I thought the MOO was GREAT! That was probably the most entertaining thing I saw all week.
Of course...I also have the tendency to cackle maniacally when WoW has server downtime and thousands of gamers run around wreaking havoc on temp servers to sate their boredom. Maybe I just have a thing for chaos. Probably. It was most definitely liberating. I felt like the class went by super fast. I didn't experience the headache that quite a few complained of.
Of course, I've been practically living online since the age of 12, so I can understand that I'm probably not in the majority.
Oddly enough I can recall having much more organized and deep conversations with online friends in randomly thrown together chatrooms. We even did a sort of round robin story a few times. That was fun.
We wrote stories. Just because. About whatever we wanted and submitted them to eachother for comments.
Not everyone had the same level of skill, but nobody complained. Everyone contributed and had fun with it. I believe someone edited the format later on.
Our guildmaster (we all met in a game) posted the stories on our guild website along with interesting conversations...not all of which were mature and academic in nature. The longest round robin we ever produced was called Aspentopia... which was full of inside jokes and nerdtastic references...
But it was FUN. And! Of those 10 I know at least 4 plan on being English teachers.
2 are graphic artists. One joined the army. One is studying theatre/acting. And...I haven't talked to the others in about 5 years.
However, I think that THAT worked because we were all very used to sitting in front of the computer for hours and we all knew eachother really well. We were all about the same age with similar interests. We all enjoyed writing. And there weren't as many of us. Probably about 10.
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"living on the internet since I was 12" Haha, YES, great way to say it. I think I have too..I have my own little bed and pillow on xanga.com :-P
ReplyDeletethis was an interesting post! i haven't heard many positive responses to the moo that we did in class. I personally did not enjoy it, maybe because I don't have the internet background that you do! It sounds like you guys had a lot of fun doing this and I think it is possible to implement things like this is college classrooms as well.
ReplyDeletei have the internet background, and i was on AIM with my friends the second my parents got a computer when i was like 10 years old. however, i still hated the moo. maybe i would like it better if it was more structured, or at least had fewer people trying to participate at once
ReplyDeleteChaos theory. Sounds like Jurassic Park. I think people like organized chaos which is why people maybe disliked the MOO. Or maybe we simply gravitate toward that which we are familiar and comfortable with. Living online or in WoW would probably lead you to enjoying the MOO. Of course, that would mean that nothing is chaotic if we all just gravitate toward experience as a mediator. We are all determined by experiences at that point, and then Stephen Pinker's point about how even seperated identical twins still hold the same values leads us to genetic determinism. I wonder how much chaos really exists?
ReplyDeleteI wasn't here for the moo, but I heard that it was very entertaining, yet not very beneficial. After reading your thoughts on it, I see some points that I had not yet thought about.
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