It's the end of the semester, so the BCRM blog will be on hiatus until January. In the meantime, I'll be looking for that perfect piece of cardboard to practice my helicopter spins. Commence countdown.
The last three ePed meetings of the semester have revolved around the old-school tech of MOOs, which along with MUDs, MUSHs, MUXs, and the like, are synchronous text-based environments originally designed for D&D-style roleplaying (they predate the World Wide Web proper by nearly a decade). Thanks to the able guidance of Ron Broglio, we’ve been playing around in the Villa Diodati, talking, emoting, manipulating various objects, wearing costumes, building rooms and objects, and committing all sorts of unspeakable mayhem in general.
Fun? Sure, but the question remains: can the MOO be used as a productive writing space for students? I’m not so sure. While I’m intrigued by the idea of using the MOO to help reconceive writing—by that I mean thinking of writing in terms of creating spaces and objects in an almost material way that transcends metaphor, "real" spaces that readers can navigate through—I wonder if the MOOscape isn’t too specialized for student writers to warm up to. While recent emendations to the interface, namely web-based enhancements, make it far easier for novices to participate in MOO-ing (UT Dallas's encore is one web engine commonly used, which allows users to navigate, build, and manipulate objects via the more familiar point-and-click mode rather than the arcane type-only method), folks with a mild curiosity in programming or building in MOOs might well give up when faced with the daunting task of writing what's a fairly difficult flavor of object-oriented code.
Typically, I use the MOO as a synchronous communication environment, a space to meet in to discuss a particular reading or a theme we've been exploring in class. Though things usually go well in these sessions, there is the occasional tendency on part of the students to chatter and play that, as tolerant as I am, occasionally gets out of hand (more on that on a later occasion). All in all, I've gauged my in-class MOO sessions a success, mostly because I incorporate them into an activity sequence where we visit a variety of communications spaces (MOOs, chatrooms, IMs, web-based flash environments like faketown) and analyze their various interfaces, aesthetics, reigning metaphors, writing conventions, and so on. Much gold to mine in such an assignment.
An observational aside: my OSU students seemed generally unimpressed with the MOO, thinking it to be outdated and a little "dorky"; many of my GT students, on the other hand, really warmed up to it, some of them going so far as to sign up for their own accounts and letting an entire weekend slip by before noticing they'd been tethered to the screen for the duration. Make of that what you will...
(Why some students shy away from MOOs; not because they fear dragons, but because they fear becoming the types of people who really like dragons.)