Author Archives: witchyrichy

Becker, C. (1994). The unofficial MOO programming tutorial. Retrieved March 11, 2006, from http://www.hayseed.net/MOO/cbecker_tut.txt.

I found this at the Lost Library of MOO (http://www.hayseed.net/MOO/). I was immediately charmed by his honesty, and his description of himself as a programmer sounds very familiar:

“I’m really not all that good of a programmer. In fact, I’m much more what people call a “hacker”, someone who borrows code, modifies it, patches broken stuff with hideously kludgy fixes, values “elegance” somewhere in between Alpo and Velveeta in the culinary correlate to programming elements.”

I borrowed most of the code for my programming project, made some modifications, and turned a joke database into a note-taking database.

Programming MOOs:

Becker gives some basics of programming a MOO, which essentially means creating and manipulating objects. These objects can then be shared in the community; he give the example of someone who created a radio which he then made available to other users. It is the community aspect that interests me.

When I talk about Wikipedia and open source software, most educators are interested but skeptical. Why do people do it? And usually for free? I suppose it’s hard to understand, but people have always done volunteer work; it usually just happens in the real world. For a programmer, the virtual world is where his talents can be of the most use.

But there’s something more going on here…a social community that just didn’t exist when I was a kid. A place where people can share their ideas, opinions, and areas of expertise. And like the real world community I grew up in, online users want to give back to the community. They create free software applications because they can do it by working together. They create encyclopedia entries because they can do it by working together. I think it’s a tough concept for people my age and older to understand.

This is an early observation but as I’m getting on the road soon for VSTE, I thought I’d synthesize my first impressions: there is a tension between using text-only or incorporating graphics:

1. Text is accessible to everyone, including the visually impaired, thanks to screen readers.
2. Text is easy on the bandwidth, something that those of us blessed with high speed access should be sensitive to.
3. Graphics make it easier to navigate, particularly for students who have been raised on graphics.
4. Easily interpreted graphics make it possible for those who speak diverse languages to be together in a MOO.

Groves, P. (n.d.). MUDs, MOOs, WOOs and IRC. Retrieved March 10, 2006, from http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/reports/teaching/chapter5.html.

schMOOze University (English as a second or foreign language) – telnet://schmooze.hunter.cuny.edu:8888/ Web: http://schmooze.hunter.cuny.edu:8888/

I telneted in to schMOOze University last night…everything old really is new again, isn’t it? I remember teaching telnet when I first started doing web courses in the 90s but have really dropped it as a subject. The surprising thing to me is that I forgot pretty quickly how I was connected and enjoyed wandering around the university reading descriptions. In his article, Paul Groves talks about the use of text-based environments and the move towards making them graphical. In his opinion, graphics aren’t automatically better:

“However, just because it is now possible today to make ?¢‚ǨÀúvirtual worlds?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ using complicated graphics, it is not necessarily desirable, technically or pedagogically. The simplicity with which users can describe themselves and the objects they create is one of the great strengths of MUDs. A richly detailed environment can be described with a few lines of text. In order to produce an acceptable graphical representation of the same environment, much greater effort would have to be applied by the user (Curtis, 1992). ”

After experienceing schMOOze U, I have to agree. The imagery and my past experiences made the university come alive. I did find the map very helpful in navigating but it was a simple ascii thing that was able to track where I was. Groves suggests that my experience was “similar to a good novel where the reader experiences alternative methods of reading/learning,” and I agree. Of course, I also love to read and am used to that type of imaginary interaction. I wonder how the millenials, so used to groovy 3d graphics, would react to a text-based MOO. In addition, I do have several experiences of college campuses, so I can help flesh out the detailed environment. I wonder how it would work for someone without that experience?

Elliott, J. & Bruckman, A. “Design of a 3D interactive math learning environment.” Proceedings of ACM DIS 2002 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, London, UK, June 2002. (Link to pdf)

I downloaded AquaMOOSE 3D on my Windows machine and have been having fun making the fish swim and create patterns. I don’t remember much about sin/cos from my high school math class but was happy to see some interesting equations included in this article. For students who were currently studying this content, however, the game would probably be even more fun, especially creating sequences and moves for their friends.

Haynes, C. & Holmevik, J.R. (n.d.) Beginner’s guide to MOOing. Retrieved March 10, 2006, from http://lingua.utdallas.edu/guide.html.

Here’s their definition from the website: “MOO (Multi-User Domain Object Oriented) is a computer program that allows multiple users to connect via the Internet to a shared database of rooms and other objects and interact with each other and the database in synchronous time.” They point out that some people are using TELNET while others are using the “new” enCore XPress MOO client. I wonder how new it is? (This is a problem with the web in general as an academic resource, I think, a lack of proper dating?)

I’m checking out their examples of sites that are using the enCore technology (which was on version 4.0 in 2004 so I’m thinking the client isn’t all that new). I found this one…

MOO Name: Ponte Italiano MOO
URL: http://lingo.uib.no:5000
Homepage: http://www.italiano.no/ (Norwegian)
Location: University of Bergen, Norway
Purpose: Computer-assisted language learning (Italian)
enCore version: 2.0.6 (tweaked)
Contact: Daniel Jung

I can’t really annotate this one because it is in Norwegian…it just reminded me (again!) that the web is indeed a world wide phenomenon. I looked up Italian because I have this dream of learning Italian, but to use this website I would have to learn Norwegian first so I think I’ll move on. I liked the nice clean design of their site and was able to navigate even though I don’t read Norwegian. That wouldn’t be possible without the graphical interface.

MOO. (2006, March 10). In Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 10, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO.
MUD. (2006, March 10). In Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 10, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD.
Object-oriented programming. (2006, March 10). In Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 10, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_oriented.

