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LinguaNEWS:Kairos Forms Affiliation
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LinguaNEWS:Kairos Forms Affiliation
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A formal electronic partnership between Kairos: A Journal For Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments and LinguaMOO will commence with the publication of this issue of the journal.
Lingua MOO was originally created to serve the Rhetoric and Writing program and the School of Arts & Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. It serves as both a learning environment for our students and a broader community for research and collaboration on projects situated at the intersection of Arts & Humanities and electronic media. Lingua MOO is also home to an international network of researchers in these areas and supports links with other educational MOOs and the GNA-Net (Globewide Network Academy).
The two electronic entities have a history of collaboration and cross-pollination. LinguaMOO founders Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik are members of the Kairos Editorial Board, while Kairos Editor Mick Doherty and Editorial Board member Joel English have been honored as " Linguarian of the Month" earlier in 1997.
The partnership is meant to enhance text-sharing and public relations abilities of both electronic spaces. LinguaMOO will be the exclusive home to all official Kairos-related MOO sessions, including the forthcoming "Meet the Authors" series, which will run similarly to the previous "C-Fest" meetings held over the last two years. Kairos Response Editor Jennifer Bowie, with the help of Haynes and Holmevik will build the official Kairos MOOspace.
In return, Kairos will forefront LinguaMOO news and updates in its News section each issue, also including Lingua news releases—such as those below—in the journal's "pages." Regular Lingua features, such as "The Beginner's Guide to MOOing," will be reviewed and publicized in future issues of Kairos.
In addition to forming an opportunity to attract each others' audiences via collaborative press releases and initiatives, Kairos will offer any accredited LinguaMOO character to submit a logged session of a class, meeting, or e-conference for possible publication in the journal.
This may begin addressing—or at least raise hard questions about—some of the long-standing issues about whether or not one can consider a MOO a "publication" for the purposes of including it on one's vitae. This very subject was a main thread in the 1997 LinguaMOO C-Fest series.
According to Doherty, "There was talk that we might try to build our own, separate, KairosMOO. But when you look at what's already available at Lingua, and the quality of people running that MOO, it's just so far beyond what we could do ourselves. This was an obvious partnership." Doherty added, "Besides, it seems to me that the very nature of the web, and of hypertext theory and application, at least implies shared resourcing rather than duplicating resources. This affiliation reflects what Kairos is all about."
The Lingua duo share Doherty's sentiments; according to Holmevik, "We think this is a natural affiliation, and one that represents the spirit of Kairos and LinguaMOO--people coming together to share knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm." Haynes added, "It is a hallmark of the Internet where we both make our respective academic 'homes.' And it doesn't hurt that at Lingua MOO we can kick back with Kairos readers and staff, just like at home on our respective screens."
High Wired is a collection of essays designed to integrate all aspects of the use and administration of the virtual educational communities known as MOOs (Multiple-user, Object-Oriented environments). MOOs were originally designed as a space for online social interaction.
While MOOs bear a resemblance to the "chat rooms" with which many people are familiar, they differ in several important respects: participants can not only communicate in actual time from great distances, but they can also add to this virtual world by building new rooms and other objects, and writing programs that alter their particular MOO universe in profound ways. LambdaMOO, developed in 1990 by Pavel Curtis at the Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, quickly became a popular hangout on the Internet, and has run continuously since then, with thousands of players from around the world.
Today, MOOs are increasingly recognized for their value as an educational tool. In MOOs teachers and students can meet on line at scheduled times and exchange ideas, even calling up online reference materials as they participate in discussions. Educators are currently exploring the potential of this technology for such applications as online writing centers, electronic classrooms, netbased collaborative environments, and even complete cyberspace campuses.
Teachers, students, and researchers who have long awaited a comprehensive treatment of this powerful technology will welcome the publication of High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs. Editors Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik have brought together a diverse group of experts whose contributions help answer questions and dispel myths surrounding MOOs and their use in education.
Contributors include John Barber, Jorge R. Barrios, Mark Blanchard, Amy Bruckman, Juli Burk, Brian Clements, Eric Crump, Pavel Curtis, Diane Davis, Jeffrey Galin, Dene Grigar, Cynthia Haynes, Jan Rune Holmevik, Michael Joyce, Beth Kolko, Ken Schweller, Sherry Turkle, Victor J. Vitanza, Shawn P. Wilbur, and Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs.
High Wired's essays are arranged in a practical sequence, beginning with the context and history of MOOs, followed by more technical essays on how to set up and administer a MOO. Subsequent essays discuss applications for the use of MOOs in education, and provide theoretical explorations of the nature of MOO communities. High Wired is at once a textbook, a reference book, and a handbook. Teachers, students, and other interested readers will find that it appeals to both practical needs and theoretical concerns.
The book will be available in December of 1997. Interested readers can order the book through the UM Press website.
October 26, 1997: The High Wired Project and Lingua MOO are proud to announce the BETA release of the first publicly available educational MOO Core Database, enCore. This is a constructivist virtual reality environment designed for educational use. It is based on the Feb 02 1997 version of the original LambdaCore Database, and supplemented with a number of useful educational tools, such as
Generic Recording and Intercom System, Generic Moderated Room,Generic Classroom, Generic Bot, Generic Slide Projector, Generic Video Camera, Generic VCR, Generic TV, Generic Video Tape, Ken's MOO Programming Tutorial, Generic Recitable Note, Generic Lecture, Generic Web Page Generic Web Projector, Generic Recorder and Player, and Generic Note Board.
The enCore also comes with a built-in web-interface, support for MacMOOSE, in addition to numerous other features and enhancements. See the enCore changelog for details.
The enCore will be complemented by the book High Wired: On the Design Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs forthcoming from University of Michigan Press in December 1997. In this book you will find more in-depth information about the use and administration of MOOs as well as specific information on the use of MOOs in education and more.
Before you download this software, please make sure you have read and understood the terms of the GNU General Public License under which it is distributed.
Download Site 1 (US): ftp://ftp.utdallas.edu/pub/ah/moo/
Download Site 2 (Norway): ftp://cmc.uib.no/pub/encore/
If you are setting up an enCore-based educational MOO, don't forget to subscribe to the enCore mailing list for announcements of updates to the enCore database.
To ensure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to attend, the one-hour meetings are scheduled for 12:00 noon Eastern US time, which is 6:00 P.M. Central European time.
LinguaMOO founder Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik hope the enCore Wiz meetings will be a forum where new MOO administrators can come together and discuss common problems, and they specifically want to encourage more experienced MOO administrators to attend and share their MOO expertise with others.
The programs on this site are distributed under the GNU General Public License. Before you download programs from this site, be sure you have read and understood the terms under which they are distributed.
Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments.