Sunoikisis: Computer-Mediated Communication in the Creation of a ...

ABSTRACT 

© 2001 CALICO Journal 

Kenneth Scott Morrell 

Sunoikisis: Computer-Mediated 

Communication in the Creation 

of a Virtual Department 


Rhodes College 

This article chronicles the efforts of faculty members at the institutions of 

the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) to create “Sunoikisis,” a virtual 

department of Greek and Roman Studies. Because the ACS includes 

colleges in 12 states ranging from Texas to Virginia, the project relies 

heavily on the Internet. The long-term goal of the project is to expand the 

academic opportunities available to undergraduates at small liberal arts 

colleges for studying the languages, literatures, and material culture of the 

ancient Greco-Roman world. The article addresses the major phases in 

the evolution of the initiative: making initial steps to develop a sense of 

community and identify areas of possible collaboration, conducting workshops 

to train faculty members in the use of information technology, involving 

faculty members and students in an excavation and survey in southwestern 

Turkey, and launching Web-based interinstitutional collaborative 

courses (ICCs). 

KEYWORDS 

Interinstitutional Collaboration, Computer-Mediated Communication, 

Web-Based Courses 

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND 

Since the spring of 1995, faculty members in Greek and Roman Studies 

(familiar to many as “Classics” and hereafter referred to as GRS) from the 

Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) have been engaged in a long-term 

initiative to use Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) in an effort 

to build a virtual department. The ACS consists of 15 institutions, 14 of 

Volume 18 Number 2 223

Sunoikisis: Creation of a Virtual Department 

which have programs in GRS, ranging in size from one faculty member 

(Centenary College of Louisiana, Birmingham-Southern College, and 

Hendrix College) to four faculty members (Trinity University, the University 

of Richmond, and Davidson College). In the summer of 1999, the 

faculty adopted “Sunoikisis” as the name of the initiative to create a virtual 

department of classics. The name comes from Thucydides’ History of 

the Peloponnesian War (3.3.1) and refers to an alliance among the cities 

of Lesbos (Methymna excluded), which Mytilene led as Lesbos attempted 

to revolt from the Athenian empire in 428 BCE. The name seeks to convey 

the idea that a group of small but healthy and autonomous programs can 

develop a set of common goals and design a curriculum that goes far beyond 

the capacity of any single program. (For more information on the 

project, see www.sunoikisis.org.) 

PRELIMINARY DEVELOPMENTS 

Following the lead of colleagues at the institutions of the Associated 

Colleges of the Midwest and the Great Lakes Colleges Association, who 

hold biennial meetings to focus intensively on the organizational and pedagogical 

issues that are unique to colleges of the liberal arts and small GRS 

programs, ACS sponsored a meeting at Rhodes College in April 1995. 1 

The agenda included five sessions over two days. The first focused on the 

status and curricula of programs. The second addressed pedagogy with a 

particular focus on the role of oral and aural components in the teaching 

of Latin and the use of digital technologies. The third session concerned 

issues of articulation between high school and college programs and featured 

a panel of teachers from local schools who discussed the nature of 

the curricula in middle and high schools and possible ways for college 

programs to provide support for programs in the schools. During the fourth 

session, the group considered the relationships between undergraduate 

and graduate programs and heard from faculty members representing the 

graduate programs at Vanderbilt University and the University of Wisconsin 

about preparing students for graduate work and possible avenues of 

collaboration among undergraduate and graduate programs. In the final 

session, the participants discussed ways of developing and supporting individual 

programs within a consortium. 

The conferees identified two specific areas where collaboration could 

measurably enhance the ability of individual programs to meet the needs 

and demands of their students. First, faculty members agreed that majors 

would greatly benefit from working with a wider variety of faculty members. 

Majors in small programs may take as many as 10 courses from a 

single professor over the course of their undergraduate career. Although 

such mentoring relationships can often work to the advantage of students, 

224 CALICO Journal


the conferees concluded that students should have the opportunity to experience 

the views and perspectives of other scholars in the discipline. To 

offer students, particularly majors, opportunities to work with peers and 

faculty members from other schools in the consortium, the participants 

identified three possible initiatives: (a) developing and coordinating travelstudy 

programs, (b) planning an intensive program of study during the 

summer, and (c) designing Internet-based opportunities for scholarly interaction 

during the academic year. The conferees also concluded that 

collaborating on a set of easily adaptable, computer-based teaching materials 

would help make planning and teaching courses less time consuming 

and demanding. They noted that such an archive of teaching materials 

should include a library of digital images free of copyright restrictions, a 

set of modular “handouts” on various aspects of the ancient world, and a 

repository of syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, and examinations. 

