Works Cited Page
The advantage of the MOO environment is that it allows the students to create whatever their imagination dictates. Rooms can represent institutions and physical aspects of the ideal world, which come into existence through linguistic description. In other words, once the students have "dug" the room (and given it an appropriate name, depending on the institution or system it represents), they can make it as concretely realized as their descriptive powers allow. The room descriptions become the "physical reality" of the MOO. Like the students who represented the Inferno on DU, these students once again become cyberauthors, engaging in the kinds of decisions that authors make in writing works of utopian literature. For example, they must decide what government structure to institute and how they will reveal that structure to their audience. They must determine what economic system their world will be based on, what the social and family structures will be, and how they will depict those for their readers/viewers. Other decisions include what kind of rituals will be part of the utopian culture, whether their world will have any particular religious beliefs or religious institutions, what kind of educational system they will institute, and so on. In answering those questions, the students determine for themselves what kind of utopian world they would like to create, and they base their decisions on their readings and other group presentations for the class. They are thus using the knowledge they gain from the class to produce a concrete, highly realized final project: a complete utopian world that others can visit. Their sense of the public nature of that project increases the students' level of motivation, just as the possibilities for creative expression increases their enjoyment of the work. As one student said while working on the project (instead of studying for some of her final exams): "This isn't work; this is fun."
Yet the project is work--work of a kind that reinforces the project's own goals. Authors of utopian literature attempt to imagine communities that function harmoniously. Inhabitants of those communities have to learn to work together to foster the greatest good for the largest number of their inhabitants. The success of the society is then determined by how well it satisfies the material, emotional, and spiritual needs of the greatest number of people who live there. Similarly, students in their small groups have to learn to work together to accomplish a collective goal: creating as detailed a utopian world as they can imagine and represent. They are given one collective grade for their project, so the "success" of their world depends upon the contributions of all the group members. They have to divide up the work among the various members of the group, adjudicating issues of fairness: for example, are all the members contributing equally to the project, and if not, how do they ensure sufficient effort by everyone involved? How will they resolve disputes among the group members that interfere with the harmonious functioning of the group? Will each group member have a specialty, or will all members contribute to the full structure of the project? These are all questions that utopian societies (and the authors who create them) need to address. The group members are working in a small community to create an ideal community, so that the nature of the project reinforces its subject matter.
This assignment was first given in Fall 1995, in an upper-division utopian literature course. The students worked in three groups: two with four members (one group all-male and another all-female), and one with two students (both female). Their worlds are all connected to the opening room, the Gateway to the Future. Of the three group projects, the most successful was "Ehrjogridia," whose opening room is called Pavillion. In that room are three characters, Menolly (a "Story-Telling Robot"), Samanthis, and Suriv (both "Generic Conversational Robots"--actually grc2's, the same kind used in the interactive Inferno projects). The student (ErinL) who created the room combined the features of the two kinds of robots, so that the word "hello" triggers the storytelling robot (Menolly), whose final word triggers one of the Generic Conversational Robots (Samanthis), who engages in a dialogue with the other Generic Conversational Robot (Suriv). Through this dialogue, we learn about one of the aspects of their society: a kind of self-exploration called a "Mesearch," in which those who break the society's rules or who aren't sure they want to live there can leave for a determined period of time to question themselves and their fitness for Ehrjogridia. The "Mesearch" becomes a kind of justice system, and the society allows only one such offense. As Samanthis explains, second offenders are permanently expelled from Ehrjogridia. To visit Pavillion and see the robots in action, you need to connect to the telnet interface. Once there, you type three commands (each followed by the Enter key):
Menolly will then explain to you how to begin the dialogue.
Pavillion is one of 13 total rooms for this project. You can see the full structure of the students' utopian world by looking at the Map of Ehrjogridia. The Overview of Ehrjogridia discusses their world's history, physical setting, community spirit, government, agricultural system, religious beliefs, ceremonies and rituals, family structure, educational system, and so on, giving you a sense of how fully realized this society is. This overview is the group's final essay, a collaborative piece that made up 15 percent of the students' overall grade.
One reason for the success of the group's project was the harmonious functioning of the group members. Ingrid describes how successfully they collaborated. Ehrin concurred. The other Erin--labelled the "computer guru" by Ingrid--agreed, commenting succinctly "It was fun!" As we can see by these comments, the advantage of such a "constructivist" or "constructionist" (Papert, Children's Machine, 139) project is that it teaches and depends upon crucial life skills. By completing such a project, students learn to work cooperatively with others, to organize their time, to resolve disagreements, to take responsibility for their work, and to communicate clearly with one another throughout the process. The final grade for the project depends as much or more on those relationship skills as it does on one's ability to program in the MOO environment. Such projects thus tend to foster some of the more humanistic goals of American higher education: to develop in students not only a love for learning, but also an ability to function well within a diverse group, working together as cooperative, responsible adults.
Leslie D. Harris
Susquehanna University