MUDs

Link it up: MUDs as an educational tool.

Howard Rheingold has once again introduced us to a new concept, MUDs. MUDs are known as multi-user domains or multi-user dungeons. These MUDs can either be text based, as the MUD we experimented with in class or can be three dimensional, such as our look at Second Life. Second Life can also be looked at as a MOO since it is object-oriented. Basically what MUDs are is a place where people can use simple commands to build these virtual worlds, solve puzzles, entertain one another, gain wisdom, seek revenge, and in some strange cases, even have sex. Many of these MUDs were created as “living laboratories” used for studying how virtual communities affect our everyday lives and psyches. This blog post really is more about what MUDs are and how they are used, both for good and bad. My example that I will present in the following gives us a look into how MUDs are used as an educational tool.

MUDs allow you to create what is an avatar, which is basically your identity, and then use this avatar to explore, build, emote, and interact with other avatars in the MUD. As mentioned, MUDs can be used as a laboratory for exploring the first-level impacts of virtual communities. MUDs are also not the only type of virtual community on the internet. Obviously we have communities such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. It just goes to show how the Internet can facilitate all of these communities and teach us so much about the use of virtual worlds and communities. In these MUDs people can basically do whatever they want to and let the story play out the way in which they want. As shown in class, the professor has her avatar in Second Life and actually carries out virtual meetings in her home that she created in Second Life. While to some it might be just a game, to others, it can be used as an important too to help educate ourselves on these worlds. A MUD can also be considered a learning community where everyone teaches everyone else. This is because once you enter a new MUD everyone greets you and helps you on your journey to learn about MUDs and become part of this new virtual community. As mentioned multiple times already, these MUDs can be used as an educational tool as shown in the example I have shown below (links can be found at the beginning of the post and in the example itself).

The article is all about how a group of writing professors that were using MediaMOO came together to start using these virtual communities for their composition classes. These professors saw how these MUDs could help bring together the classroom and allow the professors and students to interact in a different way. They knew these MUDs could help students get into contact with people from all sorts of cultures outside their own. As the article states, “they would get immediate responses to their ideas and to the text objects they created, experiencing dynamically the effects their words have on others.” The article states that one of the most important features of using MUDs is that it takes away the hierarchy that can be found in most classrooms. Without this hierarchy students are able expresses themselves more freely and have a feeling their ideas and comments really matter. The article then goes on to discuss how these MUDs are sometimes being built exactly how a campus would be built. All of the buildings and area between, not allowing certain access to certain building and lectures, etc. Professors are being able to lock out students and silent everyone while they give a lecture, etc, all things which these professors (the ones with the composition classes) see is not facilitating the use of MUDs as an affective educational tool. The way these composition classes are using MUDs as an educational tool is exactly what Rheingold discusses in his article. Everyone is teaching everyone else.