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| VOICES ON: Using MOOs in the Classroom Cynthia Haynes is Director of Rhetoric and Writing in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her co-edited (with Jan Rune Holmevik) collection of essays, High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs, is available from the University of Michigan Press. Haynes received her Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition from the University of Texas at Arlington.  Please tell us about your work with MOOs.My scholarly work includes extensive work with MOOs ("multi-user dimensions, object-oriented," or electronic conversation spaces). Jan Holmevik, my husband, and I created Lingua MOO, a free online chat space with special rooms for class discussions, collaborative work, presentations, dramas, and various other educational tools. We recently added a graphical interface with a chat space on one side and Web pages for multimedia content on the other. What are the advantages of using a MOO in the classroom?It improves critical thinking, and reactions must be quick. Students also get very creative on a MOO. They may do presentations using MOO slides or Web projectors through the graphical interface, and they build their own rooms and objects that may function as agents responding to preprogrammed cues. One student created an entire one-act play. Group work is enhanced in new ways too. All recorded discussions and events can be analyzed, printed out, edited, and published as a web page--all from within the MOO. What drawbacks do you see in using a MOO?Working in the MOO does not, as yet, necessarily supplant traditional modes of student writing. We still cling to the essay as the primary genre by which we assess student writing skills, although some of us are trying to shake this up and include other kinds of writing and assessment, including MOO activities, as part of course requirements. But how do you evaluate chat space writing? Even if students are engaged and on topic they do not necessarily understand why we do it. How can these drawbacks be addressed?Peg Syverson's (University of Texas at Austin) model for assessment of MOO activity, the "Online Learning Record," has been extremely useful to us. But for the most part, the benefits come with time, as with any new pedagogical tool or theory. Once faculty and students begin to use the MOO as a total work and learning environment, then shifts in levels of motivation, energy, and commitment can be seen. How does the MOO affect social behavior among students? The use of the MOO for classroom discussion allows racial and gender cues to be diminished. Students in a MOO tend to use more narrative discourse, use language in more descriptive ways, and find new and inventive ways of emoting and acting out via textual descriptions. When the MOO becomes too playful, the serious students pull the others in line. And the class might police those who shoot from hip, even though they might not have been as comfortable speaking up face to face. Do you have any thoughts about the future of the MOO?Holmevik's new Web access system for the MOO, the enCore Xpress Navigator, has changed the whole MOO experience, making it more viable for the coming years. With the new Xpress interface, for example, I can stream National Public Radio as an audio file in the MOO studio. Anyone with streaming audio capabilities can hear this when they enter that space. These new projects that involve educational MOOs are exciting ways to supplement writing, reading, and critical thinking pedagogy, in addition to electronic expression, digital culture, informatics, and other hybrid disciplines. What are some other exciting new happenings in online media? Michael Joyce's Of Two Minds has contributed significantly to the field of electronic publishing. On the Web, look up Victoria Vesna's "Bodies INCorporated", which invites you to construct a body for yourself by describing it. The great thing about it is that you get to describe yourself in different ways than those that are available in your daily life. I find it fascinating that Vesna makes it hard for you to delete your body. You must first kill it and then build your own grave. |
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