I started with Wikipedia to get a definition of MOOs: “a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users are connected at the same time.” MUD object oriented. So, what is a MUD? A multi-user dungeon, dimension or domain. (I think I prefer domain for the d but grew up with dungeons and dragons so understand where that reference came from although I never played the game.) The final piece–object-oriented programming–has to do with a computer programming paradigm, according to Wikipedia. The computer program is made up of objects that interact with each other. And in the case of MOOs, the user can create those objects thus changing the game experience for everyone.

General Ideas:

Everything I’ve read so far talks about the text-based nature of these games. They grew up when the web itself was still text-based. So as an educator, I think about the reading and writing skills required to participate in one of these games.

MOO. (2006, March 10). In Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 10, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO.
MUD. (2006, March 10). In Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 10, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD.
Object-oriented programming. (2006, March 10). In Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 10, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_oriented.

I started with Wikipedia to get a definition of MOOs: “a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users are connected at the same time.” MUD object oriented. So, what is a MUD? A multi-user dungeon, dimension or domain. (I think I prefer domain for the d but grew up with dungeons and dragons so understand where that reference came from although I never played the game.) The final piece–object-oriented programming–has to do with a computer programming paradigm, according to Wikipedia. The computer program is made up of objects that interact with each other. And in the case of MOOs, the user can create those objects thus changing the game experience for everyone.

General Ideas:

Everything I’ve read so far talks about the text-based nature of these games. They grew up when the web itself was still text-based. So as an educator, I think about the reading and writing skills required to participate in one of these games.

While I do not believe blogs are going to radically transform education by themselves, I believe what they represent–the ability of everyone to publish–holds significant implications for educators both in production and consumption. In particular, there are three issues and assumptions that need to be dealt with:

One advantage of blogging that is often highlighted is the ease and speed with which people can publish. But speed is not always a positive thing. For instance, in July 2005, well-known blogger David Weinberg posted erroneous information, tried to delete the blog, and discovered that the memory function of blogs had already gone to work, adding the post to his RSS feed and sending out the trackbacks. Weinberger admits that his posting was a misreading on his part partially because he hadn’t done his homework: “So, since I was way wrong, and irresponsibly didn’t do more than glance at the original article, and because deleting the post is unlikely to break any links, I’ve just pulled it.” In this case, speed led to error and a re-reading and reflection would have stopped this from happening.

Kevin Finneran compares the speed of blogging favorably to the “19th century pace of a quarterly journal.” Anyone can publish commentary without having to pass a test to get on the op-ed page of The New York Times. But maybe that “test” is not such a bad thing…even if it a little self-test: is what I am posting factual? Have I given correct credit to my source? What are the possible ramifications of what I am writing? Words have consequences which sometimes can’t, as David Weinberger discovered, be taken back. Educators can help students learn to self-censor, choosing their topics and details carefully as they consider a larger audience.

Making these kinds of choices leads to a second issue related to the use of web publishing tools: privacy. The 7th grade teacher who used blogs had her students make them private. But in Blogger, that only means they are not indexed. They could still be found using a search engine. Thus, there is the potential that the blogs could be read by others. There is blogging software that allows complete password-protected publishing, more appropriate if we plan to use blogs as private journals, taking advantage of the ease of publishing without compromising our students’ privacy.

Ultimately, though, the point of blogs is to publish online, opening your work to public display and comment. Educators can take advantage of the full features of this software by choosing activities that are more public such as current events, one of the original uses of blogs. Students can link to articles or websites of interest, commenting and annotating. In this way, students can safely become part of the larger blogosphere, learning to identify and evaluate sources and participate in online conversations.

That participation is, I believe, the piece of blogging that has the largest implications for educators: learning to engage in civil discourse. How can we disagree without calling names? How can we have productive conversations with people we’ve never met face to face? What does a quality discussion look like?

As weblogs approach their tenth birthday, these online publishing tools, commonly known as blogs, continue to generate conversation and controversy in diverse arenas from journalism to business to education. But a preliminary taxonomy of the types of weblogs shows a complicated picture. Blogs have morphed pretty dramatically from their original use for annotating the web. Politicians use them to raise money. Businesses use them to hawk products. Extroverts use them to share their lives. Communities use htem to organize. In fact, more than one blog commentator has suggested that they are so varied as to defy definition. They share a technology but trying to identify a specific genere called “blogging” is incrasingly impossible.

Educators have also embraced weblogs with English teacher Will Richardson leading the charge. His English students’ blog about The Secret Life of Bees shows off the different facets of weblogs software from posting to commenting to including multimedia, even using the blog to communicate with the author, Sue Monk Kidd.

I am having a tough time getting this paper going so thought maybe a little free from blogging would help get to the heart of what I want to say: We need to refocus the conversation about weblogs from how teachers will use them to why and what students need to know and do in order to navigate and contribute to the blogosphere.

For instance, the article in Learning and Leading (March 2004) that describes how one teacher used blogging technology to revive her use of student journals. That’s great…it’s a perfect use for blogs and one I’ve used myself with my undergraduate pre-service teachers. It solves a problem for the teacher because it eliminates all those notebooks and makes commenting easy. And it may solve a problem for students because the technology is transparent thus focusing their attention more on the actual writing. Students are potentially more facile with keyboard than pencil these days so the ability to type might also help increase students’ writing. Steven Krause, who incorporated blogs into his graduate course, admits that his assignment did not require blogs and could just as easily been accomplished using paper. It is the technical advantages of blogging that he highlights including getting rids of the notebooks, the possibility of linking to relevant materials rather than just citing, and the ability for students to read and comment on each others’ writing, “a task that would be difficult to manage with paper notebooks” ” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2005) Continue reading →