Summer 2000
Peg Syverson is Associate Professor in the Division of Rhetoric and Composition at The University of Texas at Austin. She is widely known as the creator of The Online Learning Record, a large-scale project that documents students' development and achievement using diverse forms of evidence of student learning. The Online Learning Record was adapted for college-level courses with permission from the Learning Record, developed for K-12 by the Center for Language in Learning. It has been funded by the Carnegie Foundation, DARPA, and UT . She is currently working on a web-to-database application of the Learning Record. This new application will support the use of the Learning Record on the web and also develop a national archive that can be used for research on learning in college level courses. Peg's OLR has been perhaps the only formalized method of evaluating student activity and production in educational MOOs, so we are especially happy to honor her work and presence at Lingua MOO!
Another of her projects is Worlds Fair, a large collaborative project which engages visitors in a web-based science fiction story that incorporates multimedia exhibits for an intergalactic "worlds fair" that features exhibits from many galaxies. Contributions may include non-fiction exhibits about some aspect of life on earth, or science fiction exhibits from remote galaxies. Recently, Worlds Fair received an Innovations in Instructional Technology Award from UT.
Peg is also one of the editors for the online component of the Computers and Composition Journal, the international journal for teachers of writing in computer-enhanced environments.
Spring 2000
Heidi Solheim is a long time computer-illiterate that was digitally reborn September 13th, 1999, and has been impossible to keep out of MOOspace ever since. She's currently a student of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, Norway, working on her MOOrathon project--a 24-hour long online academic discussion about MOOs, how they're used and what's going on there. The project proposal can be viewed at http://www.student.uib.no/~st02427//MOO.htm. Her ongoing quest in Lingua is to lure people out of idleness and turn guests into hardcore Linguarians, in other words, making the community more alive. (Another one would be trying to find someone who would pay her huge phonebills^&Mac197;) Sometimes when she tries to deny her textual addiction, she runs off to play trombone with her band in the world referred to as "real." The Skankster-site can be found at http://www.checkpoint.no/skanksters [Editorial note: and it's a great band!]
Winter 2000
Jill Walker works at the University of Bergen in Norway. She is currently researching her PhD, which will be built around literary and rhetorical analyses of hypertexts and MOOs. Jill first read about MUDs sometime in the mid-eighties, and was greatly disappointed when her dad forbade her using his modem to run up intercontinental phone bills to explore these new worlds. A decade later, university internet connections solved the phone bill problem, and since first logging on to LinguaMOO at a party in 1998, Jill's been in love with MOOs.
Since then, Jill's spent a year working with the lingo.uib project, constructing a MOO environment based on Shakespeare's A MIdsummer Night's Dream. Her other passion is hypertext, and she's combined the two not only in her PhD topic but also in organising online conferences like the CyberMountain MOO meeting in June 1999. (Log on to cmcMOO and '@go conference' to relive that event.) More recently, Jill's been involved in the Electronic Literature Organisations new bi-weekly chat sessions at LinguaMOO ('@go eliterature')
October 1999
James Enelow, a.k.a. Jitters, is a Ph. D. student at The University of Texas at Dallas and the former Assistant Editor of the Devils Millhopper Press. He was a freelance journalist until he discovered poetry and is now an aspiring poet who has been published in such journals as The New Review, The Review, and Cotton Row Anthology. He recently finished his M.F.A. in Poetry and M.A. in Literature from McNeese State University under the instruction of Dr. John Wood and Dr. Robert Olen Butler and was also a third place winner of the Joy Scantillbury Prize for poetry. He utilizes LinguaMoo at least once a week in class and is currently at work on a collection of poems titled Reaching for Babylon. His creativity is evidenced by his newly created rooms at Lingua MOO, Jittter's Poetry Pad and the Hall of Poets.
September 1999
Jane Love teaches in the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida, where she developed and taught a graduate seminar in electropedagogy for teaching assistants in the Networked Writing Environment. Captivated by MOO nearly five years ago, she initially focused on its uses in teaching introductory writing and literature classes and wrote about these experiences in a CoverWeb article for Kairos I.3 and in a chapter, "Ethics, Plugged and Unplugged: The Pedagogy of Disorderly Conduct," for the forthcoming volume Taking Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work (eds. James Inman and Donna Sewell, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Recently, however, her interests have focused on the theoretical implications of MOO as a literary form. Jane's current research project, "MOOscream," based in LinguaMOO and using the Encore Xpress client, explores the textual effects and theoretical implications of integrating sound into MOO spaces and objects. "MOOscream" will be featured in an upcoming special issue of Pre/Text :Electra(Lite) on MOO and audio.
