MOO

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Alec MacKinnon (alec@astro.gla.ac.uk)
Fri, 19 Mar 1999 18:08:44 +0000 

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 18:08:44 +0000
From: Alec MacKinnon <alec@astro.gla.ac.uk>
Subject: MOO

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Hi,

Wendy Lowe wrote:
>
>> I have never used a MOO with students but I have demonstrated chat
>> applications. My experience is that these are often frustrating if more
>> than 3 people are involved. Remarks start to pop up in the screen before
>> one canassemble one's thoughts, let alone type a reply to a comment

You're right, a busy MOO can be offputting. Also factors like keyboard
skill that are less important in asynchronous CMC become important. But
there are ways of dealing with this. In educational MOOs (represented, for
instance by the enCore database:
http://lingua.utdallas.edu/hw/encore.html) there are usually appropriate
tools. An enCore teaching room, for instance, has pieces of furniture which
students sit at. They can only hear or be heard by people sitting at the
same piece of furniture, unless they choose to 'speakup' - an extra command
which makes their utterances audible to everybody in the room. So you can
have students discussing in small groups, reporting back to the larger
group, etc. - traditional techniques of group teaching. This is a strength
of MOO beyond just simple chat - the spatial illusion can be used in all
sorts of ways to structure student interaction.

Alec.

____________________________________________________________________
Dr A L MacKinnon alec@astro.gla.ac.uk
Department of Adult and Continuing Education (44) 141 330 6619
University of Glasgow
GLASGOW G12 8LW
UK

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