In formulating these initiatives, the need for computer-based materials 

and CMC to assume a greater role in the curriculum and classroom became 

increasingly apparent. However, participants felt that moving electronic 

resources into the classroom would require overcoming three specific 

barriers. The first was technical in nature. Before courses could take 

advantage of computer-based visual and textual information, faculty members 

and students would need access to them not only in their individual 

work areas but also in the classrooms themselves. The second barrier concerned 

the participants’ familiarity with electronic resources and their 

expertise in using them. They felt strongly that they could not integrate 

electronic materials until they became more proficient in the use of available 

technologies. In general, the participants had found it difficult during 

the course of the fall or spring semesters to find enough time to learn 

more about the software they currently used, experiment with other applications, 

or explore the resources on the Internet. Their experience is not 

unlike that of many faculty members, but, for faculty in small programs— 

which seldom have more than three or four members—the amount of 

discretionary time seems even smaller. The third barrier was support. The 

great fear voiced by more than one conferee was having inadequate technical 

support to cope with the inevitable problems with hardware and 

software that would undoubtedly arise both in preparing the courseware 

and in working with it in the classroom. 

PHASE I: THE ACS PILOT PROJECTS IN CLASSICS AND AR- 

CHAEOLOGY 

With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Sunoikisis undertook 

a program to strengthen the expertise of faculty members in the 

use of digital technologies in a series of two workshops held in the sum- 



mers of 1996 and 1997. Nine faculty members from nine institutions attended 

the first workshop, which focused primarily on helping them create 

and use information on the Web. 2 With the objective of building the 

archive of teaching materials, participants were invited to bring slides, 

syllabi, handouts, bibliographies, lecture notes, and at least one example 

of their own scholarly work for conversion into HTML documents. To 

provide as much individualized instruction and support as possible, the 

project invited three consultants to conduct the sessions, which were organized 

to provide technical background for understanding the Web, to 

discuss the design and organization of web sites, to demonstrate methods 

for creating and editing images for distribution over the Web, and to introduce 

the conventions of HTML. In addition to the more structured 

sessions on specific topics, the workshop also incorporated extensive periods 

for the participants to work on individual projects. 

Building on the results of the first workshop, the project leaders modified 

the structure of the second workshop to include two tracks of instruction: 

the first intended for those who had not participated in the first 

workshop and considered themselves beginners and the second for more 

advanced users, including three faculty members who had attended the 

first workshop. The elementary sessions followed a curriculum similar to 

that used in the first workshop, while the second introduced users to additional 

technologies such as databases, streaming media, and geographical 

information systems. Based on a survey conducted by the evaluator, “the 

majority of participants came to the workshop expecting to learn more 

about the Web as a technology, how to identify useful resources on it, and, 

depending on their level of expertise, how to begin to develop or to augment 

and deepen their own Web materials, from creating home pages to 

integrating databases with Web front ends.” By the end of the second 

workshop, a total of 16 faculty members from the consortium had participated 

in the training sessions, which represented well over half of the 26 

GRS faculty members in the consortium at the time. Nine of the 10 participating 

programs had established a significant presence on the Web. 

Most important, however, the workshops succeeded in creating a stronger 

sense of community among the faculty members. 

One of the more ambitious projects to emerge from the workshops was 

an on-line archaeology course designed by Mark Garrison of Trinity University. 

He demonstrated his project during the second workshop and then 

offered it to students for the first time in the spring semester of the 1998- 

1999 academic year. 

PHASE II: THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROJECT AND THE FIRST ON- 

LINE EXPERIENCE 

In the summer of 1998, the focus of the collaborative efforts shifted 

226 CALICO Journal


away from developing the faculty’s expertise in the use of instructional 

technology to expanding an excavation and survey in southwestern Turkey 

to include faculty members and students from ACS. That summer, 

seven faculty members from ACS, including Garrison (the co-director of 

the excavation), conducted fieldwork in Turkey. The group included a biologist, 

geologist, engineer, and four classicists who had participated in 

the workshops at Rhodes College. 3 The archeological project offered a 

context to develop the three major components of the virtual department 

initiative. First, working with the data from the excavation and the survey, 

as well as developing a course to prepare students for their work in the 

field, offered an opportunity to explore potential uses of information technology 

for both teaching and research and to build on the infrastructure 

established during the workshops. Second, the field school allowed faculty 

members from different institutions in ACS to work collaboratively 

and to develop projects that would involve their undergraduate students 

in significant research. Finally, in subsequent years, the field school would 

expand the curricular options for students and enable them to study the 

material culture of the ancient world and archaeological methods in ways 

that only a very few liberal arts colleges and a limited number of large 

research institutions can offer. 

