+ Page 42 + --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### Ocotber 1995 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 3, Number 4, pp. 42-56 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Department of Education University of Maryland Baltimore County Additional support provided Georgetown University This article is archived as GMP2 IPCTV3N4 on LISTSERV@LISTSERV.GEORGETOWN.EDU ------------------------------------------------------------------------- CREATING A REAL GROUP IN A VIRTUAL WORLD by Gerald M. Phillips, Ph.D. edited for publication by Wendy Snetsinger Adapted from A Presentation to the Central Pennsylvania Association for Educational Communications and Technology April l8, l995, State College, PA INTRODUCTION Dr. Gerald M. Phillips was a distinguished professor emeritus of speech communications at Penn State where he taught for more than thirty years and directed l25 masters and doctoral dissertations. He was an internationally renown author having written and participated in the writing of over 45 published books . In addition, he was distinguished as an internet aficionado. He wrote extensively on several internet listservs including IPCT-L. His discussions covered a wide range of topics with a favorite being human interaction versus machine interface and the effect of computer technology on society. + Page 43 + On April 18, 1995, Dr. Phillips presented his last lecture. In it he described his philosophy of teaching, why he uses computers, and how he introduced technology into his course in small group communications. Dr. Phillips sustained a stroke the day after he delivered this presentation and died one week later. However, he left a tremendous legacy of thought, scholarship and inspiration and is most sadly missed. This transcription was prepared from a live recording. It was edited slightly for clarity and better readability. In a few cases the word or sentence order was rearranged or modified and a few extraneous remarks were eliminated. BACKGROUND AND PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING Dr. Phillips (here after referred to as GMP): I discovered, according to my physician this morning, that this may be my last public presentation. I've been laid up for a number of years, and I think that's very important to the story because my involvement in cybernetic teaching, or whatever its going to be called in the next century, came about out of necessity. I really didn't have enough money built up in my pension fund to retire in l984 when I was given a year to live. And I couldn't climb the stairs to my classroom. I was one of those divinely anointed people who had his own classroom. But, it was on the second floor right next to my marvelously appointed office--the biggest one in the department--with an easy chair, a couch, refrigerator, hot plate and wall to wall students. It was a marvel. But I was now separated from it and the Americans with Disabilities Act hadn't come through. There is a now an elevator in the building that could have accommodated me and maybe enabled me to work a few more years. But, it wasn't installed then and I had to find a way to deal with teaching undergraduate students. There was no problem with graduate seminars, which mostly had five or six--at tops l0 students. They came out to the house, and we served green tea and cookies. Or, occasionally, lager beer and whatever the students brought in sacks. We had a wonderful time and I taught my seminars. But, I had this undergraduate class of 200 students every semester. Although I had two graduate assistants, who supervised two tutorial classes of fifty each, I somehow had to deal with these 200 students. It was a required course for the College of Business and the Dean told me in no uncertain words: "I had better damn well make it go good!" + Page 44 + But, I had no idea what to do with these 200 people, if I couldn't be there in person. I had been teaching for years, and this was a class in small group problem solving--believe it or not. The idea of not being present was a horror because it was a performance class. I had to teach people how to work in committees and I had to do it with live action. The way I usually ran this course, in the past, was to get a big room with a bunch of tables and I'd put the committees at various tables. Then I'd go in a zigzag fashion around the room while my graduate assistants would fan out. We'd eavesdrop while the kids talked. At the end of the period, we would try to get some general statement about what progress they had been making. It was very frenetic. But, I'd been doing this since about l950 when I was trained in groups by Curt Lewin, who pronounced his name "Levine." I was in one of his original "T Groups." Then I went through training with Leland Bradford, the man who invented "Standard Agenda." Over and over again I went through iterations of small groups. If you've watched Jack Perkins on the Arts & Entertainment channel on television, he's one of the people I trained. Now, I want to make a small digression because there's a big jump from hands-on teaching the way we did it to cybernetic teaching. I taught public speaking a lot, and what I did at