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, 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."

Introduction

The Virtual Vision Quest