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A composition instructor offered as extra credit an electronic bulletin board (part of a campus-wide electronic network) to a composition class at Northwest Missouri State University. The teacher limited his own participation as much as possible. The electronic bulletin board (bbs) was used by about half the class, with much of the other half reading it. One student in particular, "Robin Hood," became the ad hoc authority on the bbs. Other students respected his commitment to the network, his openness and expressiveness, his helpfulness to other students on the network, and his willingness to place all his prewriting and drafting on the network. Student participation on the network was impressive, but the interpersonal relationships of the network were strained by the expressiveness which Robin Hood's own rhetorical style encouraged. At one point, late in the semester, the heightened rhetoric and argument (based on Robin's proposal to place all hardened criminals in one location and leave them to their own devices) scared some students on the network and nearly destroyed the network itself. Robin was caught in what seems a clear gender-related issue: he did not want to give up his positions, nor did he want to exercise too much authority. Balance was only reestablished when "Bess" asserted herself and helped the men stop the violence. (RS)

To control for interactions in learning research due to subjects' prior knowledge of the instructional material presented, an imaginary curriculum was presented with a computer assisted technique based on Carl Berieter's imaginary science of Xenograde systems. The curriculum consisted of a classification system for ten conceptual classes of fictitious planets. The computer system, written in Apple PASCAL, presented three types of displays: (1) definition of the concept's attributes and classes; (2) instance selection and presentation, which allowed trainees to explore the classification system in a hierarchical or tabular format; and (3) a test of concept acquisition. The instruction was presented within a science fiction context; the first screen welcomed subjects to the Starcruiser Academy Science Officer Training Course. Subjects in the first study were 38 high school students. The treatment group, who received advice on selecting pairs of examples to maximize learning, scored moderately higher than the control group. In a second experiment, undergraduate education majors were exposed to either hierarchical presentation of materials, matrix or tabular presentation, or a combination of both. Results strongly favored the hierarchy-only approach. (Extensive appendices include a number of the presented screens and instructions accompanying the classification test). (GDC)

The "Wooster Review," a national literary magazine staffed by undergraduates, began in 1983 as an experiment in student publishing. A naturally formed interpretive community emerged as the "Review" developed: as students read, they noticed weaknesses or thought of other options the writer could have chosen; as they discussed, they began to argue their different readings and reveal widely different tastes and interpretations. Conscious of their own struggles with writing poetry and fiction, the student-editors, without direction or intervention, developed an interpretive community very much like that outlined by Stanley Fish in "Is There a Text in This Class?" The editorial decision-making process followed a pattern: (1) opening evaluations (a survey of opinions), (2) a move toward consensus, (3) reevaluation, and (4) decision (reached by the group, either by consensus or by vote). What was at stake in the decision-making process was not only an evaluation of a manuscript, but also the group's own sense of authority. The conflict between differing interpretations caused students to reconsider, to reevaluate their own readings, and introduced a sense of tentativeness into the acts of reading and interpreting on an individual level and in the group's sense of itself as a collective editor. (A partial transcript from a "Wooster Review" meeting is included.) (AEW)