Penn State was run the Shyness Clinic. And for thirty years shy kids who couldn't graduate unless they took speech, came to my clinic and I had to train them so that we could certify that they'd passed the course for graduation. It was kind of awesome, but, it was all hands-on work. I'm not a technologist. I took a post doctoral in computing and statistics in l962 and learned to program in what they call 99 gate--that's "digital programming general algebraic translator extended." This may sound like the memoirs of an old doddering fool, but, there 's a method to this madness. Because as I went along learning computers, I built a philosophy of teaching. In l987, confronted with the absolute discovery that I couldn't get to my classroom and that I could not handle these 200 kids in person, it seemed like the obvious decision was to put these kids on what was then "bitnet" and "VM." We could tie them all together online so they could interact directly. I sat down with Gerry Santoro, who did the technology for me, and we designed the course. Gerry has now made marvelous advances in branching into the World Wide Web. But, I had no Web then. I just had that VM as the backbone and IBMs (or IBM compatibles). We wanted no part of Macs. We thought of having a prerequisite, "Do not own a Mac!" We were DOS addicts, and DOS was "DAT!" + Page 45 + It was bewildering because at the time I made up this document. (GMP holds it up.) I went looking for it and I actually did find it in my computer and printed it out. So this dates back to l987. The header on it in my catalog on my hard disk is "What in the hell is my philosophy of teaching anyway?" In that file, I put a series of quotes which I've excerpted here. These were the kinds of things that were driving me in teaching. This list of quotes GMP discusses in the following paragraphs is appended at the end of this paper. Of course you understand, I've come out of a philosophical background. I'm supposed to be a humanist. Aristotle, Plato -those were my people. I didn't study Greek, but, I did study Latin and Ancient Hebrew. A lot of what I picked up started there with people like Quintillian-- Marcus Fabian Quintillian-- who is credited for founding the first school for higher education for pay in democratic Rome in the first century AD, just before the great emperors began to take over. Quintillian said, in essence, that what he wanted to do was fulfill Cicero's dictum: "To train the good man, who also speaks well." Because oral performance--oral communication- was the way you influence society and contribute to society. It was absolutely imperative that citizens be trained to express themselves in order for a democracy to live. Quintillian took over Cicero's principles and founded the academy in which he said, "We learn best through imitation and participation. Set before a child worthy masters and let him choose what he wants to include in his own life and give him a way to live his life so he has practice at including it." He was followed by people like Tacitus, who invented the first simulations. Tacitus would set up mock legislatures for students to participate in and he would hand them assignments. Tacitus used to give addresses to the students, such as "Your country is going to war against an enemy that was once your ally, and you feel that the war is futile and you will lose. Stand up and say what you would say in the legislature." And the students would then have time to prepare the speech. We were sort of modeled our classes after that method because we would set up classes.-- Now listen to these criteria very carefully. We set up classes where we would have the students come together only rarely and the lectures would not be lectures on theory. In contrast, they would be briefings- briefings about an assignment. + Page 46 + We would then pull problems out of their environment. We would ask them to do things, such as, "Make recommendations to the Board of Trustees about women's sports." "Do something to raise the standards of the freshmen who are being admitted." "Set up remedial programs for freshmen." Everything was taken within the university environment. Then we would alert the personnel--all the people who might be interviewed, anyone who might be bothered--and everybody would get involved. It was terrific. I did that for years and years and years at three different schools, and it worked like gangbusters. So here I was now confronted with technology between me and the task that I had to do, and I'm thinking about the principles that applied here because they're all humanistic principles. One of my favorite psychiatrists, Jordan Scher, made this statement, "Man is born alone but must acquire 'twoing'." It's a marvelous statement. The whole dedications of his career was to the development of twoing between people -teaching people how to be together. George Herbert Mead, another hero, said, "The purpose of childhood play is to practice for adult work." This great pragmatist principle also drove the course. Harry Stack Sullivan, is my personal hero. "The young person," he said, "must seek chums for the purpose of consensual validation. Without them, they will never reach adulthood." And