The students’ primary means of deliberating with students at other institutions is through their posting of messages to an IEDP web-based discussion board, which is prompted by their reading and responding to messages from other students. The dialogic give-and-take of deliberation through frequent reading and responding to IEDP postings by other students constitutes the heart of this part of the IEDP experience.

Students start their IEDP Internet experience by visiting the host web site. At the site they will (usually) find many deliberative forums to join. Some of the forums are topically framed, such as "The Environment," "Guns and Violence," "Popular Culture," "Sports and Society." Other forums are "Open" (designated only by number--"Open Forum #1," "Open Forum #2," etc.) and are places where students may raise and seek response on any issue they deem worthy. Students’ first IEDP decision may be which forums they will join, although many instructors guide this decision by requiring that their students join certain topical or open forums while still having the option to read and join other forums, too.

Some instructors have their students wait and preview other students’ postings as they come on-line. Such a preview is helpful in orienting students to the nature of public deliberation via the Internet and in familiarizing students with IEDP student culture, in particular. This kind of "lurking" is considered good form across the Internet. Lurking helps students move swiftly into fruitful IEDP exchanges and does not disrupt the on-going conversation. As part of lurking, instructors may have students read and analyze on-going "threads" or exchanges from previous semesters (some of which are still available for reading on-line). Students take note of what is being "talked" about, who is posting, how topics are raised and debated, what form, language, and structure characterize the posts, and which kinds of posts seem most productive in generating helpful "conversation."

After previewing the IEDP web site and selecting forums to join, students are ready to participate. They usually start by introducing themselves to others in the forum, and if they are among the first to participate in a semester’s forum, they raise an issue for deliberation. If a conversation is already in progress, students are asked to read all of the posts in a specific "thread" and then add their voices to the discussion. Of course, they can also seek to interest participants in new topics at any point.

Once the IEDP multi-class network is fully underway, students are primarily responding to the statements of others. The challenge for students is to listen carefully to what has already been said by others and to find a way to connect and interact constructively with others . In their first attempts at such response posts, students usually state (and restate) their opinions without providing evidence or reasoning. In fact, threads can get caught in repeated statements of opinion ("I think . . . "; "I think . . . . "; "I think . . . "). Students often abandon such fruitless conversation by joining another thread or by raising a different issue. Learning how to stay on topic and move beyond simple statements of opinion is one of the important learning opportunities of the IEDP experience.

If students are to move beyond statements of opinion and make public deliberation meaningful, instructors will have to help most students learn and practice a variety of effective deliberative strategies. Such strategies include:

Which deliberative strategy should a student pursue in a specific forum? How productive will it turn out to be? These questions and decisions lie at the heart of the IEDP learning experience for students and instructors.

In order to help students recognize and pursue new deliberative strategies, instructors often design accompanying activities, such as journals, thread analyses, rhetorical analyses of posts, web research, and more. At the end of the semester, many instructors have their students look back at what they have written or review the many threads in which they have participated and evaluate for themselves the quality of their IEDP experience and the new insights they have gained through public deliberation via the Internet.

I ask my students to participate in one open forum and at least one topical  forum and to contribute a minimum of one productive post per week. I explain that for a post to be productive it should be a positive contribution to the aims of successful democratic deliberation. I tell them that successful  democratic deliberation assumes that all participants have equal access to the deliberative forum, that all have equal rights to free expression, that all bear the same responsibility to "hear" as well as to "speak," and that viewpoints and opinions may be expressed and considered, but not imposed. I explain that democratic deliberation, which thrives in a climate of open-mindedness and a willingness (indeed, a necessity) to compromise, is oriented to consensus or, failing that, agreement to continue deliberating.

In addition, I tell them that productive, positive contributions to democratic deliberation include (but are not limited to) posts that

Finally, to help my students come up with appropriate issues to discuss, I suggest a number of conditions that might warrant public deliberation on an issue:

I tell students that the IEDP will give them an opportunity to discuss the issues they are following in the news, with a wide range of students whose opinions may be very different from their own. Past experiences have shown that these cross-institutional discussions can get very heated, and therefore, very exciting. This excitement can sometimes lead to reactions of anger, passion, awkwardness or disbelief. These reactions can, in turn, lead to even more exciting and productive exchanges--or they can become flame wars. Therefore, it's good to follow a few common, widely understood rules for networked discussion. (See first handout in "Assignments and Handouts.")

