In One Place

I haven’t been able to focus as intently as I like on my topic this week since I’m at the conference but have enjoyed the time I have spent exploring and reading. I feel like I have a basic understanding of MUDS and MOOs.

Besides the text vs. image issue I discussed earlier, what I’ve been thinking about is some of the technical aspects of MOOs. The unofficial programming guide got pretty detailed, pretty quickly, and seemed “geeky” even to me. I read some directions for installing a MOO and it was pretty complicated. So, I would suppose that the MOO would have to be set up by someone else besides a classroom teacher (MOOSECrossing is a good example) and then teachers could sign on. When I get a minute, I am planning to request to be added to MOOSECrossing to see what’s going on, if anything. That being said, I immediately wanted to create my own MOO and could see how students would be intrigued. What a great project to encourage creative, descriptive writing.

One of my wondering is why MOOs (like LOGO) never really seemed to catch on. Is it because they demand a different mind set about what kids should be doing and learning in school? If these technologies had been introduced in a less standards-oriented world, would they have had more of a chance? I’m reading Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson in which he discusses how video games and even contemporary television shows require higher order thinking skills than the shows I grew up with like Happy Days or Bonanza. MOOs certainly put decision making in the hands of students, allowing them to explore and create in a way that would be difficult to grade in traditional ways.

Did a hands-on workshop focusing on social software: delicious, blogs, flickr, and wiki. While the group was interested and enjoyed trying out the various tools, their main question was how can we use these tools while protecting our kids? It’s a completely legitimate question. And I find myself sorting around for compromising answers that will still allow them to use the tools. Unfortunately, all the compromises tend to strip out the power of these tools. So, we let kids blog but no one else can read them. Or we download photos from flickr rather than letting out students browse the pictures themselves.

I don’t have an answer that makes me happy. I know of at least one school division that has started the practice of white listing: the entire Internet is filtered and then teachers who wish to use certain sites submit them to the administrator so they can be opened. I understand, I understand…schools are in the business of protecting kids. But when they go home, the Internet is probably not filtered and we have done nothing to help them figure out how to work in this online world. So, now they are, IMHO, doubly at risk because they are unarmed.

I would like to see us focus more on educating kids to protect themselves. What do you do if you find something bad on flickr? They have a built-in reporting feature so the community can police itself to a certain extent. I’m not suggesting we let kindergartners loose on the web but by the time our students have reached late middle and high school, we need to be talking to them about the power and potential for harm on the web.

Amy Bruckman. (n.d.). Retrieved March 12, 2006, from http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/.

I know I’m supposed to be reading about MOOs but I’ve also been exploring them. Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to board the elevator at MediaMOO. I was able to get on the train. I also ate some cheese and put on a costume in the women’s dressing room. Very fun!! However, I need to get a better handle on the verbs. I’ve figured out look and read and I was able to push the button to get the elevator to come but couldn’t get on.

Here’s my main question: have people moved away from MOOs? MediaMOO was celebrating its eighth birthday but that was in 2001. Is it still active? I don’t think I qualify to join since for now I am not doing research into media. (Probably soon, though.) But I wonder if these communities become too hard to maintain. They take a lot of start up and attention. And…I’m pretty sure there isn’t one presentation here at VSTE about MUDs or MOOs. The focus this year seems to be on blogs and podcasts.

I’ve also started reading about “constructionism”: “My research applies the “constructionist” philosophy of education to the design of online communities. Constructionism advocates learning through design and construction activities — learning through working on personally meaningful projects. ” (Bruckman, n.d.). This is obviously different from “constructivism” which has to do with constructing new knowledge based on a learner’s schema. Since she’s from MIT, I’m assuming this goes along with Seymour Papert’s ideas about logo and lego. What do we learn when we “make” things and what is the definition of “make”?

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.