MOO

Draft

Definition

• A MOOs is a Text-based virtual reality
• MOO = MUD, Object Oriented, so a MOO is a kind of MUD.

MOOs in education

MOOs very quite popular in education in the mid-nineties. They were used for a variety of purposes:

• Distance teaching virtual environments
• Virtual meeting spaces (like Chat
• Non-intrusive collaboration
• Learning environments (e.g. quests)
• As constructivist environment to learn programming
• As living hypertexts (text with people)
• Social rules experimentation and learning.
• Familiarization with online spaces and international exchange (activities with kids).

MOOs also were popular as environment for carrying out research, e.g. topics like

• Collaboration (e.g. Dillenburg et al. 1997)
• Sociology
• Identity

In 2006, text-based virtual communities have lost a lot of attraction, since some functionalities can be replaced by integrated environments such as groupware, C3MS or LMS but they are still used for a variety of purposes (since replacements are not really available).

Software

• Lingua MOO, home of enCore (MOO database recommended by DSchneider)

Links

The Lost Library of MOO Best resource for MOO research papers.

References

• Bruckman, A. et Resnick, M. (1993). Virtual Professional Community: Results from the MediaMOO Project. In Third Internation Conference on Cyberspace, Austin, Texas. URL: PS

* P. Dillenbourg, P. Jermann, D. Schneider, D. Traum, C. Buiu, (1997) The design of MOO agents: Implications from a study on multi-modal collaborative problem solving, Proceedings 8th World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, Kobe, Japan. HTML.