I still follow the old habit of asking students to browse forums and select a couple they find interesting to join. I don't require them to join open forums, but rather let them select forums that have either a topic or a discussion flavor that they find interesting. I require them to post twice a week (at least), and to copy me on their posts. In addition, I ask them to turn in a couple of informal writing assignments about the posts.

(1) After studying "ethos" in class, I asked students to submit one of their own posts, together with a discussion of the ethos they were striving for in that post; I asked them, too, to consider whether that post drew any responses, and if so (or not), could they imagine why (or not)?

(2) Later in the semester, I asked students to select a thread that interested them, and to analyze it using one of several approaches we had studied in class (we had read a variety of articles about electronic discourses): a sociocultural approach; a gendered-language approach; a rhetorical/deliberative approach. I liked this assignment because it required students to choose a lens through which to examine discourse, but it allowed them to choose a method of analysis that was meaningful and interesting to them.

The one skill I would most like students to achieve--and the single most important learning goal I have for this project--is to listen to and engage with others in meaningful dialogue. In other words, I want them to learn the skill of deliberation. I want them not just to "express" an opinion, but to hear, and respond to, the points that others make. That end will shape the guidelines I plan to give students next time around. I think I will ask them first to "listen"--to summarize or paraphrase another post they find interesting, and to respond to it (Rogerian rhetoric or, in more contemporary terms, dialogic argument). My netiquette guidelines will include some discussion of the techniques of quotation.

The IEDP is a forum, a place where students can learn how their arguments work with a real public audience and where they can practice the art of deliberative rhetoric.

I divide students up and assign them to a forum, but they often get impatient with their own forum and look at what's happening in others. Some have then participated in several forums. I ask students to post 10 times; it is assigned as homework. I want to see students develop an ability to read another student's argument and respond by exploring that argument's assumptions; to question each other's points they have in common and, most importantly, points on which they disagree; .to make a clear and reasonable case for their views and concerns yet remain open to other views as well; and to keep the discussion ongoing. As an accompanying assignment I have students examine and identify the reasons an argument is using.

The course in which I offer the IEDP is a course in argument and research, focused through an introduction to primary democratic documents and to rhetorical strategies. One writing project is a rhetorical analysis of a teacher-selected thread from a current or past forum; this assignment has been very successful. I have tried framing IEDP participation in several ways within this frame; the most successful seems to be to frame it as an opportunity to try out their rhetorical skills on a real audience and perhaps to find out how those in other parts of the nation think.

Regarding forum assignments: Students are assigned to a forum in the beginning; then if a student is not feeling that she fits into the assigned forum, I allow a change. For several years, I experimented with various posting assignments; once a week, twice a week, etc. Last quarter, though, I required that they participate in conversations and print their best conversation; students seemed more engaged somehow than when they had a particular number of posts. I find it interesting that those who successfully engage in real dialog post the most frequently; those whose posts are ignored get discouraged and don’t want to do it.

I ask students to post at least twice a week, making a total of three posts, two of which must be responses to other students. By specifying the number of times per week rather than simply the number of posts, students seem to engage more frequently. When I teach in a computer lab, my students often come early or stay late to read and make posts. Posts are usually done as homework, except for the first week when we do them in class and when I ask students to discuss a specific rhetorical strategy they've used or would try to use apply a rhetorical strategy learned/discussed in their posts.

Because my students have been first-year composition students, I particularly emphasize issues of audience when participating in the IEDP. But I also use the students' IEDP participation as a means for them to  engage in self-analysis about their own cultural positioning, examining the assumptions that underlie their own stances on issues and to see how that influences the types of arguments to which they are drawn.

