Introduction

Pedagogical shibboleths such as "collaborative," "constructive," "active discovery," "student-centered," etc. are frequently heard today, especially among those involved with the use of educational technologies. However, many faculty continue to teach as if such technologies were a passing fad and simply the latest technological idolatry in a closing century's long line of such compelling, and momentary, liberations. Some educators may even feel that their techno- or cyberphobia is even a sign of preserving the western intellectual heritage in the face of an electronic glitzy blitz on superhighways going nearly instantaneously nowhere.

Then there are the cyberphiliacs who have never met a silicon chip not hailed as salvation-by-megabytes. This crowd is full of a kind of eschatological, perhaps even apocalyptic, fervor for the coming technoheaven. What to think, what to do, in this kind of cyberography when one is either facing a traditional classroom of students, or is mentoring a totally online course? How to be if one has neither the viruses of technophobia nor technophilia?

On a personal note, I used to say not so many years ago that I had no need for a computer in my office since I was in the humanities and life was not a calculation, but a meditation, not a digital configuration, but a dynamic spiritual reality. Virtual reality was a vestigial one, a future remnant of the present. Give me my electric typewriter. I did start to use a word processor and, yes, it was helpful. The mid-90s were at hand and I was embarrassed that I could not even send an email. Shouldn't I have been born in the medieval world anyway?

Then the conversion experience began, not a Rinzai-like sudden satori, but more the gradual awakening and the plodding through the mind-fields of the technologies, one little step at a time in spite of myself. I had been vaguely aware of the Internet and its possibilities for learning, much like seeing diffused sunlight on a foggy morning, but it was not until I met a communication studies professor and learned what he was doing, did I become bold enough to take the plunge. I did want to prepare myself for teaching and mentoring opportunities in the future, but my office computer was a Goliath and I was no David.

There was no mystical moment, no computer-mediated epiphany, just a sense that here was an opportunity to face what I had really wanted to avoid. I endured the purgation rite of passage through my quasi-cyberphobia and entered, however modestly, into the nearly mystical workings of computers and the Internet.

I was found by a colleague who became my computer mentor and we, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (me), traveled the virtual vision quest in the land of strange languages and stranger rituals. My mentor, the verbal virtuoso Ken Williams (http://webpages.marshall.edu/~williams), could speak in ways that made the Tower of Babel confusion sound clear and precise. He could zing off FTPs and MOOs, MUDs, HTMLs, URLs in a cascade of techno-glossolalia. The man has a gift. He worked with me with great patience just as it says in the Tao Te Ching: "I have only three things to teach: patience, simplicity, compassion."

It turns out there is something to the saying about a thousand miles beginning with a single step. My mentor has moved on to another college, but he taught me how to take one step at a time. And as Thomas Merton said in a different context, but one which can be applied to using educational technologies well, "In this we are all beginners, but some are just more beginners than others."

TheVirtual Vision Quest

I started small by experimenting in a class with a discussion list and email and even co-founded an electronic bulletin board (http://web.marshall.edu/htbin/mu-religious-talk-bbs.pl) for the discussion of religious ideas and ideas about religion. Some students were as cyber-challenged as I, fortunately. Some probably assumed I knew what I was talking about and doing, fortunately. As it turned out, most students were not computer wizards and I was not alone in experiencing even those first, small steps as a real experiment.

It was important that I be fully honest with the students from the beginning as to my computing knowledge and skills and acknowledge that we were all in this experiment together. Technological help was available even if I was not the one who often gave it. Allowing the students to see my limitations seemed to help them not be embarrassed to admit their own. So, in spite of reading all about telecomputing, in practice I worked in a collaborative learning-by-doing atmosphere where I was a learner too. We could thus all genuinely try to help each other. As long as I did not pose as an "expert," I was free to make mistakes and try again…and again.

What follows is a montage of my experiments and experiences with one particular way that may serve to demonstrate that while the use of educational technologies can not in themselves transform poor teaching or mentoring into good, and while such technologies are not absolute essentials for good learning and good teaching, a good use of selected technologies can both enhance the learning process and help in its being more enjoyable. For, as Thomas Aquinas said, "There is no joy in life without joy in work."

The particular educational experiment I speak of is electronic collaborative writing in both classroom and totally online environments. It will be argued that such writing does foster a student-centered experience and that such experience is both pedagogically sound and needed, certainly in my department and discipline of religious studies where students' abilities to interpret, evaluation and integrate are far more important than just the transfer or processing of information. In my experience (and not based on a priori theorizing), this kind of experimental experience has significantly transformed the learning process for learners (students) and for their mentor (professor), me.

