MOOs Vs. Face-to-Face Classes

MOOs will never take the place of the traditional face-to-face classroom interaction. No computer interaction ever could. But they do provide an enormous tool for expanding traditional teaching spaces. The pedagogical potential of educational MOOs are just beginning to be explored. What we do with these spaces is critical. As Tari Lin Fanderclai points out in "MUDs in Education: New Environments, New Pedagogies,"

....MUDs are places for self-directed learning, learning that blends work and play, that often looks chaotic but that is uniquely effective...Perhaps as MUDs become more accepted in education and we make better uses of their potential as learning environments, we'll even take a few of those lessons about empowering students and staying out of the way of their learning back to our real life classrooms. And that, it seems to me, might be the most important thing any of us could learn from educational MUDding.

Conclusion

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