This project explores the potential of explores MOO 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. The final result of this project will be a working MOO-based, hypertextual literature classroom, which provides an engaging environment for learning about a particular literary topic and models the development of similar spaces for other topics. Besides creating the Gromboolia environment itself, this project bridges the current gap between hypertext theory and computer pedagogy. To hypertext theory, it brings the idea of hypertext as a shared space and of hypertext reading as a potentially social, rather than purely solitary, activity. To the discourse on online learning environments, it will provide a resource where the subject of instruction is the teaching environment, where the structure of the knowledge to be learned shapes the space of instruction itself. In so doing, I argue that MOO is not an aging and outmoded technology, but rather an educational tool of still-unrealized potential.
If you'd like to know more about this project, please feel free to read:
I also presented a report on this project at Digital Resources in the Humanities 2001 in Edinburgh. (View the presentation.)