Building with MUD

GOTI Background

(For information see the GOTI homepage).

Building a Home (Page)

The course home page proved to be an essential component of the course. Because of the lack of face-to-face contact, this page was needed to provide clear guidance for students as to where they should be and what they should be doing at any given time. From this page, students accessed course information (syllabus, assignments), on-line readings and transcripts of MOO sessions, a Web Board for posting drafts and responses to readings, a submission page for turning papers, and the MOO itself.

My Winter 1998 Eng 101 Homepage.

Virtual Park Hall

VPH is housed on a UNIX server owned by the English department. It is based on the publically available High Wired enCore database from LinguaMOO. Students were encouraged to obtain a MOO Client such as Pueblo for connecting from their own computers. Facilities were also provided for connecting via the web using a java-based client, and by a standard telnet connection. (See GOTI's MOO Resource Page for connection information).

Each instructor built his or her own classroom suite and furnished it with objects. We got a lot of use out of three fairly simple objects:

• "slide projector": A means of preparing and presenting lecture-like material inside the MOO with provision for limited formatting effects.
• "lecture": Another way of presenting prepared material. Not as obtrusive as projector and does not allow formatting.
• "intercom and recording system": Allows communication between discussion rooms and main classroom. Creates transcripts of all activity in each room. (See a sample transcript from my Winter 1998 course.)

Some advanced rooms and objects I did not use, but which have since been added to VPH include:

• "classroom": A varient on the basic room object, provides easy means of shifting between large- and small-group discussions. Also includes features such as a clock and blackboard.
• "auditorium": Designed at LinguaMOO for panel discussions and presentations to large groups.
• "grammarbot": Andrew Burke used the generic "bot" object to create a conversational robot programmed to provide answers to frequent grammatical questions based on keyword prompts.

These and other MOO tools are discussed at length by Ken Schweller, "MOO Educational Tools."

Proceed to What We Learned