Now, an imaginary example. An author produces a draft manuscript, then sends it electronically to a few colleagues (a half dozen? a hundred?), soliciting feedback. She receives from several people extensive replies, including in some cases suggested additions and changes to her original text (a few of which she cuts and pastes directly into the original, with due credit). The subsequent version of the essay is markedly different from the first, and she repeats the process, sending it back to several of the original commentators for additional feedback. Eventually she sends the text to an electronic journal, where it is peer reviewed, revised further, then eventually published under her name; the reviewers and audience for this journal, of course, may substantially overlap with the circle of colleagues to whom she had sent the essay in the process of developing it. Following publication, she receives praise and criticism from several readers of the journal (through electronic mail, naturally), as a result of which she rethinks her arguments and begins another essay....

Questions immediately arise: When was this project published? When was it finished? Who deserves credit as author? Who were the reviewers and who were the audience? In certain technically sophisticated fields of inquiry, such as artificial intelligence, essays have been developed in this way for many years. For example, over twenty years ago, Marvin Minsky's frames paper was distributed over the ARPANET, extensively discussed, and repeatedly revised, long before it was published. Today, these information tools have become much more powerful, easier to use, and more widely available to the educational research community.

These examples suggest that familiar distinctions between correspondence and scholarly writing, between personal and professional interchange, and between revisable works in progress and final published articles, need to be rethought as electronic forms of production and distribution of text take hold in scholarly circles. Current postmodern theoretical trends reinforce this changing view of texts and authorship. Yet our ordinary ways of speaking about and evaluating educational research have yet to catch up with these changing conditions. What, for example, do these changes portend for tenure decisions? Why do we value refereed journal publication as the common coin of academic evaluation, when other forms of scholarly interchange (such as posting a series of arguments or research results on an electronic bulletin board) might in fact reach and influence the ideas of a far greater number of colleagues? What meaning an d value do our conventional understandings of copyright, intellectual property, and plagiarism hold in an environment in which the continuous production, distribution, revision, and development of ideas in text is occurring even more seamlessly than before? What significance do these changes have for educational scholarship, which engages multidisciplinary communities in research and has less sharply defined scholarly traditions?

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Yet this fork in the road would also lead into uncharted paths. Is it useful to have access to tens of thousands of documents, with no reliable way of culling the few dozen that one could actually have time to read? Widespread self-publishing would put all authors and all texts at the same level of formality, with no practical way to differentiate the original from the derivative, the credible from the crank, the substantive from the hackneyed - since no one could possibly read or evaluate them all. We are reminded of Jorge Luis Borges's library of Babel, which contains all possible books: "The impious assert that absurdities are the norm in the Library and that anything reasonable (even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception."

Don't we in fact depend on some quality control mechanism, however imperfect and subject to abuse, to allow us to get any work done at all? While one might propose different filtering mechanisms from current systems of peer review and editorial screening, there seems no feasible scholarly future that does not have some such system in place. Even when individual scholars can put their collected works on open access, therefore, people will want some way of sorting through those most worthy of their attention and those less so.

Hence, a second approach to electronic publishing is the electronic journal (whether there is a parallel paper version or not): a peer-reviewed and edited document that solicits manuscripts, evaluates them, encourages authorial revision, then selects a set of papers for each issue. Such a journal is the aptly titled Postmodern Culture, edited by Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth. Aside from the medium of production and distribution, some claim that there is no essential difference between electronic and paper editions of such journals. The peer review, revision, and editorial processes can be achieved as fully with electronic documents as with paper documents. In fact, the line between electronic and paper editions is already blurring, because many paper journals solicit papers in electronic form, collect reviews through e-mail, and perform their editing directly on the electronic version. Electronic journals can exercise the same forms of quality control or certification; they can establish a definitive version of the text; and they are archivable in an electronic form that might be even more lasting than paper.