A Continuous Experiment

Email, archived (http://archives.marshall.edu/~altany/rst205a-9902-list/0274.html) email discussion lists, and chat rooms can be used to stimulate student responsibility for not only their own learning, but for the learning of others in the course, to reconceptualize for students what the learning process has been and could be, and to regenerate latent passion for learning that often seems to have been squeezed out of students by the time they even begin higher education. The sample course, "Introduction to Religion in the Modern World (World Religions)," (http://webpages.marshall.edu/~altany/rst205-0101.htm) portrays both the use of educational technologies and the role of collaborative writing in the course as a whole.

Intercultural contacts between my students and students elsewhere in the world (i.e., Japan, China, Taiwan, Sweden, Israel, Hawaii, etc.) via one-to-one email and group-to-group discussion lists and the inclusion on a course discussion list of scholars from Israel, Australia and various part of the United States have not only enlarged educational opportunities, but aided in changing student perspectives of the learning process, their roles and responsibilities in it. They have begun to experience that process not as some mechanical, habitual routine, but as an innate and enjoyable aspect of being human, both individually and communally, a sense of learning becoming as a mirror before one's soul.

Educational opportunities expanded as the students encountered learning resources in the form of individuals, such as a scholar on women & religion in Australia (along with some of her lecturers and students) who was able to give a different culture's perspective based upon individual experiences and reflections. And students' perspectives on the learning process itself were affected by using the technologies.

These technologies required them to begin to consider that learning was not primarily a continual accumulation of information, but a human event, one that required some degree of begin able to consider imaginatively the views of other people and cultures on their own terms, from the inside, while simultaneously experiencing their own, familiar ideas and perspectives from a new angle. For example, a Jewish professor of Judaism at a college in Israel helped to explain the Jewish interpretation of a "messiah" and of Jesus of Nazareth. To students who were Christians, his explanation offered a very different point of view to any they had ever considered.

The roles and responsibilities of students in the learning process have been more deeply etched by online dialogues and projects. In the fall, 2000, my world religions students engaged in a project with students at Kansai University in Osaka, Japan, that included individual email contact, discussion list dialogue on love, marriage, family, religion and culture, collaborative writing by groups composed of both the Kansai students and Marshall students, and the submission of original poems by students to the class list. The students discovered from experience that if they wanted to learn and to enjoy the learning, the responsibility of full participation lay with them. I was the guide, but could not and would not (even if I could) do it for them. They faced the recognition that passivity leads simply to the reinforcing of an old model of learning while being active gave greater play to the possibility of becoming a learner who is constantly developing ways of learning, and of learning how to learn.

The Recognition of Intrinisic Value

It seems that for many traditional age college students learning has become stale and too habitual, too formalized and instrumental instead of being of intrinsic value as well. A discussion list can help awaken a desire (passion!) for learning by inviting guests to the list who themselves radiate a real enthusiasm for learning and can serve as peer mentors to those less excited about the transformation from student into learner. An American Buddhist on one course list took so much time and care in responding to students' questions that he could be seen as a model of a learner for, although he was much older than most of the students, he was deeply alive with curiosity and a willingness to consider both old and new ideas.

My reading of the literature and my own anecdotal experience over several years seems to confirm the visceral notion that learning is not totally a private matter and that key truths about the human spirit have been forgotten in the inertia of the professor-driven, lecture model of education. The need for responsibility and responding with ability in collaborative thinking and writing placed me in the position of acting most and best when realizing I did not need to act so much at all.

The paradox lies in deciding not to teach students anymore so that they could learn (http://webpages.marshall.edu/~altany/visionteach.htm). Lao Tzu is said to have said, "I have only three things to teach: patience, simplicity and compassion." After years of over-preparing for courses and delivering lectures, sometimes good enough to surprise myself, it was time to let the students learn how to learn.

Learning and Re-Learning

For example, one semester in my course, "The Teachings of Jesus," two notable American biblical scholars, Luke Timothy Johnson and John Dominic Crossan (http://bailey9.marshall.edu/~altany/rst304-9901-list/0660.html), joined the course discussion list, although not simultaneously. Learners (alias, "students") worked in groups to compose the most significant questions (or comments) to put to the online, virtual guest scholar. They could then follow up responses with more questions or comments. It was as a recapitulation of the learning process in miniature.

