The Gromboolia Project: A MOO-based, Hypertextual Literature Classroom

Introduction

This project explores the potential of MOO (Multi-user domain, Object-Oriented _1_) as a platform for creating hypertextual online learning spaces. Specifically, it involves the creation of a large suite of MOO objects for the study and teaching of the "nonsense songs" of the British Victorian poet Edward Lear followed by classroom testing of the space with students. I hope to demonstrate the value of MOO as a tool for teaching literature and to provide a working model for the development of similar spaces for studying other topics. More broadly, I hope to weave together strands from the still largely separate realms of hypertext theory and computer pedagogy, showing how the insights of one can enrich and expand the other.

Rationale

The use of MOOs as general educational tools is nothing new. At sites like LinguaMOO [11], Diversity University [6], and many others, instructors in a variety of disciplines use MOO to facilitate discussion, provide distance learning, explore identity issues, and promote collaboration. MOO is particularly attractive in language and writing instruction since it is an environment literally constructed out of language [4, 7]. However, these uses emphasize the interaction that takes place within MOO-space with little regard for the nature of the space itself._2_ I would like to refocus attention on the underlying hypertextuality of MOOs. The typical spatial metaphor of "rooms" connected by "exits" is an almost exact analogue of hypertextual nodes and links, a fact that becomes self-evident in web-based MOOs where rooms appear as web pages and exits as links._3_ From its earliest postulations in Vannevar Bush's Memex [3] through George Landow's Intermedia [9] and beyond, hypertext has been presented as a means, perhaps the ideal means, of exploring intertextual and contextual relationships among literary texts. MOO, I argue, offers a platform that can provide the same complex networks of interrelationships within a synchronous, collaborative environment. 

Project Description

The project takes its name from Gromboolia, the collective name assigned to the imaginary settings of Lear's poems. Gromboolia is less a fully conceived alternate universe than a loose collection of place names and descriptions that recur among the poems, but it suggests connections, both obvious and subtle, between his works. MOO seems ideally suited for representing a pseudospace such as Gromboolia and the textual relationships which define it.

The first stage of this project is underway, as I have begun construction of the central spaces and infrastructure on CowTown MOO, an enCore-based MOO hosted by the Ohio State University. As currently planned, the suite will contain about eight rooms based on the places of Lear's Gromboolia, as well as rooms that will house the texts and illustrations of at least eight of Lear's poems. These latter poem-rooms make use of the generic web page object, a special form of room that allows the use of HTML markup to provide greater control and flexibility in formatting room descriptions. Using the web page object and cascading stylesheets (CSS), the typographic features of the standard edition of Lear's work [10] can be accurately reproduced.

The infrastructure of links between both types of rooms reflects the relationships among poems and places. Some of these relationships are fairly explicit (e.g., Lear's poem "The Dong with a Luminous Nose" is a retelling -- from a different viewpoint -- of his earlier poem "The Jumblies"), but I am especially interested in also representing implicit or provisional links between the objects (e.g., the connection between two differently-named places that serve similar functions within the poems). By creating variants of the standard exit object (a relatively simple task in MOO), I will be able to create visually distinct link types to express these different relationships.

Future additions to the MOO environment will include textual, contextual, and interpretive notes (which could take the form of separate spaces, of note objects placed in the room upon which they comment, or of more exotic interactive objects). Since one of the specific virtues of MOO is collaborative construction, I plan to leave some of the furnishing of Gromboolia to groups of students, whom I will bring to Gromboolia beginning later this spring. Gathering data about student interaction with and enhancement of the MOO space, and refining the space in response to that data will constitute the second phase of the project.

Expected Contributions

The final result of this project will be a working MOO-based, hypertextual literature classroom, one that provides an engaging environment for learning about a particular literary topic and that provides models for the development of similar spaces for other topics. Besides the creation of the Gromboolia environment itself, I see this project as bridging the current gap between hypertext theory and computer pedagogy, potentially broadening the scope of both fields. To hypertext theory, it will bring the idea of hypertext as a shared space and of hypertext reading as a potentially social, rather than purely solitary, activity._4_ To the discourse on online learning environments, it will provide a MOO classroom where the subject of instruction is the teaching environment, where the structure of the knowledge to be learned or the topic to be explored shapes the space of instruction itself. In so doing, I hope to begin to reveal the unrealized potential of MOO noted by Espen Aarseth when he states that they "are not the poor relatives of more artistic textual media but contain a potential for textual complexity and diversity that is far from mastered, or even conjectured, at the present time" [1].