learning how to act

. . . at the tuesday cafe

For people new to MOOing, the Netoric Cafe is a good place to learn how to act in this kind of environment and a good place to sharpen e-discourse skills. The other MOOers make excellent teachers and mentors--they're experienced and generally pretty forgiving. In fact, some of them have been using synchronous communications software of one kind or another for a long time, maybe since about 1991. A document that appears when you type read scholarly on MediaMOO gives a little bit of the history of these scholars and writing teachers.

MediaMOO sets out the most of the policies that govern behavior in the document that comes up if you type "help manners."

MediaMOO is a good place for English teachers, teachers of rhetoric and writing, literate, professional scholars, to learn more about electronic discourse and about MOOing, and the Tuesday Cafe is an excellent place for people to learn more about using computers in the classroom and CMC. The Tuesday Cafe, however, is not a good place to bring undergraduate students who are just beginning to learn about the Internet and who don't have research projects ongoing. For one thing, MediaMOO itself prohibits that kind of public use.

It takes real literacy to get good at electronic discourse, whether it's e-mail, webwriting and -reading, or MOOing. Until they are literate, some people might find that some of the special qualities of a busy Tuesday Cafe--like the speed, playfulness, and multi-threadedness of the discourse--can be frustrating.

Introduction to the Tuesday Cafe.
What is the Tuesday Cafe?
What are some of the benefits offered by this kind of community?
What are some of the disadvantages of MOO discussions?
How do people get to the Cafe?
Works Cited

Last updated: 10 June 1996. Questions and comments? Please e-mail Sharon Cogdill at scogdill@tigger.stcloud.msus.edu.