"The text is less a narrative than an object to be entered, less narrated than constructed." (Jennifer Bloomer, describing Finnegan's Wake in Architecture and the Text 14)

I stare into the fuzzy gray screen. The pixels quiver almost imperceptively, in and out of phase with the hum of the computer. I make my first step into a MOO room that I have just created. I hesitate before the blank screen of the MOO client as I do the blank page. But whereas I would fill up page after page with words in hand-writing, the MOO interface invokes restraint.

As a MOO writer, I deal in potentials. I have only to type in a few words, a few lines of command, to evoke a place, a mood, a personality. I initiate a writerly text: This writing can never stand on its own; it requires readers (MOO players) to interact with it, to add to it.

The success of a MOO space is not so much verisimilitude or efficient transfer of information, but the ability to spark "events" through the evocation of a particular mood or ambience.

I want to use MOO writing as my analogy for teaching. I would like to move away from the paradigm of the passing down of narrative/knowledge from teacher to student to the creation of an intellectual and imaginary space which will allow/force students to take part in the creation of the narrative/knowledge.