Will the coinage catch on? Or did someone else already coin it and I’m just seeing someone else’s thoughts come back to me with a kind of alienated majesty? (Apologies to Emerson.)

I thought my next EDUCAUSE blog would be about Diana Oblinger on educating the Net Generation. I’ll get to that one in a bit. First I have to tell the story of what happened after that session as I was blogging and waiting for the Horizons VCOP to gather for lunch and talk.

Well, nothing happened as I was blogging and waiting, except for blogging and waiting. Actually, it was just after that period that things got very, very interesting. The Horizons Virtual Community of Practice is a group of NLII-based folk who talk about emerging technologies and their uses in teaching and learning. As we sat in a circle and began our conversation, I brought up browser windows of all the stuff I and the DTLT instructional technology specialists are doing right now, so that I could share them with the group when it was my turn. Jim [I’ll edit this tomorrow with a link and a full name–sorry Jim] began by talking about a kind of “bot” they’ve constructed at his school as a kind of interactive FAQ agent that answers questions about schedules and services and so forth at the school where he works. He shared his discovery that students spent more time playing with the bot than they did asking it genuine questions. That sparked a lively conversation about why people would play with a tool that was clearly a bot and not even a learning bot. I was reminded of the bot Martha Burtis had set up in our own DTLT content manager/intranet back home at the University of Mary Washington, so I decided to log into the flashchat module in that intranet to see if I could find Martha online and tell her what was being discussed in Denver.

What ensued almost defies description.

For about three hours or more, a discussion of bots, intelligent agents, student learning, scaffolding processes of inquiry and reflection on inquiry, John Milton, film studies, portfolios, midrashes, flow and cognitive friction, conferences, cyberspace, real space, music and improvisation, swearing and profanity, cognitive dissonance, color commentary, telepathy, project-based learning, and I’m sure several other topics I’m not remembering right now went on in both cyberspace and realspace. As we discussed stuff at our table, I kept feeding parts of the conversation to Martha, beginning with a link to Jim’s “myagent” website. Martha then replied, asked questions, etc. I kept feeding Martha’s comments into the table talk. Then Vicky Suter opened up another cyberspace environment in which the Horizons VCOP does its virtual meetings. I then fed the transcript of the UMW-side chat into the Horizons space, while Vicky took notes on the table talk and the interaction with the UMW cyberchat in the Horizons space. She and I then began exchanging documents in the Horizons space. I grabbed an entire transcript of the UMW chat and put the document in the Horizons space. I grabbed the entire transcript of the Horizons chat/table talk minutes and put it in a document on my hard drive. Meantime Jerry Slezak, another instructional technology specialist, came online at UMW and started talking with Martha about bots and teaching and learning and all of the above. Then I fed some of Jerry’s remarks into the table talk.

All this time, people came and left in both realspace and cyberspace. Threads kept emerging and receding and then getting picked up again. Jerry and Martha were away for a half hour, then came back and picked up right where they left off, which I then fed into the realspace talk, which then got captured in both the Horizons space and the UMW chat space.

It’s hard to describe how this process made me feel. At its most intense, it was something like telepathy, but without any sense of being crowded out of my own mind. It also made me think how constructive both distance and nearness can be, with the appropriate mediating tools and environments. But the main thing is that two DTLT staffers were able to travel to EDUCAUSE with me and participate in what I’d have to call a seminar. No one planned for that to happen. But the beauty of this group of participants is that everyone knew exactly what was happening as soon as it started happening, and that awareness made it possible for us to deepen and extend our intellectual and personal engagement to an astonishing degree.

It isn’t that realspace and cyberspace became one. For me, it’s that realspace and cyberspace were united within community, the best space of all.

Thanks to all of you who made that possible. You know who you are. Special thanks to Cyprien Lomas, who invited me to the session in the first place. Cypien is an NLII Fellow who blogs on emerging technologies. Check out his blog. I’ve also added his link to the blogroll on the right.