Computers and Writing
May, 1999

E-Genres: Form, Content, and Medium in Class Electronic Discussions

I need to begin by acknowledging the contribution of Susan Antlitz to my presentation. Susan's MA thesis at Western Illinois University was a study of class listserv lists, and she established the categories and did the initial counting of the messages in the list for my FYcomp class last spring.

My topic is "E-Genres: Form, Content, and Medium in Class Electronic Discussions." I've been conducting asynchronous electronic discussions with all my classes since 1994: first with a mailing list, then with listservs, and starting last year, with a web bulletin board. The students in the first class in '94 (an upper-level class called "Topics in Rhetoric and Composition") used the mailing list to post their ideas about the course readings and topics. They were relatively quiet in class, and the list was their way to reflect on the work we were doing. There was some interaction, but most of the posts were carefully thought-out reactions to readings and class discussion topics.

Nonetheless, at the end of the semester, several students in the class expressed their sense of the class as a community. Aaron sensed that this was something new. And Ryan saw that the list had given the class a unique kind of connection. At that time the community development seemed like an add-on--a gift we got in the process of extending class discussion beyond the limits of the class meetings. I was among the many who wrote or talked at conferences about email communities--how they develop and how they support learning. About a year and a half ago, however, I began to realize that for my students, the development of the social community on the lists was replacing any sense of their purpose for learning. Then midway through the spring '98 semester, I got a chance to try out WebCT with one of my classes (a graduate class in Computers and Writing) and I moved that class's electronic discussion from the listserv list to the WebCT's web Bulletin Board. Both the class and I noticed some differences, and I decided to attempt a comparison between two classes: both first-year composition classes, using different communication mediums. At WIU we have a one-semester FYcomp requirement, followed by a second writing course in the sophomore year. My spring 1998 course had used a listserv list and my spring 1999 course used WebCT and communicated on the WebCT Bulletin Board.

If you're not familiar with WebCT, the CT stands for Course Tools; it's a package (like a lot of others) that provides a framework for conducting web-based courses. Pictured is part of my highly customized top page for FYcomp (we studied popular culture). Also on the top are buttons leading to the course calendar, private mail, the student's grades, the writing assignments, and the bulletin board. And here's the Bulletin Board. It works fairly intuitively: there's a "compose" button for new messages; clicking on the author's name opens the message in the lower screen; and there are buttons to reply and to quote the message in a reply.

It's fairly intuitive, but it's not transparent. Students need to think about what they're doing. And in this way it's unlike email. I'm going to argue that email has become transparent for our students. Even a year ago, in January of 1998, my FYcomp students arrive in class already comfortable with their university-provided email accounts. Many had used email while they were in high school, a small number had used it for class projects in the fall semester, and they all used it to correspond with their friends or families. The first time I was in the computer lab with my students, none had a problem getting themselves subscribed to the listserv list.

I don't provide formal topics for out-of-class discussion, though as a participant I'll suggest topics or ask questions. I do, however, usually get lists started with a question. The initial messages sent to the '98 list were responses to my prompt about personal writing processes. Almost immediately, however, students began including personal information ( Jen), even suggesting that that was more important than the answer to my dull question. And by the second day of the list, the first "just making contact" message arrived from Laura. This kind of phatic communication can be useful for the participants--just like phatic greetings in oral speech, and it has been customary to get a few of these "just writing to say hi" messages on all of my class lists. Last spring, however, this type took over( Brad). And not just in this class, but in my other FY class ( Danielle) and in my graduate class. When class topics or assignments were mentioned on the list, they were often along the line of a progress report--still a phatic message ( Paul).

To cut to the chase, over 40% of the messages to the '98 list were primarily phatic--messages that made contact, saying "here I am, acknowledging you, and inviting you to acknowledge me." Included in that number is the class joke: posts about the weather ( Edwin). Initially they were just part of making contact. Jason, however, objected, releasing a barrage of weather messages--85 in all, including some of them ( Laura) that were comically detailed. The weather became one of several instances of student-initiated rituals and conventions that Joan Turnow calls the "underlife" of students, borrowing the term from anthropologist Erving Goffman (Link/Age, 97). Developing and maintaining this underlife is an important part of students' sense of their community.

In contrast, only 13% of the messages in this spring's WebCT bulletin board were phatic, and a large number of them came from the same student. And there were only 25 references to the weather. In both the listserv and the bulletin board, about the same percentage of messages referred to writing assignments, but the bulletin board posts were usually somewhat more substantial than the brief mentions on the list. JaNeice, for instance, comments on the specific challenge of the assignment and writes a little about her process. And quite a few posts, like this one from George, were actually pretty good reflections on writing, indicating that some real learning is taking place.

