Nexus Analysis: Discourse Cycles and Emerging Internet

- Written by Suzie Wong Scollon

PREFACE 

On a dark December day in 1980 when the temperature was nearly 40 degrees  below zero and the valley in which Fairbanks, Alaska lies was filled with choking  ice fog that glittered brilliantly in the campus lights, Suzie Scollon proposed an  idea to Ron Scollon that radically changed our lives. Five years before the  invention of the Internet she proposed that we use the internal electronic mail  system of the University of Alaska Computer Network (UACN) to teach university  classes, to communicate among faculty, and to communicate between faculty  and students who lived across the 1280 mile span of Alaska where there were  UACN facilities—from Kotzebue on the Arctic Coast to Ketchikan in the Tongass  rain forest of Southeast Alaska, a distance about the same as the distance from  Dublin to Budapest. 

At the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies in the School of Education of the  University of Alaska in Fairbanks Suzie was teaching students in remote villages  of Alaska in the XCED (Cross-Cultural Educational Development) program. This  partial distance education program used a complex system of plane travel for  teachers and students, mailed correspondence, and the very new university  audio-conferencing network. Ron was teaching graduate students in education  on campus in Fairbanks. Suzie had learned of the university’s existing electronic  mail system (UACN) which was present through network terminals in most