In other instances, my World Religions (http://webpages.marshall.edu/~altany/rst205-9902-schedule.htm) course was in discussion list contact with a class of college students in Japan, with faculty and students at a college in Israel (http://archives.marshall.edu/~altany/rst205a-9902-list/0366.html) (in spite of a bombing nearby and a student strike), with a former professor turned monastic (http://bailey9.marshall.edu/~altany/rst322-9901-list/0348.html) who talked with my students from her meager lodging in the hills overlooking Florence, Italy, with a group of students at BYU-Hawaii who came from all over the Pacific Rim and South America, with an American Buddhist jazz pianist (http://archives.marshall.edu/~altany/rst205a-9902-list/0081.html) in southern California who practices chanting the Lotus Sutra, with a Catholic priest at a church in Russia, etc.

Not only was there cooperative work in formulating ideas and questions, but that very cooperation helped nudge some learners into a different model of learning. Something the very asking of questions of a virtual guest is a way to integrate the academic and the personal as in the questions of a student (http://bailey9.marshall.edu/~altany/rst322-9901-list/0387.html) for our online hermit in Italy. The model was ancient, but new to those who had only really experienced a relentlessly teacher-centered model beginning in grade 1.

Another collaborative means is voluntary participation in creating an issue of a course's journal, for which a group of students is totally responsible, from ideation to final publication on the course discussion list. What I most value in this activity is the potential for learners to take the initiative and realize that their work is for a real audience of their peers, not simply a private communication to the professor.

Before I started incorporating email and email discussion lists (http://archives.marshall.edu/~altany/rst205a-9902-list/0429.html) into my courses, collaborative work meant only meeting in groups during class time and perhaps in groups outside of class, if the complex problem of finding a time and place for all to meet could be overcome… and if the decision of one or more in a group to ride on the backs of the others in the group could be addressed effectively.

Rating Collaborating

By collaborative writing projects, in both classroom and online learning, I mean the whole process of creative and critical work from the initial assignment to the posting of a group's writing on the discussion list for all the people in the course to read and respond. It gives students an actual audience for their writing and since the list is archived on a web site, it could be accessed, at some time or other, by the world (I like to present this point dramatically because writing in splendid isolation does not always produce the best writing).

The repercussions for students knowing they are writing for their peers and being able to read the writings of their peers can be a major factor in transforming the very geography of the course from one of isolated islands to a virtual and real community of learning and learners for both residential students and those scattered over physical space.

The retrospective comments of learners, such as those below, testify to the value of such collaborative work:

Kept all of us in contact with email… made learning… enjoyable… I have learned to interact with a whole class, not just a friend or 2 in the class. I have learned to be responsible for my own learning. I have even learned to use my computer.

It not only helped me with my computer skills but it's a fun way of learning.

I learned that there are other ways to learn. I also learned how to think… I would highly recommend electronic courses.

It is also a great attempt to put the love of learning back into education… I have learned to enjoy learning for learning's sake again.

The Process of Collaboration

A typical collaborative writing project (http://www.doiiit.gmu.edu/inventio/altanya.html) that has been used to produce such projects as videos, power point, role-playing and dramatic presentations, religious dance and simulated ritual involves collaboration at the following stages:

• group or team formation
• topic selection or analysis
• exchange of email addresses
• delegate, decide, research, write, integrate and present the topic via the class list
• posting to the mentor of a list of all in the group who have actively participated in the project (each group has the power of excommunicating a member(s) who simply refuses, in a patterned way, to join in the work, with my final approval required
• responses of the others in the class
• each member of a group sends me by individual email a critical reflection upon the collaborative learning process that was just experienced
• discuss with the class the strengths and weaknesses of the collaborative effort.

Collaboration in a totally online course is especially challenging and inviting. The learners are separated by space, but not time. The use of email, an email discussion list and a chat room for synchronous exchange was both frustrating and fruitful. Not everyone could or did arrive in the chat rooms at the designated times, but in an electronic course gave students an opportunity for planning their work (http://www.doiiit.gmu.edu/inventio/altanyb.html) in real time. As much as the technologies used, what was important was constructing a virtual community where only one's printed words manifested one's presence and participation.

The decision to ask members of the course to introduce themselves to others on the class by being creatively personal seemed to help to build this community. Each learner posted an introductory message in which each person essentially wrote the first paragraph or page of her or his autobiography (http://www.marshall.edu/rst/Journal_1,2.htm#Student-Collabortive-Essay), focusing not upon factual information , but upon insightful ways to let others glimpse a little of their thinking or inner life. Not only was the ice broken, but doors swung open.

Student Commentary

Life is a journey. A journey that can lead to some surprising places. Some places expected and some unexpected ... very unexpected. Starting in Indiana almost 40 years ago and landing in Huntington, West Virginia was not exactly what I had in mind. But it's been an interesting journey none-the-less. A journey that has taken my life into the music world, sales world, computer world, motivational speaking world, counseling and ministry worlds. A journey that has brought a beautiful wife, two wonderful children and a place in my life that afforded me the opportunity to go for something I was unable to try for earlier in life ... a college degree.

