As my colleagues and I approach the celebration of Current Issues in Education's (CIE) sixth birthday - it is not a bad time to take an honest look back at our original vision of collaboration and ponder what we have encountered along the way to becoming a settler of the cyberspace frontier. At this point we have a string of accomplishments that we think we are justified in feeling good about - although we may be a tiny bit infected with youthful optimism. Getting here has not only taught us much about educational research and scholarship, but has also given us vast experience in the world of electronic journal (e-journal) publishing and cyberspace. It has put our communication, scholarship, and research skills to the test, and given new meaning to and new appreciation for cooperation, collaboration and compromise.
During the past five years, our journal has attempted to create a forum for insightful discourse about current issues in education. CIE has, from its inception, advocated for submissions that contribute to influencing and expanding the body of knowledge in education, as well as those that enhance dialogue among educationists, policy makers, and the public. Along the way we have found that we have created an online community where all of us can converse, debate, argue, confer and ponder current issues in education.
But how did we get to this point? As CIE's first editor, Leslie Poynor, stated in her editorial address in the first published volume in 1998, there existed at Arizona State University a "shared interest in establishing dialogue between areas of education that are rarely brought together." The choice of an electronic format was born of a hope that this dialogue we were establishing would be possible if "scholars of diverse backgrounds can engage in a dialogue that transcends the limits of physical space" (Ganesh and Jennings 1999). In the 1990s, scholarly communication was in the early stages of a fascinating and far-reaching transformation made possible by the computer and communication revolution. Much has been said and written about this transformation already, but there is no denying that electronic publishing would change the world we live in. Today it is changing what publishers do. It is changing the way scholars, researchers, educationists and students - all of us - work. And in this environment of change we face many challenges.
Over the last decade electronic publishing has developed an ever more central role in communication. The blurring and assimilation of boundaries have accompanied progress in e-journals between features of the information landscape, which were once more distinct and bounded in the traditional papered journal publication. These features of evolution and growth can be experienced objectively and physically, as well as subjectively and metaphorically. By influencing the shaping of the languages of professional discourse, the blurred and assimilated boundaries have asserted their influence in a way that is subjective and metaphorical - space/cyberspace as the final frontier.
In the now canonical essay "Across the Electronic Frontier," Kapor and Barlow (1990) described the Internet in the following terms: "In its present condition, cyberspace is a frontier region, populated by the few hardy technologists who can tolerate the austerity of its savage computer interfaces, incompatible communication protocols, proprietary barricades, cultural and legal ambiguities, and general lack of useful maps or metaphors."
The frontier metaphor stuck. Rheingold (1993) observed: "The pioneers are still out there exploring the frontier, the borders of the domain have yet to be determined, or even the shape of it, or the best way to find one's way in it" (p. 58). Rushkoff (1994) noted, "Nowhere has the American pioneer spirit been more revitalized than on the electronic frontier" (p. 235). Whittle (1997), discussing the future of the Internet, waxes poetic: "The pioneers, settlers, and squatters of the virgin territories of cyberspace have divided some of that land into plots of social order and plowed it into furrows of discipline -- for the simple reason that is natural resources can only be found in the mind and have great value if shared" (p. 420).
By the mid 1990s, cyberspace was well underway, focusing primarily on virtual communities and online identities, along with a market economy. Before the Internet, communities were people who lived or worked close to each other. Sometimes the community would be of like-minded people, although it was unlikely that they would be a very compatible group all in the same place. Cyberspace transformed this, because it enabled like-minded people to form communities regardless of where they are located in the physical world.
Current Issues in Education is just such a community. It's potential is to create links between people and groups with shared educational interests - and for them to promote their ideas to others. By increasing access to information, e-journals such as ours bring about a greater engagement and interaction between the individual and larger processes. They are unlike anything that has come before, providing a realm of possibilities that are at the same time fascinating and oh so powerful. The possibilities that we might yet be able, together, to create a common good that speaks to human purposes that encourages discourse, while maintaining connections with others, are just around the next cyberpage. These possibilities can be articulated as a site of empowerment, an online space reserved for construction, creativity, community, cooperation, collaboration and compromise.
The nature of an e-journal allows plenty of room for growth, experimentation, and customization. The type of publication that can evolve along with the Internet and the community. Each e-journal can tailor itself to the needs of its authors, readership and available technology. It has flexibility, ease of access, intelligent searches, portability, and visual creativity. We invite authors to experiment with the wide variety of possibilities for (re) presentation that are available in an e-journal. And while we have as of yet no takers on employing video or audio clips, or the multitude of technological possibilities, we look to the future day when it will happen. The promise, or to some the threat, of e-journals has been around for a number of years now, ever since the far-off days of the pioneers in the latter part of the twentieth century and their exploration of the unknown in the new frontier of cyberspace. We hope that CIE is considered one of the settlers of the cyberspace e-journal frontier that has brought about the possibility of a revolutionary change in the provision and dissemination of the educational world's research and scholarly output.
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References
Ganesh, T. G. & Jennings, T. A. (1999). E-journals today: Forerunners of the unrealized potential of the digital medium. Current Issues in Education, 2 (1). Retrieved April 21, 2003, from http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume2/number1/.
Kapor, M. and Barlow, J. P. (1990). Across the electronic frontier. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved January 7, 2003, from http://www.eff.org/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/eff.html.
Poynor, L. (1998, November 18). Editor's Notes.Current Issues in Education, 1(1). Retrieved April 21, 2003, from http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume1/number1/.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Rushkoff, D. (1994). Cyberia: Life in the trenches of hyperspace. San Francisco, CA: Harper.
Whittle, D. (1997). Cyberspace: The human dimension. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman.
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