we started thinking about alienation, thinking about the alienating force of those machines, the alienating force of the Internet, HyperCards--everyone sitting alone at a terminal, and working through something alone. Lordy, I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that to those kids. I wanted them to have contact. They had to be in contact. I thought about Mark Hopkins who said, "The teacher on the end of a log, and the student at the other represents the only teaching milieu that's worth having." I wanted to have contact with those kids. I had always had an open door, and I'd always had, well not exactly hands-on contact, that would have been interdicted in this world--but certainly I was available to students. At one time, I could even learn their names and remember them. + Page 47 + These things are hard to deal with when you look at a room filled with computers. I had seen a demonstration of people sitting around a table each with a computer terminal. Nobody talked to anybody else, they just typed messages. And somebody said: "Well, you can't do that, because if you think about it, these people are not in contact. The machine is mediating everything they do. They're not talking. They may not be talking in the same room, however, they are communication with people at different locations. With Bitnet, you could have people at eight different locations and have the group running, and also have an internet chat--a bit of insanity in which the screen would start picking up handles--"Cutey Girl, Tweedie Pie and The Demon Avenger. " To continue teaching, I had to try using this technology to communicate with the groups. "You do not know what you think until you give it life," was Lev Vygotsky's interpretation of Aristotle. At Iowa State University group work was taught by a man named Hall in the College of Agriculture. He was doing it so that 4-H kids could learn how to work in groups for projects. A guy by the name of James McBurney picked it up and brought it to Northwestern. And then, the Northwestern School of Speech developed the whole program in group discussion that eventually became pretty much standard in American Universities. Well that's the backdrop. I had all of this philosophy (crumples up notes). Now, I'll throw it out because I had no way of implementing it. I had no way of getting to people. If you got me on a computer, and I knew you as PZH116, you had nowhere near the personality you have now. Computers are kind of evil things, and even though I work with them all the time, they have a malevolent character about them. They tend to suck up the human soul. My problem was I had to work with what I had. A bunch of IBM DOS computers. I had a VM system which was installed by IBM. I had 200 students that I couldn't get to. Question was, "What do you do with the course?" THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTION And so, Gerry Santoro and I sat down. He did the technology, and I said, "You know there was a problem that I had when I would go from group to group. I'd set off a 'Hawthorn Effect.' When I came up to a group, the group wouldn't act like it did when I wasn't around." + Page 48 + So I said, "Maybe we can just beat that rap. Why don't we have three standing groups. We don't want to take out of this course the face-to-face physical contact between people. That's too important. But let's trust these kids. We'll organize the students into groups, ask them for a schedule, and we'll have them work in their groups on their own time. I don't want to trust them too much. You've got to know what's going on out there. Ok, well--minutes. We'll have someone write minutes. We'll have a minutes workshop, and we'll teach one person per group to write minutes. We'll give that person the title 'recorder' because that person keeps records." Then a voice inside of me said, "Yeh, but what are you going to do with the minutes?" Answer,"Well, we're gonna put the minutes in the computer and each group is going to be responsible for giving me a report every week of what they accomplished. What they did. If they want to give me a verbatim account, I'll take that. But theyve got to type it into the computer. The little voice inside me then said, "Well, what if nobody knows how to make a computer work?" Only back in l987, we thought very, very carefully and said, "No, wait. We're gonna beat our own system, if we make this thing too complicated." So we took one representative from each group and good old Lori Jackson, who was my most prodigious Ph.D. candidate, sat down and did the most remarkable job of speed training I have ever seen in my life. I still have it in the files. An absolutely extraordinary document. She took the students through the document step by step in 45 minutes, handed them the document, and we were connected. From then on, we could run the confounded course. Or, oops, not really because there were assignments that were pretty complicated. We wanted to make sure that the kids understood the basic premises of agenda forming, standard agenda, leadership technique, and bringing people into involvement. They had to learn all these things, and I had to be there. I absolutely had to be