A multi-user dungeon (domain), object oriented (MOO) interface stares back from my browser with READMEs and Intro button eyes. A few weeks into my Second Life, and real life (“RL”, to an avatar) is moving at the speed of light. I received my demonstration Moodle account (with accompanying class to create) only last night; yet, the need to test drive that interface has been nudged right off the list, maybe tomorrow I’ll Moodle.

Connected.

I am connected to people with an efficiency and productivity that is astounding. Case in point: That last sentence was punctuated by the appearance of w0nk0, the educator in Australia who invited mooved me into this MOO environment as a SysAdmin. Ten minutes later, and I have already traveled through three or four rooms in the sim, learned a bit about interacting, and now “see” a haggard cabinboy as water lasps lazily and an Albatross calls from above. w0nk0 logged in, saw that was idle in his virtual reality, and offered instruction.

Nice.

w0nk0 explains that “a MOO requires you to use imagination a little more” [than a 3D sim], and offers this excerpt:

It is substantially easier for players to give themselves vivid, detailed, and interesting descriptions… in a text-based system than in a graphics based one. In McLuhan’s terminology, this is because MUDs are a ‘cold’ medium, while more graphically-based media are ‘hot’; that is, the sensorial parsimony of plain text tends to entice users into engaging their imaginations to fill in missing details while, comparatively speaking, the richness of stimuli in fancy virtual realities has an opposite tendency, pushing users’ imaginations into a more passive role. I also find it difficult to believe that a graphics-based system will be able to compete with text for average users on the metric of believable detail per unit of effort expended; this is certainly the case now and I see little reason to believe it will change in the near future.

Pavel Curtis, Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities
(Submission to the 1992 conference on Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing, 1992)

“Believable detail per unit of effort expended”. Interesting, indeed.

But I digress (at light speed, these days)…One educator has formed a group of educators and educational gaming professionals withing the SL community, called Gaming and Learning. He also had the foresight to create a companion Google Group, “Gaming and Learning in Second Life” (GaLiSL), as a hub for communicating within the group “out of world” (in RL). Seeing the potential for edge-seekers in education [Azwaldo Villota avoids temptation to juggle a cute play on words], I test the water with a few comments, edit a Page, and even open a free wiki.
The number, even the variety of experiences (and, more importantly to me, the number of ideas now percolating in me wee brain), have me wondering…

What have I brought to the dance?