MUDs and MOOs: Collaborative Narrative Play at Work in the Classroom |
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A Brief History of MUDs and Academic MOOs Narrative Play in Educational MOOs Collaboration and the MUD Project |
Collaboration and the MUD ProjectThe second primary reason for the MUD project is to foster collaborative work among students. Collaboration should be an integral part of MOO work, as it appears to be an essential element of electracy and electrate texts in general. The MUD/MOO project is thus designed to be a collaborative effort, drawing on the "groups" feature of the JaysHouse MOO. Like narrative, collaborative practice is an essential part of electrate writing. Arguments posed by French poststructuralists like Roland Barthes, in "The Death of the Author" and "From Work to Text," can be reinforced by simple observation of new media artifacts: most popular media are collaborative works. Film, perhaps the first "electrate" medium, has been collaborative from its earliest days. Indeed, groups produce most modern Entertainment media, even if our print-based culture still privileges one author (or director, or musician). Technoprophets like Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler have been predicting the coming importance of collaborative practice for some time; technological developments support their assertions. For instance, Manuel DeLanda, in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that digital technologies have given us the cybernetic model, one built not on top-down hierarchies, but on distributed control. He suggests that advances in computing--from parallel processing to the Internet--use distributed, bottom-up methods that will become our culture's modus operandi. This observation makes Johndan Johnson-Eilola's call for critical digital pedagogies (in Nostalgic Angels) all the more relevant. Johnson-Eilola urges that instructors adopt classroom strategies that critically examine digital media structures. "Unless actively opposed or at least critically examined, the information space can exert great and invisible force on researchers"(114). He urges us to examine the rhetorics of electronic texts. Instructors who fail to do so will use electronic texts uncritically, and "may end up necessarily adopting the stance of training students to be consumers"(129). The MUD/MOO project helps students think about electronic texts. It reintroduces narrative as a research strategy, reasserts the importance of aesthetics, and demands that they work collaboratively. This collaboration--building a MUDspace and making the essential decisions regarding its rhetoric--gives students a critical distance, which they would not have gained in conventional MOO assignments. The MUD/MOO project does all these things while drawing on students' pre-existing knowledge of gaming forms. Creating assignments structured around their readers' narrative experience will help students understand the poetics at work in many of the new media objects they encounter daily. Previous: Narrative Play in Educational MOOs |