To prepare the first group of undergraduates from ACS to work in the 

field school, Garrison organized and directed the first interinstitutional 

collaborative course offered by the consortium. The one-unit course, Archaeology 

Practicum: The Archaeology of Western Asia Minor (Excavation 

and Survey at the Mound HacImusalar in the ElmalI Plain), served as 

a prerequisite for the summer field school and consisted of two components: 

an on-line discussion and lecture. Each week, students were expected 

to download reading assignments from the Web and to post responses 

to study questions in an asynchronous, threaded discussion. They 

also attended a synchronous on-line lecture every week. Each faculty member 

involved in the project took the responsibility for providing the readings, 

study questions, and lecture for at least one week of the course. In 

designing the computer-based elements of the course, the project decided 

to use only technology that was readily available to all of the institutions. 

WebBoard, which was available through the ACS Technology Center, was 

used to distribute the readings and discussion. Lectures were conducted 

as conference calls during the first year the course was offered. Students 

listened to the lecture over a speakerphone at the remote locations and 

referred to notes and images posted to the WebBoard conference. They 

could also ask questions in a chatroom which the lecturers monitored 

during their presentations. The project contracted with the long-distance 

provider to digitally record the sessions which were then made available 

as streaming media files for subsequent consultation and review. In the 

second year, lectures were directly webcast via the media server at the 



ACS Technology Center, which also automatically archived lectures for 

later review. (For more information on the archaeology course, including 

the archived audio files, see www.colleges.org/~turkey.) 

PHASE III: EXPANDING THE ON-LINE EXPERIENCES 

In the fall of 2000, the project adapted and expanded Garrison’s model 

to launch a three-hour course on the literature of the Neronian period for 

advanced students of Latin. The readings for the course included selections 

from the Epistulae morales by Seneca, De bello civile by Lucan, and 

the Satyricon by Petronius. Following the structure of conventional courses 

with three hours of classroom instruction each week, this course consisted 

of three components: an hour-long synchronous webcast lecture for 

all of the participants, an asynchronous threaded discussion among the 

students, and tutorials offered by the participating faculty members on 

each campus. 4 As in the archaeology practicum, the professors took responsibility 

for at least one week of the programming which included designing 

and posting the study questions for the on-line discussion, presenting 

the lecture, and evaluating their responses and their comments on 

the contributions of their peers. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, 

the course also featured the lectures of three scholars from institutions 

outside of ACS. Each traveled to one of the participating institutions, 

met with the students on that campus, and offered a lecture on a 

topic germane to the course but that was also suitable for more general 

audiences. An additional technical goal of these lectures was to webcast 

the lecture to the students and faculty at other locations in the consortium 

without altering the experience of those who attended the lectures in person. 

To the students at remote locations, the lectures were not unlike the 

other lectures in the course. They had access to a set of notes published 

through the WebBoard, and they could pose questions in the chatroom 

which a faculty member at the host institution forwarded to the speaker 

during the question and answer session. Students did note, however, that 

having a live audience at the location from which the lecture originated 

contributed to their experience. 

The course differed from the archaeological practicum in additional ways. 

First, the faculty members who offered the practicum had all had direct 

experience in the field at the excavation site and had opportunities for 

working on the details of the practicum and planning the field school 

while they were in Turkey. In contrast, few—if any—of the faculty members 

who participated in the Latin course considered themselves experts 

in the field of Neronian literature, and some had never met the course 

participants in person before. Consequently, the project held a workshop 

in June 2000 to provide the participants with an opportunity to study and 

228 CALICO Journal


discuss the texts and to become familiar with other primary sources for 

the period as well as a broad selection of secondary literature. Walt 

Stevenson of the University of Richmond planned the workshop which 

consisted of a session on the historical context of the Neronian period 

followed by sessions on the lives and works of Seneca, Lucan, and 

Petronius. For each of the sessions, Stevenson compiled a set of primary 

texts and four or five secondary readings. The participants then formed 

teams of two participants each and assumed the responsibility for presenting 

the major points of the articles and leading the group in a discussion. 

Although a considerable amount of planning had taken place earlier 

in a planning conference on the WebBoard and a series of conference 

calls, the workshop enabled the faculty to finalize details of the course, 

incorporate the views and ideas that emerged from the faculty development 

component, and develop a deeper sense of community and commitment 

to the project. 

