Jane is our typical 18-year first-year student in a composition course in the year 2010. How will she work? What will she learn? Peering into the near future like this, I think we can try to envision something that will not be radically different in institutional and epistemological terms. That is, we are still talking about colleges where students take courses during semesters from professors housed in departments. I think in time the notions of the course, semester, and department will all disappear or at least mutate beyond recognition, but not in the near future.

Instead, we can imagine Jane taking the traditional general education-type courses in math, history, science, and, of course, composition. So I am picturing an evolution of a composition course I might teach now. The students read essays from a thematically-organized reader, post responses to some online discussion, come to class to discuss both the topic and the rhetoric of the readings, and then write essays based on all this business. In short, a fairly typical comp. class.

Here though something else is going to happen.

Jane logs into the course site. It is a virtual environment not unlike many contemporary video games in terms of its interface. Though there is a helper agent, unlike a textbook with its contents and indices, this is a space she needs to discover, much like the college campus is, here in her first semester. This learning environment has been produced by a software publisher but it has been customized by me, much in the way that many video games today will allow you to design your own levels and such. So, yes, in case you are thinking this, it is something like a learning-MOO in the same way that you could say the SIMS is a like a MOO.

Anyway, so what does this space contain? Well, other players/students. Of course, students will already have other means for communicating with one another (e.g. IM), but this feature adds some interest and liveliness to the experience.

More importantly, the students encounter a variety of “learning objects” (LO): various combinations of interactive media. For example, let’s say the theme of my class is College life. There might be a series of LOs that show films or film clips (depending on copyright costs) from various decades; movie reviews; TV clips about the period; and various essays and articles written about them. In other words there would be a constellation of prior media all cross-referenced. This material could be accessed through the game space, which would be laid out like a campus. The user could switch between different decades, say 1950s onward. So you could go down to the Student Union and see what it was like in the 50’s, 60s, 70s, etc.

In particular, I’ve asked to students to find out about political activism. I’ve created a brief lecture/presentation from the material on the site to give them a starting point. it will give them some hints of places to go. Now they have to go and find information. For example, if the go to the 70s and head for the student lounge, they might find a television on where they can see news reports of Kent State. If they go to the Student Union and find the movie theater, they might see Animal House. If they go back to the 60s and go to the lecture hall they might find a teach-in in progress, etc. etc. Outside they might find a bus with students headed down south to register voters.

As the students interact with the various characters they learn different pieces of information. Their path through the game is automatically recorded so they can review what they have encountered later, but they can also take notes–video, audio, or text input–at any point, and send that material to me, to the class, or just keep it private.

So Jane spends a couple hours roving around the virtual campus, watching some movie clips, talking to folks, running into other students. Nowadays classes get together for three hours a week. In 2010 though a lot of that activity can be handled asynchrounously and on-demand. There’s no need for us to meet for a lecture or presentation. Even much of the class discussion is better handled this way, where students have more time to be thoughtful.

However, we are still a human community, and college is still about learning mature, FTF interaction. But now the reason for meeting is different. We meet to satisfy our need to put a human face on learning and to ground our virtual experiences in the certainty of physical interaction. Class meetings then become more like staff meetings: organizational spaces where we reinforce the sense that we are a community working toward a common goal.

And what is that goal? Well, it’s similar to composition today in that it is about becoming rhetorically effective and critical users of media, but instead of writing its new media. Ultimately the students are constructing their own learning objects, an archeology of their own learning experience. These objects are multimedia and built over time. A large part of the process is editing and mixing existing media objects and blending them with some new video, audio, and text. So the students in this class might go out and take some video of their own physical campus. They will include edits of their interactions in the virtual campus and their commentary on it. They will also include other media from the class and other material they might find elsewhere through the net.

On some level, “beneath” all this content, is text, but the rhetorical effectiveness/style of this text lies in its ability to serve as a mechanism for a database. Organization/arrangement is an issue of interface, of HCI, in relation to this database. Argument becomes secondary to what we call “experience design” today: what is the rhetorical effect of interacting with this LO? Audience awareness is perhaps the one thing that remains constant, though the nature of the audience has changed and certainly the way one addresses the audience/user has changed.

Are you ready for this?

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