A couple other significant differences: There were considerably more requests for help or advice with class projects on the bulletin board (12% compared to only 4% on the list) Some of these were questions directed to me, but most of them were general requests to the class. And on the bulletin board most of them generated some kind of response (even though some were just expressions of sympathy or claims to be having the same problem.) Next, the listserv list included evaluation of specific class activities in only 4% of the messages. In contrast, that kind of evaluation happened in 12% of the bulletin board messages, like Rachael's. And finally, there were 48 bulletin board messages about the bulletin board itself. Most were questions about the same thing. Since the bulletin board is a web site, it doesn't automatically update itself. Students who were used to seeing new email messages pop up in their mailboxes were confused when their posts didn't appear on the list. They also weren't used having messages they had already read not appear the next time they logged on. Here's the obligatory Powerpoint graph showing the comparisons I just mentioned for the phatic messages, the requests for help, the evaluation of class activities, and the technical questions.

Beyond the message types here, the other messages--about movies, current events, class reading assignments, weekend activities, spring break--showed up in about equal numbers. There's just one more difference I need to note. Both lists had some end-of-semester goodbyes ( Janet), like the ones I showed from the 1994 list. These messages on the listserv list reflected the feeling of community that I had come to expect. There was some of that on the bulletin board too, but one message from Amy challenged that feeling. Four responses (like Mandy's) confirmed Amy's experience.

I thought at first that I could explain the differences between the two mediums in terms of intimacy and distance. I imagined a continuum of paper documents ranging from the most intimate to the most distant, from the diary, to the essay in the middle, to the professional publication in a scholarly journal as the most distant, and a similar continuum of electronic forums for writing, ranging from IRC chat rooms to corporate web pages. That may still be a good idea that's worth pursuing in more detail--I can imagine trying to tease out whether IRC or a MOO is more intimate. But a post to the pre-conference listserv list (which unfortunately I didn't save--so I don't even know who to give credit to) got me thinking in a different direction.

I think now that the primary issues are familiarity and transparency. In a very short time (from 1994 to 1998) email has become so familiar that it's almost transparent. Students are learning to use networked computers--and email--at a very young age. This past January at least a half dozen of my freshmen said that they had had computers in their homes as far back as they can remember; they grew up with them. The group that Don Tapscott (Growing Up Digital) calls the N-Generation has started to reach college.

In 1994, and for a few years after, I had to help my students sign up for their Internet accounts and teach them how to log on and use email. Now, however, at my school, students get their accounts during freshman orientation, and there are training sessions in the software for those who need it. All my students now arrive in class already using email. They carry on regular correspondence with their families and their high school friends across the country--and most have done so for a while. And a great deal of that correspondence is primarily phatic. The students use email just to keep in touch.

And so, when my spring 1998 class was assigned participation in an email list, they did what they knew how to do. They used it in the same way they did their other email. And why shouldn't they? Messages to the list showed up in their private mailboxes, along with their other mail. And if a message saying "Hi, how're you doin'? The weather here sucks & I've got too much work to do. See ya" will do for our best friend from high school, why not for new friends from class? And because we feel close to the friends we write this kind of message to, we also feel close to the class list members we exchange ritual phatic messages with.

The students in the 1994 class wrote primarily about ideas--they engaged in a real discussion and their sense of a community came from the excitement of that exchange. For the 1998 class, the feeling came by transference--they felt toward the class what they felt for their other email corespondents. The familiar medium brought with it familiar behaviors and familiar feelings.

Students using the bulletin board didn't have the comfort of familiarity. Two students had used a WebCT bulletin board (though minimally) in a course the previous semester. For the rest, it was a new experience. These students were, of course, as familiar with email as the class the previous year, and some email conventions (a conversational tone, for instance, or unconventional capitalization) persisted. But the technology--the medium--was unfamiliar. And here's where transparency comes in. A medium is transparent when we don't notice it: whether it be the serifs on the letters in Times Roman typeface or the way we turn pages in a book. A new technology or a new medium isn't initially transparent. Take WYSIWYG word processing, for example. I clearly remember when making a word bold had to be a doubly conscious choice, since I not only had to think about doing it, but I also had to find the B button, move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse, and then remember to click the button again to turn it off. Now that the program is transparent, the only really conscious choice--or rather impulse--is to give a word emphasis. And I tend to do it too much. (Brief digression--that's probably part of why I prefer to write HTML code by hand--Typing in the tags can't be transparent. Every formatting effect has to be a fully conscious choice.)

For many students, email has become a transparent medium, while for my spring '99 class, the bulletin board was not. The effort that students had to make to get to it and then use it invited them to take it more seriously and self-consciously. And of course they had to go through the course syllabus on the web in order to get to the bulletin board, so they had a reminder every time of why they were there. Finally, the bulletin board was a special place, only for the class, unlike email, with its messages from others.

I realize, of course, that I've been skewing this presentation to favor the web Bulletin Board. That's because I want my students to have the more serious course-based discussion I had with this spring's class (and those early email classes-- a long time ago, back in 1994 and 95). But we lost some of the community. I mentioned Susan Antlitz's thesis at the start. Her work traces the stages of community building (derived from M. Scott Peck) through the 1998 listserv list. I suspect she'd have a harder time doing that in the 1999 bulletin board. But that's a trade-off that, at the moment, I'm willing to make.

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