I have enjoyed the class discussions so far and I am truly looking forward to some good e-mail discussions. I would like to wish everyone good luck in the class and to keep an open mind. I know it is going to be hard because I have already been struggling with it.

I am a Christian, and I am anxious to learn more than just the theology behind the story of Jesus. Learning as many angles as possible is conducive to a healthier perspective regarding life, no matter what side of the fence you may stand.

I have enjoyed hearing the different views during class. Personally I don't have a strong religious background and feel that this class might be an enlightening point of my semester.

Collaborative writing helps people work with others, develop an ability to both hear and listen, find out what one really thinks and how much one will defend that thinking or be willing to change it. It develops friendships that transcend class periods and proximity of chairs, benefit from other perspectives, worldviews, interpretations. Participants work out ways to solve problems caused by disagreement or lack of responsibility, learn more about who is doing the learning (oneself), write with precision, and realize that both the mentor and those in the group take one's ideas seriously.

Whether in spontaneous collaborative writing at an opportune moment, or in a formal group project of writing an essay and then presenting, as a group, its content to the class, whether in a traditional classroom setting, or in an online course, collaborative writing has a role that should not be overlooked because of the predictable problems expected. Those problems may have more to do with many students still holding to the professor-centric model, or being afraid or leery of a student-centered one. But, again with the wisdom of paradox, it does seem that the way to overcome a fear of collaborative writing as an inevitable call for chaos is to experiment with collaborative writing even more.

Assessment and the Big Fade

In assessing the ongoing experiments in collaborative writing, several initial evaluations have surfaced. The quality of writing appears generally good (for example, "The Four Mystical Seasons of Love and Union")(http://www.marshall.edu/rst/Journal_1,2.htm#Student-Collabortive-Essay) and peer review may be an important factor in that, as well as the sense of belonging to a group and not wanting to disappoint the others or oneself in front of the others. When collaborative essay are submitted to the discussion list students are writing for an audience of peers and not only in an exchange with the professor. This kind of peer audience and review is a more realistic procedure for how much writing is actually done outside of school.

Computer proficiencies developed or expanded through the use of email, discussion list, chat, web navigation, word processing, etc.. Some students were similar to my earlier self, attempting to "get by" without even a first name (or any name) basis with computers. Most of the time students appreciated this new or deepened proficiency

Perhaps more importantly, mid-course self-reflective writings, self-evaluations, student evaluations at the end of a course, conversations with students and the work produced during the course suggest that the level of enjoyment and the effectiveness of learning seem much greater in a course that includes a fair amount of collaborative writing enriched through various technologies. In addition, it gives a varied pace and rhythm to a study.

Anonymous student evaluations emphasize learners' own appreciation of this:

The discussion list … provided a… forum to express thought… Keep on, Keepin on into the world of cyber teaching.

I liked the integration of computer use with our class work… this is one of the BEST classes I have taken.

This one (course) has come off as being less professor centered and more student centered.

Course has really improved my critical thinking and creative writing.

After the different teaching style become normal, I liked the creativity which developed in my writing and learning technique.

I learned that there are other ways to learn. I also learned how to think.

The Old vs. The New

I find my own level of enjoyment has increased and my enthusiasm deepened, by mentoring the collaborative process for learners. And I think there is a direct connection with the creative incorporation of educational technologies into classroom courses, online mentoring, and interactive TV learning, of which collaborative writing is a valuable part, and my receiving the outstanding faculty award at my university.

This use of the technologies has helped me no longer want to be a teacher who teaches, but to be a mentor or guide (v. an academic guru) who is also the director of resources for learners, allowing them to develop their own interpretations and analyses, not just to memorize mine. Some learners insist they like only individual work where they are fully responsible and do not have to rely upon others. I understand that, but living itself, with very rare exceptions, is a daily collaborative experience. If living is such, should not learning, a major aspect of living, be also?

In this context, I find myself gradually fading away from center stage, the spotlight is dimmed and I become less the star of the show. The learners have come to know that they can help themselves into the questions, answers, and new questions without expecting me to churn out tidy modules of what they need to know. The better the collaborative writing procedures and actual writings, the better can be the individual writings, if for no other reason that one is re-minded that no one is really a Cartesian bubble, that the ancients recognized that without collaboration both survival and life's story became tenuous. We are more than our technologies and techniques. Collaborative writing re-minds students that we are individuals-in-concert where the music needs all the players for its greatest and resounding sound (bytes).