there. It drove me nuts, because I liked to lecture. I enjoyed standing up and haranguing a large group. I'm a performer. I always was a performer. It was absolutely like a stone in my chest that I was going to have to give that up and I had no idea what I had to give it up to. So I gave it up to Larry Johnston who was Joe Paterno's camera man. He did the original football games. Larry said, "I'll video tape you in your study. You'll give me the lectures privately. Then you could have your graduate students meet the class and play the video tape." + Page 49 + But one of the graduate students said, "Why do we have to go to the class? Why can't the class send a representative to pick up the video and then show it at their group meeting? In that way each class will have the benefit of your lecture at their convenience." I said, "Yeh, but questions. You know what happens when I say Are there any questions?" So how do you suppose we answered that? E-mail. Good old e-mail. What better use of it then keeping student/teacher contact. Yeh, sure they could ask me a question when I lecture, but, they couldn't get a real discussion out of me...not with 200 kids asking questions. Even when I had office hours, if more than three kids came in at once I couldnt answer them all. With e-mail I had the advantage of asynchronousity. They asked a question when they had a question. I answered the question when it was convenient. Actually, I found myself going on six times a day to answer those questions. I got the graduate students to start answering the questions, too. It worked really well. Suffice it to say, the results of this operation were that we won the Joe Wyatt Award for teaching in 1991. I wrote a book called _Teaching How to Work in Groups_ published by Ablex in l99l. You can all get a copy at your local library, if you really want to see it. (He laughs.) You see technology. It's a wonder. My department subsequently killed the course. My successor took it over and she was completely computer illiterate and clobbered it. But, the course is being taught at about l50 institutions around the U.S. right now. The book is selling. We are doing wondrously well. But, Ive got a lot of problems. One of the problems with the course is a guilty conscience, because I still worried about that loss of contact. And as I see more and more of this stuff done, I'm saying to myself, "People are now applying technology to courses for the sake of the technology itself. I had the opposite reason, it's the factor of human contact that initiated my move to the technology. However this factor, doesn't exist with them." I'm on a real interesting listserv called HMEDIA. It's a group of historians who are applying this medium to the teaching of history. It reads to me like a horror story. The problems that they are having are the problems that come with the dehumanization in history, and the fact that the story part has been taken out of history. You know we've had the political arguments about "his story/ her story." Now we get, "a narration of events." How do you get the computer to give a narration of events? A narration of events is very different from a story. + Page 50 + Over the years, we worked through a number of problems in translating the course from face-to-face to on-line, and not the least of the problems was the subtleties that get involved in the creative process. Since we've worked on this course, at least two Penn State professors have developed online courses and other faculty are developing similar courseware. John Harwood has designed an English course to teach writing online and Jerry Madden is trying to teach art appreciation and drawing online. We have some terrible fights. They're certainly egregious disagreements because Jerry gets captivated with the technology, and I hate it. I use technology because it sustains me and enables me to stay involved, where I might have otherwise stayed in my rocking chair and just doddered, which I may very well be doing right now. I learned a good healthy fear of this technology and I wanted to share this with you. Steve Talbott just wrote a book called _The Future Does Not Compute_. In it he says "The computer destroys humanity." And people chuckle and say that was what they said when the printing press was invented. But, Talbott points out that the printing press did nothing to alter the nature of the book and nothing to alter the nature of the human being. It made reading more available, but that's all it did. The computer is something else again. The computer changes entire life styles. I've written a book during the Gulf War (_Notes from a Sealed Room_). I co- authored and edited the book with a neurologist, Dr. Robert Werman of Jerusalem, who wrote his diary as the scuds were falling on Israel. That was a marvelous experience. I never saw the man until the book was out. We've now gotten together three or four times. He's in the same terrible shape that I am, so look for our book _Living with Heart Disease_ published by Hampton Press. It should be in your bookstore before the end of the month! It was a marvelous experience. I'm doing another book right now, as editor, with a lady physician at Harvard. She