The Web and other computer-based instruction automatically offer a set of statistics about "activities". Be careful!

We stared at the screen expecting our participants to being "active". We interpreted that to mean: contributions of our participants visible at the screen, which refers to written and delivered contributions.

However, activity in this narrow sense does not tell anything about reading, witnessing, lurking, or stealing. It does not tell anything about participants who read and ponder or about participants who struggle with access on their respective home or office technology.

While the discussion process in the virtual seminar proceeded, we kept in contact with many of those participants who did not show up. We learned about technological crashes of all kinds, but also about health and job matters. We learned about willingness vs. all kinds of constraints. Most of this also would have interfered with face-to-face seminar attendance. We learned about enthusiasm, fun, eagerness, satisfaction, reading and witnessing, which did not appear on the screen. (Isn’t the word "witnessing" an interesting word? It was coined by our evaluator Helmut Fritsch when he observed that people were involved with the seminar in many ways other than directly contributing comments. It says a lot about what went on in the background, and our quantitative data support the concept.)

Some people suggest that "cafe" and chat environments create "interaction." We haven’t experienced their pros and cons. But with E-mailing on a more personal level we have gained insight in the real learning process of our participants and got some light behind the black box.

The seminar format was almost entirely content oriented. All contributions were open to be read by every participant of the seminar. Any discussion "groups" were just groupings within the discussion process which could be seen in the structure of the discussion "tree".

Most organizational matters were addressed either by individual E-mail or in the "help" conferences. Some participants addressed "chat" or organizational matters to the general seminar in their remarks.. Most, however, did not. There was very little casual conversation between participants. Almost all contributions represented a reasonable degree of Web-based seminar civility (That is, polite but with serious intent.).

• A virtual seminar on the Web is writing and reading, and reading and writing instead of speaking and listening. Writing takes time, speaking is faster; once you wrote your contribution to the seminar it is immediately distributed around the world and it then stays as long as you want. Otto Peters introduced the term ‘knowledge building community" for our seminar.
• Imagine you would receive as many contributions orally in ordinary seminar settings and you would try to treat them as thoroughly and individually as it happened in our virtual seminar. You would never be able to assimilate and digest all of the spoken words. We think with the Web we approach a new way of writing, a new accessible approach to dialogs, academic discourses, educational and training programs which is independent of space and time.
• A virtual seminar format is sufficient for professionals who are primarily content oriented and interested in gaining expertise by guided, moderated, facilitated conversation and discussion; it is a great and new opportunity for participants to meet in seminars from their home or workplace no matter wherever they are located. In some cases the virtual seminar may need a "real" gathering, too. An interactive videoconference might serve as well as the equivalent of a residential. We continue to face the challenge for a mix of media and of methodologies or formats to achieve our learning goals best.
• We would like to give our experiment a title like: A cross-cultural dialogue on foundations, institutions, theory and technology as well as their applications in distance education by Anthony Bates, Ulrich Bernath, Boerje Holmberg, Gary Miller, Otto Peters, Eugene Rubin and 40 participants of the "Professional Development in Distance Education" seminar for faculty and university administrators in January - March 1997.

Thanks!