Another part of the IEDP experience for students is the face-to-face conference. A face-to-face meeting with other participating IEDP classes within regional proximity is not a requirement for IEDP participation, but it adds significantly to the full IEDP experience. Many faculty have found that the prospect of meeting the students with whom one is communicating helps student-authors to envision their readers as real people and serves as a natural constraint upon discourse which may easily become inflammatory. Furthermore, the face-to-face meeting adds a degree of excitement to IEDP participation and can extend the range of relevant assignments to include collaborative and oral activities across institutional boundaries. More importantly, the face-to-face offers a way to bring IEDP participation to closure by turning the attention of the class to opportunities to achieve consensus or promote action among one’s peers.

A variety of activities may occur at the face-to-face meeting as befits the teaching and learning goals, including:

To prepare for the conference, IEDP instructors in regional proximity need to make contact with each other. The IEDP faculty discussion list serves as a good venue for locating regional faculty and discussing plans for the meeting.

Among the many decisions to be made are the location and agenda for the meeting. The activities for the face-to-face meeting should include those which most naturally bring the semester’s learning goals to closure. Also, the place, time period and agenda for the meeting should be added to the syllabus for the class so that students may plan from the first day and make needed adjustments to their schedule so they may attend.

Many participating faculty have found that their institutions are proud of their participation in an inter-institutional project like the IEDP, and they will offer support for the meeting. Many schools can offer meeting rooms without attached costs. Some faculty have access to bus transportation through their school’s athletic department. Small grants from deans and chairs may support bag lunches or other snacks. Other ideas and sources of support for the face to face meeting are readily discussed on the IEDP faculty discussion list.

The original galvanizing force behind the IEDP was a face-to-face conference of professors in rhetoric and composition. At this conference, which that year (1995) was in Washington, DC, a group of professors were talking about how important it was to be able to share ideas, research, and intellectual work with their colleagues. They lamented that students rarely get the chance to share their work with students from other campuses, and they spent many hours talking about how they could organize a course so students would have the same learning opportunities as the professors. From the idea of the professional conference, they worked backwards, trying to figure out how to get students together, and, once together, what they would have to discuss. Because the conference was in our nation's capital, and because they were rhetoric professors, they thought about having students study writing about public issues. The students could collaborate over e-mail (a new concept at the time!) and then get together at a conference near the end of the term to present their ideas to each other.

Since then, the face-to-face conference has proved an integral part of the IEDP. The conference enables students to practice an essential component of rhetoric: civic speech. It also enables them to collaborate with their fellow students at other campuses. They have the opportunity to meet the people with whom they have been corresponding electronically, and they address a real audience concerned with the current issues that have absorbed them throughout the term. Their research gains added meaning because it will matter to a large group of listeners. The students are also are in a position to develop ethos in a manner that rarely occurs in the classroom where the student writes primarily to the teacher. In the face-to-face conference, students present their research and their findings to their classmates as well as teachers, and, because the presentations are oral, they reach a wide audience and practice the skills necessary for civic speech. Because they have the chance to gather, they are in a position to share their learning in a forum that prepares them for professional work and civic action. These forums take the form of single presentations, group presentations, roundtable discussions, and poster sessions.

For most students, the face-to-face is a culminating experience. They take great pride in their work, they feel professionally engaged, and the conference itself is a celebration of their learning and their research. It is an exciting time for the students and the teachers--many students report that the conference is the best experience they have had in college.

One of the goals of the IEDP is to enable students to take part in diverse intellectual and social communities focused on deliberating political and social issues of concern to them. The electronic lists generate student discourse on public issues and provide forums for detailed written discussions with classmates and with students at universities across the nation. This exchange of opinion via the Internet is an intense experience, and it is expanded and deepened at the end of the semester a regional face-to-face conference where students present their work to each other in a variety of formats: group presentations, poster sessions, debates, formal speeches, and impromptu speeches.

