and adding to what HTML does, but I've got sufficient handle on it to be able to churn out a few respectable-looking pages in a reasonable amount of time.

My current students are doing a few different things with web page authoring. The lower level ESL students are writing the text that goes with photos of themselves out on field trips. I put the first lot of text in myself, but as they produce their own writing, I substitute it for mine. This means that they have a model to work on, and get to see the pages changing which reinforces the sense of the web being a dynamic thing, not static.

A higher level group of native speakers are writing articles to link to the Duke Street "@lbe e-zine" technology project. We've already got one two page article up about the history of the electric guitar. Pending articles are: the histories of meccano, computers, steam engines, bicycles, teddy bears and cameras. One student from this group is doing an article on her involvement in the Melbourne gay and lesbian scene.

Another group is doing a study on their own learning processes, describing the activities we've pursued in a numeracy group. This has involved quite a few field trips, which is great for adding photographic content. We've been looking at maps lately, learning how to interpret different kinds of mapped information, from Melway street maps through the topological maps of tram and train routes to the detailed contours of topographic maps.

Reading the newspaper online is another interesting activity that seems to be going down well. Pairs of students sit together at the (only) monitor and help each other to read a news story that grabs their interest, or something they've raised in the "This Week's News" section of our class. They then report back to the rest of the class on what they've found out and in some cases rewrite the story in their own words. This works better than a lot of other rewriting activities I've tried. I don't know exactly why, but it may be because they choose the topic themselves, they make their own meaning from it with very little mediation from me, and don't have a copy in front of them to plagiarise when they get to the writing stage. There's something too about the kinds of interactions that take place between two people sharing a monitor ... the screen pulls their focus in a way that the paper never seems to, and somehow the pairs become immersed in their own reality, apart from the others. 

Now comes the latest and (to me) most strange and wonderful part of my journey into cyberspace. 

Just under two months ago, Dale Pobega convinced me to have a go at MOOing. (Read his article about MOOs in "Literacy Now" No 5 1997). I really had no idea what to expect after my rather uninviting experiences with chat sites (IRCs as they call them). I figured it would be somewhat similar, except that there'd be ONE person I could really talk to. Boy was I ever wrong!

From my first visit to schMOOze University, I was lost to my pre-MOO life. Even with the confusions of using an awful program to access the site and having text rolling off the screen before I could read it , I still had a wonderful time and met some very kind, friendly, helpful people who didn't in the least mind my ineptitude and gave me all sorts of advice and assistance. Besides, the place was just plain fun!

In essence, MOOs share certain qualities with chat sites - you are talking in real time to real people, using written text as the means of communication. From there, it's all divergent. At schMOOze University, the population is made up mostly of ESL/EFL teachers and students. The environment is described as you enter each space, and you find objects which can be manipulated in different ways - books to read, beer to drink, games to play.

There are regular people who you can see there almost every day. They get to know each other. Really! Just like neighbours who chat over the fence regularly, or co-workers in a staffroom. My impression is that, while there is a certain amount of imaginativeness (fibbing?) about the way that people present themselves there, the majority of regular schMOOze residents end up being fairly true to who they really are. 

I've taken students there, singly and in groups, and had other teachers or students meet them there to chat and show them around. I've done the same for other people too. I've been to meetings of a group called Neteach, an organisation for teachers who use the internet for teaching. (This group also has a mailing list which I now subscribe to.)

But the most exciting thing for me has been learning to program in the MOO language. I had no idea this was going to happen when I first started. I just kept asking questions of anyone who'd talk to me about how the place worked and what I had to do to get a better grip on it. This lead from being a guest to having a permanent character, a room of my own, getting a builders bit (permit to build new rooms and objects) to a week or so ago getting a programmer's bit, which means I can access most of the MOO's commands, and create things that are more complex and interactive. 

At the time I'm writing, I'm still reading the manual, as well as looking at loads of other people's "code" - the actual stuff that makes programs work. If someone had said to me, "Go to a MOO - you can learn programming" I probably would have swerved and gone somewhere else. But they didn't. So here I am, at 3:30am trying to get this article finished so I can go back to programming verbs. I'm amazed at myself. 

Around now, some of the MOOers from the US are starting to log on. It's just after lunch their time, on a Saturday. For the last half hour or so, while writing this I've been talking to Joker, who lives in Hong Kong. We're talking about personal stuff at the moment, but when China took over there, I had some very interesting discussions with him about what was happening and how it affected him.

 Earlier on today I did a mini interview with Larry_Laffer, a young guy from South Australia. Here's an extract of our conversation:
 

Larry_Laffer says, "well, as I said, my friend from university showed me the lambdamoo, and I loved it straight away. The contact with people from other countries half way around the world just hooked and that's what keeps me coming back. The people I can meet..."
Flemmex nods.
You ask, "It's strange isn't it?"
Larry_Laffer says, "As to affecting my life, well it's effect has been phenomenal. I love spending my two hours a day on moo, just talking to people, learning about what they do in everyday life."
Flemmex nods.
You say, "I love that too ... just the everyday details"
Larry_Laffer says, "It's affected my life so much that I plan to go on holidays to places where I know people from the moos, so I can meet them."

 This is very typical of the kinds of things that people say about MOO life. And it really happens too, not just plans. At present, three people who know each other from schMOOze are getting together to go to Canada to do a presentation at a conference. The presentation is on.... schMOOze of course! And lucky me, I'll be there! Not in Victoria, Canada., but in my own living room (at home and at the MOO) on Tuesday at 7:00 am, waiting to meet the new people and help introduce them to the amazing phenomenon of MOO.

 =======================================

Mex Butler 
August 1997