MOO teaching, again

MOO teaching, again

Well, new thought….I talked a bit earlier this week about using *lists as blogs until we get edublog up and running. That will, of course, be better, because that would be usable inside and outside the MOO. And I see that salmon has some interesting ideas about how these inMOO blogs will look and function, though I’ve only heard a touch about that, and probably shouldn’t be blogging about that even if I *did* know all the details (wink wink), but I think I can safely say that with all these new ideas, we will end up something very educationally useful and very different from other blogging software….

But anyway, I’m still interested in the idea of *lists…at least in the short run. It’s because someone asked me when I first talked about blogging inMOO how it would be different from an *list…and in many ways it’s not different at all. The main difference is that it would be accessable outside the MOO as well, and that it’s html, which lets students add links and images and have more control over how their text is being presented… that it would have a GUI, but essentially, at its heart, it’s the same idea.

So: I’ve blogged about this before, I know….say we have a class coming through. When their characters are created, they are equipped with a *list. So, we have generic character, Emily. Emily has her character, her chunk of the server for uploading images and sounds and html docs, she has her chunk of MOO quota, and she has a *list, *Emily. Her teacher will subscribe to it. Possibly there’s also a *list for the class, say, *CTL2231 the *list for questions to all, like a bulletin board of sorts.

Then what’s the point of a personal *list? Hmmm….well, maybe not all classes require a personal *list. But I think generally there’s a place for the concept of journaling your experiences somewhere, particularly inMOO where it keeps some continuity…and, really, for a classroom setting, it would certainly help in assigning a grade to what’s going on…if people are journaling what they’re doing and why and how and how they feel about it. It could be set up like…once a session, send a message to your *list about what you accomplished today, what trouble you ran into, what frustrated you, what pleased you. What your goals are. Have your goals changed on the basis of today? Teachers could post questions that need to be answered. Teachers could…oooh….teachers could post questions on all the personal blogs in one fell swoop. I think the *list commands might need a bit of tweaking to keep the journal metaphor consistent, but that’s pretty minor. Just to have it not be mail so much, but…’your journal entry has been saved’ or something like that. It would also be cool if the *list were an object that the character carries, which it usually is. It could be a book icon, so there’s a sense of ‘writing in your journal’. I suppose the description of the *list would be something like, “To add an entry to your journal, type @send *Emily” or, I don’t know, to keep things consistent with the journal imagery, @write *Emily, or @blog *Emily, or @newentry *Emily. I don’t know. It hardly matters, that seems to be the most minor of details….

Just a thought.

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