has gotten very attached, and she will e-mail every day on the computer and I will give her my symptoms de jour. This morning after I finished my long and extended medical examination with my regular doctor, I got on the computer and we exchanged notes back and forth for about an hour and a half as she interpreted what my doctor had told me. Now she tells me, she's got to get out here to State College. And she's going to bring a stethoscope because she wants to listen! + Page 51 + I've had a number of these things happen when I started meeting people on the computer. Then, they became very real and became very much a part of my life. Well, I'm writing a book about computers and human connections--interpersonal connections. People who pair off. And I'm not talking about "Gee we met and married on a computer." My experiences made me wonder about the notion of trying to provide education without human contact. My closing premise is "Shouldn't we start with the other premise? How can we use computers to facilitate human contact?" And that's where I'm going to stop and have you respond or ask questions. QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: I had a vision of a husband and wife in twin beds with a computer on their beds and they're communicating with each other. GMP: Yes, let me tell you a while ago one of my children had a major problem with one of her children, and my wife, Nancy, had to be at her bedside--and so she had to leave me for four days. She contacted one of my e-pals whom she particularly likes, who happened to be a student of mine here at Penn State almost 27 years ago. And Nancy asked her to come out and baby sit me. So Deanna who is now a lawyer in Denver and a computer freak and internet wanderer comes to the house and she's baby sitting me. We spent whole days where she was using my Zenith, I was using the IBM, and we were talking to each other through the internet. We would go ten hours without exchanging a spoken word. So it is not so far fetched. My wife won't touch them. She thinks they're cursed. She has a real antique a l982 IBM Display Writer. It's an authenticated word processor with 8" disks. She won't leave it. She's absolutely attached to it. It's still in perfect order. It's the only one, they tell me, in this whole sales area. It's the only one left that's functioning. When I retired I turned my big box of 8" disks over to the library. They said, "How are we going to read these?" I said, "Well, you can buy my Display Writer for $5,000." So when they're ready, and they get enough of those disks from other sources, I'll bet they come around. + Page 52 + QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: I was wondering whether you are familiar with the work of Neil Postman or other critics, and I was wondering if you were offering a cautionary path unless we start to focus on human contact and figure out where technology has been going. GMP: Well, you're looking at a piece of history here. The lady that I m coauthoring the internet book with is Neil Postman's most recent Ph.D. (Barnes, 1995). Neil and I were together in the old General Semantics Institute, long long ago with Count Korzybski. _Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk_, I used as a textbook here at Penn State for many years. I've been familiar with Neil Postman's work for many years. I hear he still doesn't use a typewriter. No, I dont have all his concerns. He is a pure Luddite right down to the core. This young woman that Im working with, who I've had out here several times, is one of the most sophisticated Mac users you'd ever want to discover and she is concerned about the impact of the graphical user interface. Some of Postman's concerns are very important, and they're not only his concerns. There are a lot of shrinks that are seriously disturbed about the impact of the computer and particularly the graphical user interface on human interaction. I'm participating right now in an experiment funded by the Canadian government where we're actually doing psychotherapy online. I have certification from the American Psychiatric Association as a lay therapist. And it's very interesting. Two of the three clients that I'm doing formal psychoanalysis with have purchased tickets to come out here because they have to see who I am. QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: You talked just a second ago about the graphical interface and you refer to your background of philosophers and speech communicators. I'm concerned about how people no longer know how to converse. GMP: Well, I'll give you the flip side of the coin. Lanham of the University of Chicago, argues in his book _The Electronic Word_ that e-mail is actually a form of oral medium. I'm working with a specialist in group philosophy whose trying to figure out a theory of the rhapsoid. Back in the olden days of Homer there used to be professional story tellers that would come and they would create a set and they would build a fire and they would stand behind the fire and they would take one of those Greek harps, and they would intone the story. That's how the Odyssey came to be. + Page 53 + That's how Homer circulated his work throughout the