Since its inception, Lingua MOO has become an active center of teaching, research, and meetings. We feel that the learning environment is enhanced by academic activities at all levels. For example, in the summer of 1995, Lingua MOO hosted the first online dissertation defense. Jan programmed a special Auditorium for the defense, complete with moderated discussion in panel format, headsets for the audience, programs sitting on their virtual seats, and visual maps to help orient the attendees.

In addition, Lingua MOO is the hostsite of several regular events. In early 1996, prior to the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Milwaukee, Lingua MOO began holding a series of colloquia on the topic of conference presentation formats and their relation to the fifth canon of rhetoric, "delivery." The meetings are open to anyone and are faciliated by volunteers (graduate students, faculty, writing center directors, and some non-academics). All meetings are recorded and transcripts archived in the C-FEST Forum located in the COLLABORATORY and from the Lingua MOO Archive and Resource page off our homepage. One outgrowth of the C-FEST is a year-long project called "The Audience Delivers Hypertext," which will consist of a hypertext compiled by Matthew Levy of UT-Arlington wherein C-FEST participants post brief position statements about formats and delivery. Instructions for how to join the ADH project and the C-FEST listserv are located in the C-FEST Forum at Lingua. The culmination of this project will be "performed" during a C-FEST Special Interest Group (SIG) at the 1997 CCCC in Phoenix (pending acceptance of the proposal).

At the end of the 1996 spring semester at UT-Dallas, in conjunction with the university's Spring Arts Festival, Lingua MOO hosted a week-long series of poetry and short fiction readings called LinguaFEST. Published poets from Dallas, Michigan, Austin, and Pennsylvania participated in the readings, and students and faculty from UT-Dallas read poems during one evening. Each reading was conducted in the Auditorium and followed by a reception and discussion period. Of course, all readings were recorded and archived. The Poetry Room holds a collection of poems, feel free to read them here. Future events like LinguaFEST are being planned for the new Writer's Garret complex of rooms (to include the Poetry Room and several writer workshop rooms, a Cafe, and other related rooms of interest to writers).

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