The backgrounds and objectives of the students who participated in the 

archaeological practicum and those of the students in the course differed 

as well. As a prerequisite for the field school, which was limited to only 

two students from each institution, the practicum enrolled 16 students 

from six institutions the first year and 13 students from eight institutions 

the second. By contrast, the only factor that limited the enrollment in the 

course was the students’ levels of proficiency in Latin. As a result, 30 

students from five institutions enrolled in the course. The excavation and 

field school also involved faculty members with expertise in a number of 

academic disciplines and offered opportunities for students to conduct 

research in biology, geology, and anthropology in addition to archaeology 

and art history. Consequently, students in the practicum were more diverse 

with regard to their declared and intended fields of study than their 

counterparts in the course, the overwhelming majority of whom were 

majors in GRS. 

To help students from different campuses have a better sense of who 

their peers were, each participant in the course “registered” for the course 

by providing some basic personal information such as their musical preferences, 

interests outside of academia, and postgraduate plans. With the 

intention of encouraging interaction outside the structure of the course, 

students had access to a dedicated chatroom, the Deversorium, where 

they could meet in a type of on-line café. Faculty members agreed to respect 

the uniqueness of that chatroom as a forum for unmonitored student 

interaction by entering only at posted times during the week to hold 

on-line office hours. Students could also anonymously submit questions 

to the Servus Oracularius, who dutifully posted the questions and responses 

with the standard warning that interpreting the meaning of oracular pronouncements 

might not be entirely trivial. 5 Students were also required to 

do a project, and they reported on their results and provided feedback to 



each other in the context of one of the weekly discussions normally reserved 

for the study questions. Over the course of the semester, a strong 

sense of community among the entire group of students never emerged. 

For example, the Deversorium and the Servus Oracularius went unused. 

However, the need for establishing community among the students at the 

different campuses was not as great as with the archaeology practicum. 

The course was designed to increase the range of views and interpretations 

of a period of Latin literature for students who already had considerable 

experience in Latin, not as a preparation for a later activity such as a 

field school. 

Students also developed greater ties to their colleagues at their own 

institutions for three major reasons. More students from each campus 

enrolled in the course than had in the practicum. As a three-unit course, 

the course also included the additional on-campus tutorials. Finally, the 

interinstitutional collaboration only lasted for 11 weeks during the fall 

semester. Since the semester calendars at all of the institutions extended 

beyond the schedule of collaborative events, faculty members and students 

met independently and addressed topics and texts suited to the needs 

and goals of the individual students and programs. 

CONSIDERATIONS FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT 

Current plans call for a further expansion of offerings to include an 

elementary sequence in ancient Greek, which will debut in spring 2001, 

and advanced courses in Latin and ancient Greek in fall 2001. Discussions 

are also underway concerning a more comprehensive elementary 

course in archaeology and revising the practicum to address topics at a 

more advanced level. The evolution of the project up to this point has, 

however, revealed some issues that will require attention if Sunoikisis is 

to meet its more ambitious, long-term goals of establishing itself as a viable 

academic structure that can directly compete with larger programs at 

research universities. As Sunoikisis expands and other collaborative initiatives 

get underway, the different academic schedules and calendars at 

the member institutions of the consortium will pose increasingly substantial 

barriers to interaction. For example, of the five institutions that participated 

in the Latin reading course described above, no two institutions 

had the same daily schedule nor the same academic calendar. While merging 

the schedules and calendars seems unlikely, the project has suggested 

that the colleges explore the possibility of designating a period of time 

during the week for interinstitutional collaboration. 

One of the goals of the second phase of the project was to determine the 

level of financial support required to sustain Sunoikisis and a formula for 

distributing those costs among the participating institutions. Within this 

230 CALICO Journal


context, creating an adequate framework for compensating faculty members 

for participating in collaborative initiatives remains a primary concern. 

With support from the Mellon Foundation, the project offered honoraria 

to faculty members for participating in the training workshops during 

the summers. As the focus shifted towards expanding the curriculum, 

the project offered a modest level of compensation for those willing to 

direct an ICC while continuing to provide travel support for the other 

faculty members who participated in planning workshops. Although the 

project recognized that the effort of organizing an ICC clearly called for a 

stipend, it was assumed that the curricular advantages of the ICC as well 

as opportunities for faculty development would provide adequate incentives 

to ensure the participation of others. Reports from faculty members 

suggest, however, that Sunoikisis must address a number of indirect costs. 

Above all, the collaborative initiatives require faculty members to divert 

some of their time and energy from local needs and responsibilities. At the 

same time, the collaborative activities and the outcomes do not necessarily 

conform to the structures used by member institutions to evaluate faculty 

for determining salary increases and awarding tenure and promotion. 

For faculty members in the smallest programs who regularly teach large 

overloads, participating in a collaborative course rather than teaching an 

extra course offers clear advantages both for themselves and their students. 