If students understand from the first day of the semester that the face-to-face conference will be part of the IEDP experience, that knowledge affects the whole project. The students’ knowledge that they will ultimately meet each other in person contributes to a different, more thoughtful dynamic on the electronic lists, leading to a deeper sense of civic responsibility and a keener sense of audience as they work towards public presentation. Furthermore throughout the semester, students become aware of how others’ posts project images of their authors, and they then become concerned with the development of their own ethos. Then at the conference, they tend to forget the teacher as audience and to think instead of how best to communicate to the diverse conference attendees. Also during the conference, students’ preconceptions and prejudices are frequently shattered when they meet each other, contributing further to their learning.

During several offerings of the IEDP, my students have had opportunities to use e-mail to work collaboratively with students from Merrimack College and Worcester State College in preparation for the face-to-face conference. Our students seek out like-minded students at the other institutions. They then negotiate a project to present to others at the conference, and they divide up the work so that each member of the team contributes to the final outcome. Through this process, our students have learned actively about civic dialogue and tested their capacities for critical thinking, communication, and persuasion. As students have studied and practiced language, writing, rhetoric, and critical thinking, they have widened their perspectives and become more responsive and responsible through rhetorical interactions with diverse, multicultural groups of participants made possible by the networks.

A brief word about the conference schedule: Generally speaking, when I have hosted the regional conference, the agenda has two parts. During the morning sessions, students meet each other and make their presentations to each other on topics derived from their IEDP forums. During the afternoon sessions, students participate in deliberative discussion circles, where they take on a "case" or problem related to forum themes (such as how to reform drug or sex education in high school, or how to reduce gun violence in schools, etc.). They then present their insights to the whole group. The day ends with a whole group discussion about the complete IEDP experience. When URI hosted a particularly large conference with students from many schools, we added a guest speaker at lunch. The day had the feel of a professional conference, and the students recognized the special quality of the experience

Philip Burns
Worcester State College

One approach to a face-to-face conference is to combine and adapt the formats of traditional academic conferences (for morning sessions) and general public forums (for afternoon sessions), with the former providing a basis for the latter (the knowledge and experience students [as students] acquire at the "academic conference" supporting and informing their participation as citizens in the "general public forum"). At the morning academic conference all students actively participate through individual speaking roles (with or without visual aids that have been produced either individually or collaboratively) as part of integrated panel presentations, with 3 to 5 students on each panel and the rest of their peers serving as a responsive audience. In the afternoon public forum session, which addresses issues that are similar to those that had been addressed academically in the morning, students-as-citizens participate in problem-oriented deliberation groups--groups whose deliberations are informed in part by what had transpired during the morning academic experience--with each group presenting the results of their deliberations to the full audience of their peers upon completion of all groups' deliberations. Logistically, depending on number of attendees, there may be duplicate (or triplicate?) morning panels/afternoon groups on each topic, each set of panels/groups meeting in different rooms, but it is most effective if everyone meets together for the final presentation of deliberation results.

Regarding the foci for the face-to-face conference, here are two alternatives: One alternative would have the morning panel topics and corresponding afternoon deliberation topics corresponding to key issues that had emerged in the IEDP forums during the course of the semester. That way, the conference would be a face-to-face adaptation of what the students had been doing on-line during the preceding weeks.

The other alternative (which is the one I prefer) would make a clear distinction between what the students discuss via the IEDP forums during the course of the semester and what they address at the face-to-face conference. Within their on-line forums students would have discussed various public issues, including those that have come up during the Presidential campaign, the candidates themselves, and other campaign-related topics. In other words, the on-line forums would tend to replicate public discussion generally. The purpose of the face-to-face, in contrast, would be to address issues that bear more directly on the IEDP project itself--issues such as the role of higher education in public discourse; political apathy/activism among college students; what makes democratic deliberation effective (or ineffective); the problems/challenges for democracy in an electronic age; and the politics of pluralism, diversity, or multiculturalism. The main reason I prefer this model rather than the other one is that I think it forces the students to think about the democratic process, their own role in that process, the goals of the IEDP itself, public rhetoric, etc.--stuff that I think has wider and more important application than what they think about any particular public issue of the moment. In any case, this is the approach I tried to take in designing our face-to-face at Worcester State College.