Hellenic world. It was written on scroll. It wasn't done from memory. The Hebrews worked from memory. The Greeks worked from scrolls. The Romans had parchments and so you know Gutenberg with his printing press didn't do more than formalize what was already there. QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: There's been an awful lot in the press about e-mail. E-mail and pornography. E-mail and marriages. E-mail this. E-mail that. It's all romanticized. What we're beginning to discover is that e-mail is very useful for genuine and authentic bonding, which must, in some way, be consummated. GMP: Now my other ego is that I'm the list manager for the QC listserv. And QC-L is a private conversation list made up of all-stars taken from other lists all over the country. They have to go through a trial period. They have to share with us what they have to say, and we decide whether we'd like to meet them in person. We had our first meeting here in State College last June, and they're coming back again this June. Incredibly strong linkages have formed. I got hooked up on another list with a doctor out in California who has now retained me as a consultant. He formed an organization called Physicians United to fight against HMO's. They're all linked up by computer. But, also they have to have an annual face-to-face conference. I'm working with him on this. I'm privy with the doctors talking with each other on this list, and it's most remarkable because it is conversation. We're having some big battles about how you cite this stuff and whether what you post to an e-mail list is copyrightable. Right now I should tell that the current weight of authority is that material is copyrighted from the moment you hit the send button. People who use the material are governed by the rules of fair use. They must cite the source and they can only use excerpts. [The program concludes with applause.] + Page 54 + APPENDIX The following are quotes mentioned in preceding presentation. They are the principles that guided GMP's instructional strategies and which he filed under the title, "What in the hell is my philosophy of teaching anyway?" "We learn best through imitation and participation. Set before a child worthy masters and let him choose what he wants to include in life and give him a way to live his life so he has practice at including it." --Marcus Fabian Quintillian "Man is born alone but must acquire twoing."--Jordan Scher "The purpose of childhood play is to practice for adult work."--George Herbert Mead "The young person must seek 'chums' for the purpose of consensual validation. Without them, they will not reach adulthood."--Harry Stack Sullivan "The foundation of life is work, love, and the social interest. None of this can be done alone."--Alfred Adler The fundamentals of education is a teacher on one end of a log and a student on the other."--Mark Hopkins The barbarisms, communication skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing are the only way to connect people through time."--Robert Maynard Hutchins We learn best through imitation. Teaching is to set before a child worthy masters and let him choose what he wants to include in his own life."--Marcus Fabian Quintillian "Learning takes place in groups. Reading is not learning, only when what is read is activated and shared does it become learning. You do not know what you think until you give it life." --Lev Semyonovitch Vygotsky "The unexamined life is not worth living."--Socrates "The fool tells me his reasons, the wise man persuades me with my own...a man learns to be a man only in the society of his fellows."--Aristotle + Page 55 + "The human group is the fundamental unit of democracy."--James McBurney "We become what we are because of the way people respond to us. Personality is the regular responses other people come to expect of us. Personality cannot develop without the collaboration of others."--Harry Stack Sullivan REFERENCES Barnes, S.B. (1995). _The development of graphical user interfaces from 1970 to 1993, and some of its social implications in offices, schools, and the graphic arts_. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University. Lanham, R.A. (1993). _The electronic word_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Postman, N. (1992). _Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology_. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Postman, N. (1976). _Crazy talk, stupid talk_. New York: Delacorte Press. Talbott, S.L. (1995). _The future does not compute_. Sebastopol, CA; O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Werman, R. & Phillips, G.M. (1995). _Living with heart disease_. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc. Werman, R. (1993). _Notes from a sealed room: An Israeli view of the Gulf War_. Carbondale, IL: Illinois University Press. (With and Introduction by Gerald M. Phillips). + Page 56 + ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1995 University of Maryland Baltimore County. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by the University of Maryland Baltimore County. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Susan Barnes, Editor IPCT-J SBB3007@IS2.NYU.EDU