Moos - one way we are inventing ourselves

Lingua MOO

Lingua MOO was created in 1995 by Cynthia Haynes (UT-Dallas) and Jan Rune Holmevik (University of Bergen, Norway) to serve primarily the University of Texas at Dallas Rhetoric and Writing program and their School of Arts & Humanities and the University of Bergen's Department of Humanistic Informatics. Lingua MOO functions as both a learning environment for our students and a broader community for research and collaboration on projects situated at the intersection of Arts & Humanities and electronic media. Since 1995 Lingua MOO has also become home to an international network of researchers in these areas. We have classes and professional academic organiztions meeting at Lingua MOO from such countries as Norway, Germany, Korea, Australia, South Africa, Denmark, and England, just to name a few. Users may log in as guests or may apply for an account, which allows you to create your own virtual room(s) and use the educational tools available or create your own. Applications for accounts at Lingua MOO will be considered on the basis of mutual interest in our mission. Reasons for application should be explicit regarding the use of Lingua MOO in your research, teaching, and learning. Using a MOO is easy, and you can communicate in real-time with others or explore the environment by yourself. Login to Lingua MOO and try it out!

The Common Place MOO: Orality and Literacy in Virtual Reality by Don Langham

A year ago at the first World Wide Web conference in Geneva (WWW94), Malcolm McAfee and Ken Eustace presented papers at the Teaching and Learning on the WEB workshop. The authors now examine their research development over this time period. The content of this paper reflects upon a year of association with Paideia and Charles Sturt University (CSU), and our experience with the 'state of the art'. A qualitative extrapolation about the future implications for education with an immediate path and an incremental path to follow is discussed. Educators follow both paths all the time, each path contributing to the other. The empirical discoveries we have made over the 12-month association, raise some current research questions. AussieMOO was our meeting place, where this paper was created using the communication style of the written conversation.

Learning Communities

Envisioning a world without schools/Creating a world of learning communities/Mission Statement

"The Coaltion for Self-Learning is a collective of autonomous individuals and groups each working independently but in mutual aid to help one another promote ideas and actions for creating learning communities and their relevance to social change. It's goals and purposes are to envision a world without schools -- a world of cooperative community life-long learning centers as a significant element in the emerging cooperative commonwealth where individuals are honoured and celebrated and where they find a safe place to be, to belong, to learn, and to go on developing in a meaningful way - for them, and for their whole family/community/society."

Constructing Maps for the new promised land: Learning, Community, and the Internet by Barbara Duncan and Kevin M. Leander

The Internet is perhaps the fastest growing, most frequently traversed, and least understood macro sociocultural context of education. Currently there is a great deal of enthusiasm for the use of the Internet in creating learning communities. How are we to understand these communities, participation within them, and their potentials for learning?

From Big Brother to Electronic Panopticon by David Lyon

This is the text of Chapter Four of David Lyon's The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994): 57-80. It isused here with the permission of the author and the publisher.