However, for those in the larger programs, which have more faculty 

resources and can support majors and minors without requiring their faculty 

members to teach heavy overloads, the expanded curricular opportunities 

alone do not represent sufficient incentives for modifying their existing 

course offerings. 

Sunoikisis members are currently working on a number of ideas that 

would make the benefits of collaboration more concrete for faculty members 

and their institutions. For example, the project is developing a protocol 

that would enable the institutions to work as a consortium in the funding 

of sabbatical leaves and the hiring of multiyear sabbatical replacements. 

Such a plan would offer several advantages. It would allow institutions 

to plan leaves well in advance and reduce the costs of recruiting 

faculty members for the individual institutions. In spite of the need to 

move from one institution to another, the multiyear contracts would make 

the positions more attractive and attract a larger pool of qualified applicants. 

The institutions would benefit from the experiences the visiting 

faculty members gain at their sister institutions. In addition, situated within 

the framework of collaborative courses, the institutions could acquire faculty 

resources in areas and fields that would otherwise be too specialized 

for the curriculum in smaller programs. 

In conclusion, Sunoikisis has already achieved some of its basic goals. 

More of the faculty members in GRS are proficient and comfortable in the 

use of information technology, a strong and growing sense of community 



has developed among the faculty, and the project has expanded the academic 

opportunities for both students and faculty. In the process, it has 

identified and worked to overcome some of the barriers to interinstitutional 

collaboration. Although the long-term viability of the project is far 

from ensured, it remains committed to the proposition that collaboration 

facilitated by emerging digital technologies will become a widely accepted, 

if not the dominant, model for higher education in the future. 

NOTES 

1 Participants in this meeting included Stephen Clark (Centenary College of Louisiana), 

Catherine Fries (Millsaps College), Dawn LaFon (White Station High 

School), Anne Leen (Furman University), Kenny Morrell (Rhodes College), Jeanne 

O’Neil (Davidson College), Allyson Raymer (St. Mary’s Episcopal School for Girls), 

Patsy Ricks (Jackson Preparatory School and Millsaps College), Douglas Seiters 

(University of the South), Walter Stevenson (University of Richmond), Livia Tenzer 

(Rhodes College), Stuart Wheeler (University of Richmond), Jeffrey Wills (University 

of Wisconsin), and Susan Ford Wiltshire (Vanderbilt University). 

2 The participants in this workshop were Stephen Clark (Centenary College of 

Louisiana), Mark Garrison (Trinity University), Michael Gleason (Millsaps College), 

Hal Haskell (Southwestern University), Kenny Morrell (Rhodes College), 

Samuel Pezzillo (Birmingham-Southern College), Richard Prior (Furman University), 

Douglas Seiters (University of the South), and Walter Stevenson (University 

of Richmond). The consultants were Suzanne Bonefas (Associated Colleges 

of the South), Ross Scaife (University of Kentucky), and Randy Stewart (University 

of Utah). 

3 In addition to Mark Garrison (Trinity University), the faculty members from 

ACS included Elise Friedland (Rollins College), Stan Galicki (Millsaps College), 

Hal Haskell (Southwestern University), Pam Haskell (Southwestern University), 

Kenny Morrell (Rhodes College), and Jeannette Runquist (Birmingham-Southern 

College). Other members of the faculty from American institutions were Jim 

Doerner (University of Northern Colorado), Pedar Foss (Depauw University), 

Gary Reger (Trinity College), Rebecca K. Schindler (Depauw University), and 

Neel Smith (College of the Holy Cross). 

4 The principal collaborators in the course were Miriam Clark and Kevin Crotty 

(Washington and Lee University), Stephen Clark (Centenary College of Louisiana), 

Hal Haskell (Southwestern University), Anne Leen (Furman University), 

Rebecca Resinski (Hendrix College), Scott Rubarth (Rollins College), David Sick 

(Rhodes College), and Walt Stevenson (University of Richmond). 

5 For designing elements to create community, see Rena M. Palloff and Keith 

Pratt, Building learning communities in cyberspace: Effective strategies for the 

on-line classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999), pp. 59-86. 

232 CALICO Journal

AUTHOR’S BIODATA 


Kenneth Scott Morrell received his B.A. in German and Classics from 

Stanford University and his Ph.D. in classical philology from Harvard 

University. He is Associate Professor of Greek and Roman studies at Rhodes 

College in Memphis, Tennessee and has been directing the Sunoikisis 

project since 1996. 

AUTHOR’S ADDRESS 


Rhodes College 

2000 North Parkway 

Memphis, Tennessee 38113 

Phone: 901/843-3821 

E-mail: morrell@rhodes.edu 



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