College "MOOs" Foster Creativity and Collaboration Among Users

By Lisa Guernsey

Kenneth G. Schweller, a professor at Buena Vista University, reaches his students everywhere these days. He talks with them by the drink machine in the student union and laughs with them while relaxing on the south quad. He even joined them at midnight in a deserted warehouse near the campus for what he calls "a real bull session" on the meaning of life.

Mr. Schweller may seem to be everywhere at once -- but he has a trick: All of those interactions took place in cyberspace.

The student union, the south quad, and the warehouse do not exist. They are virtual spaces created by Mr. Schweller and others on an Internet site called CollegeTown.

The site is a Multiple-user Object-Oriented environment, or MOO, which allows simultaneous users to communicate with each other. Students, professors, and librarians from all over the world enter CollegeTown using the telnet function. They receive notices on their computer screens indicating which rooms they have entered and who else is present in them. They may "talk" with other people who have connected to CollegeTown by typing greetings that appear immediately on the users' screens.

When people connect to CollegeTown, they step into a space called the Forum, which is similar to a student union. They are told that offices, lounges, and studios surround them. There are stairs to the east and, to the south, an underground walkway to a nearby town. Users travel through dozens of virtual spaces by typing, for example, "south," "west," "down," or "up."

Those who visited the "poetry room" on a recent Tuesday walked into a poetry reading, attended by nearly two dozen students. Virtual flames flickered in the virtual fireplace as the participants, most of whom were in Mr. Schweller's "Exploring CyberSpace" class, sipped espresso and read poems by Robert Frost, lyrics from songs by Bush (an alternative rock band), and original works by some of the students.

CollegeTown visitors also have access to the MOO's virtual library, containing Moby-Dick, the works of Shakespeare, and other electronic texts. Or they may enter the "television studio," which contains recordings of interviews and performances that have taken place in CollegeTown.

Buena Vista students make up the majority of CollegeTown regulars, but they are not the only ones. Isabel L. Danforth, for example, a librarian from Wethersfield, Conn., often visits CollegeTown to help students and to talk with Mr. Schweller. Students from Portugal and England have visited in recent weeks.

The ability to bring together people who are miles apart is one of the most appealing aspects of MOOs, say many users. Last semester, Mr. Schweller collaborated with professors at other colleges and required his students to complete projects with peers outside Buena Vista.

"Most of our students are from the Midwest," he says, "but on CollegeTown they interact regularly with folks from around the world, folks with many different cultures, politics, and opinions. Students tell me this is the most enjoyable aspect of on-line collaboration."

Other MOOs are available -- such as Diversity University, which is equipped with resources for users who are blind or deaf -- but many are used only as game-playing spaces, in which people adopt personalities and socialize. People often find MOOs by using Yahoo's World-Wide Web directory, which links them to Web pages that provide telnet connections to the MOOs. CollegeTown's Web address is http://www.bvu.edu:7000/, and telnet users can connect to patty.bvu.edu 7777.

Mr. Schweller created CollegeTown in 1994 to bring more of an academic flavor to the MOO environment. As a professor of computer science and psychology, he has published several papers on how computers and students can interact more effectively. In his "Exploring Cyberspace" course, which was held daily during January, he had his students perform skits and other projects in CollegeTown to introduce them to new technologies. They received three credits for the class.

"Students today will spend a good part of their life in cyberspace, as universal access to the Internet becomes an affordable reality," he says. "I wanted to give my students a taste of the world they will be inhabiting in the next millennium."

He acknowledges that MOOs are still primitive models of networked communication. Users -- students and professors alike -- say communicating in a MOO can be disorienting at first. Conversations overlap, especially when more than three people try to talk in one room.

"From my standpoint, there are lots of disadvantages," says Laura L. Inglis, a psychology professor at Buena Vista. "It's sometimes hard to connect the various lines of conversation."

Interactions in a MOO also may slide into rowdiness, as users experiment with the new technology. At the end of the recent poetry reading, for example, several students jumped into the fireplace.

But Ms. Inglis credits Mr. Schweller with making CollegeTown a true learning environment. "He makes it fun yet keeps it from slipping off into mere games."

Mr. Schweller helped her create a virtual office, which she calls Stonehenge, in CollegeTown. She sometimes visits with students there and has required her students to visit CollegeTown as part of a class quiz. "I got some resistance from the students who aren't 'techies,' but at least they all did try it," she says.

Many users say communicating in a MOO does not require much technical expertise, but they acknowledge that it can be difficult to create virtual objects and spaces that allow users to be as creative as possible.

Doughnuts, guest books, and even "android" librarians are some of the objects that can be found in CollegeTown's rooms. Adept MOO users program the objects so they can be "used," like the espresso machine in the poetry room. When users type "drink espresso," they find themselves pouring a steaming-hot cup.

"It is almost as if we were magicians in a magic land," says Nuno Almeida, a student at the University of Minho in Portugal, who often visits CollegeTown.

Mr. Schweller hopes that other professors will become excited about the creative and collaborative qualities of CollegeTown. He has created several rooms, such as the History Hall and the Psychology Building, that are ready for new inhabitants and any objects they may want to create.

He has also met with several educators who are already using MOOs to enhance their classrooms. They gathered in a virtual space called the "collaboration center," a bright room with a view of CollegeTown's virtual shoreline. Visitors to the center who type, "look blackboard," can read some of the notes from the meeting.

"Naturally, I believe that face-to-face interaction is almost always preferable to on-line interaction," Mr. Schweller says. "If you can all meet in a real-life classroom, you should do that. But in the classrooms of the future, in the workplaces of the future, our colleagues and classmates may be globally dispersed."

If people can find a way, through MOOs, to overcome that distance, he tells his students, "we can create a community in every important sense of the word."

Some Buildings in CollegeTown

The Forum: A large hall with a granite floor and a high ceiling. A coffee lounge, television studio, radio station, and several offices surround the space. This is where CollegeTown visitors appear as soon as they connect to the MOO.

The Ivory Tower: Accessible by a spiral staircase from the Balcony of Thought in the Hypatia Hall of Philosophy. A place to "discover truth." Users are told: "Reflect carefully as you enter!"

The Library: A large room with two bookshelves, a card catalogue, and an "android" librarian named Libby. The book depository, video room, and archives are accessible from this room. About 50 electronic documents, such as the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare, can be viewed here.

The Poetry Room: An oak-paneled drawing room with a fireplace in the corner. A candle, an espresso machine, and a "box of yummy, scrumptious donuts begging to be eaten" stand in the center of the room. Visitors will notice that as soon as they enter, "the room is filled with an expectant hush."

The South Quad: A grassy quadrangle surrounded by ivy-covered buildings. Several buildings, including the Hypatia Hall of Philosophy, surround the quad, which also contains a billboard and a water fountain. A nature trail and Main Street lead to a nearby town.

The Warehouse: A rickety old warehouse that is dark and musty. Visitors "sense the scurrying of small paws off in a corner." Visitors here can also browse lists of objects and rooms that have already been created.