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And there is even a further step along this continuum: what Stevan Harnad calls interactive publication or scholarly skywriting. This fourth model undoes the very idea of a journal as a unidirectional avenue for dissemination of textual information, to the creation of an electronic virtual community of scholarship in which the collegial working out of ideas is a continuous, seamless process. Harnad's journal Psycoloquy offers one model for this process:

"Psycoloquy is explicitly devoted to scholarly skywriting, the radically new form of communication made possible by the Net, in which authors post to Psycoloquy a brief account of current ideas and findings on which they wish to elicit feedback from fellow specialists as well as experts from related disciplines the world over."

Psycoloquy is a publication in which original work is presented, along with commentary and rebuttals, in an ongoing, iterative manner. Such approaches to scholarship, Harnad argues, begin to exploit the unique potential of electronic media, with their capacity for rapid, direct, interactive communication, rather than simply creating electronic proxies of traditional paper-based forms of publication.

Harnad does not argue that interactive publication should completely replace other forms of journal publishing. It appears that what may emerge over time, then, are at least two branches for scholarship. The first, which might be called a more dialogical model, engages scholars in a highly collaborative construction of knowledge, through forums such as EDPOLYAN or journals such as Psycoloquy, which take advantage of the capacity of electronic networks to allow frequent and rapid iterations of publication and response. In such a context, notions of authorship, intellectual ownership, protections of copyright, and so forth, may become somewhat irrelevant. The second branch includes journals that still solicit and produce articles of a set, finished form: works that are reviewed, revised, and published as considered representations of a person's (or group's) arguments and point of view. Publications in this latter category may take either paper or electronic form; but there is nothing in them that requires the unique potential of the electronic medium. As Julie Foertsch puts it:

"The potential of electronic discourse is not being fully realized if e-journals become nothing more than a clone of printed publications....Rather than trying to compete with the established reputations and fancy formatting of print journals as the final destination for scholarly work, e-journals should focus on opening up the avenues of scholarly communication at a much earlier stage."

On the other hand, the care and precision of proofreading, revision, editing, designing, and typesetting manuscripts to create an authoritative (and aesthetically appealing) version of an author or authors' document has traditionally been linked with the finality of creating a printed, bound version that will be archived as such for perpetuity. Both the producer of the text and its editor and publisher have a common interest in seeing it be as complete, persuasive, and carefully written as possible, since there is a sense in which, once published, there is no taking it back. The printed medium, therefore, also has distinct benefits.

Now, as noted previously, there is no a priori reason why such care and attention cannot be taken with electronically published texts as well, but it works against the spontaneity, speed, and revisability of electronic media to impose such discipline on the writing and editing process across the board. Texts are so easily modified, amplified, or erased electronically that the insistence on any electronic version being the final one seems artificial; this helps explain why the most common forms of electronic publication still remain those that are preparatory to publication in a printed form - real publication, in the minds of many - and why some electronic journals, such as Postmodern Culture, have initiated print versions as well.

In addition to this point, it is striking in any review of the literature on this subject how much of the advocacy for electronic publishing comes from authors in mathematics and other scientific/technical areas. Part of this is explained by the growing need for more rapid and extensive dissemination of research results and information in these areas, as discussed previously. But note that the view of knowledge or information entailed here, and the model of dissemination it invokes, assumes a kind of published text that is data-rich and that has a relatively homogenous form. Such texts can be produced relatively quickly; can be edited, reviewed, and prepared for electronic publication more easily; and can be screened rapidly by readers for salient information, in part because they exist within disciplines having a highly standardized article structure (though such drives for standardization exist in the social sciences and in education as well.

But when an essay's form is closely linked in design as well as in substance with the expression of a distinctive point of view; when it has an aesthetic quality that cannot be hurried or rushed into preparation for print; when an author's voice and style depend on saying things in just this way and no other, then the rapid turnaround and fungibility of electronic media do nothing to help, and might in practice hinder, the preservation of a form of writing and publishing that cannot be reduced to an information dissemination model.