Summer 1999
Juli Burk is the creator of ATHEMOO, newly upgraded to the High Wired enCore system! She is also an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Hawaii where she specializes in Feminist Theories and Directing. She has published two essays about MOO and theatre, "The Play's the Thing: Theatricality and the MOO Environment" in High Wired and "ATHEMOO and the "Future Present: Shaping Cyberspace into a Theatre Working Place," due out in June 1999 in the anthology Theatre in Cyberspace: Issues of Teaching, Acting, and Directing (book website is at: http://www.mindspeak.com/schrum/TICS/TICS.html). Recent productions on the proximal stage include Anne-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations, as well as the world premieres of Velina Hasu Houston's Cultivated Lives and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl's The Story of Susanna.
ATHEMOO is a professional environment developed for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education in June 1995. Currently populated by over 400 members, we have experimented extensively with the new venue of the MOO stage and have produced ten theatrical events in the last four years. Several members also hold classes there and the Sunday Seminar Series has featured presentations by LinguaMOO's Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik, StudioZ's Dan Zellner, and many others. Come and visit ATHEMOO: http://moo.hawaii.edu:7000!
In October 1999 Juli is directing Twyla Mitchell's Mirrors, a production designed for and supported by the enCore Xpress interface and plans are also underway for a MOO production of Faust by Steve Schrum. ATHEMOO also houses the MetaMOOphosis project by Rick Sacks, an around the clock improvisational MOO environment based on Kafka's novella. The Kafka House includes rooms, costumes, and scripts and has been extensively updated in recent months.
May, 1999
Espen Aarseth is Associate Professor of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, and the author of numerous essays on hypertext aesthetics, online culture, and computer games; and the recently-published book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Johns Hopkins, 1997). He directs the CALLMOO project (see http://cmc.uib.no), using MOOs in foreign language learning.
April, 1999
Adrian Miles teaches hypertext theory and practice at RMIT University (Melbourne) where he has introduced and encouraged the use of hypertext in several discipline areas. His current work is exploring the possible relations between hypertext (or hypermedia) and cinema, as well as building little experimental hypertexts. The Bowerbird hypertext search engine is one such experiment, providing what is hoped to one day become a major research search engine for the hypertext community.
His interest in MOOs is quite recent, but with the development of the Encore Xpress client it is apparent that new forms of hypermedia writing and reading are being developed that have the potential to redefine our, and our students, notions of electronic literacy and writing.
March, 1999
Kenneth Elliott is a playwright, poet, and graduate student at The University of Texas at Dallas, and is a member of The Dallas Poets Community (in which he served a brief stint as a poetry editor for the literary journal Illya's Honey), The Playwrights' Project, and Awful Coffee, the graduate student poetry group at UTD. He has read his poetry at venues throughout North Texas, and his plays have been produced in the Dallas area.
His interest in LinguaMOO is the result of seeing the MOO environment as inescapably dramatic, self-aware, ritualistic, interactive and performative: in a word, theatrical.
May, 1998
Jennifer L. Bowie is a Technical Communication Masters student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is the Response Editor for Kairos. Jennifer's position at Kairos takes the print journals "letter's to the editor" several steps further using such technology as; the Web, email, MOOs, and any other internet tool that is applicable to create an "interactive response section".
Not surprisingly this section results in being nothing like the old letters to the editor. Kairos's partnership with Lingua has allowed for an even more interactive section, with the Kairos Meet the Author (KMTA) series. Jennifer became the planner, coordinator, and host of the KMTA series. KMTA, a Lingua MOO forum, consists of discussions lead by the authors of Kairos webtexts about the issues raised in the texts as published. MOO logs for these texts are edited, then published in the journal, creating the possibility of many levels of interaction.
April, 1998:
Harold Knight is a doctoral student in Arts and Humanities at UTDallas, where he is a graduate teaching assistant (Rhetoric, Creating Fictions, Advanced Composition, Arts and Performance: Musical Theater in America). He is also a musician who bought his first computer twelve years ago to write his first dissertation in musicology. He came to Texas from Massachusetts to write short stories (with no knowledge of on-line technology other than that the www existed), and is now planning to teach his Creating Fictions class this summer using "Story Space." He uses LinguaMOO in his Rhetoric classes, requires on-line (both web and and library catalogues) research, and has both a personal home-page and his syllabus on-line. He is a dog too old to learn new tricks, but has fallen into a world he didn't know existed and can't believe he ever did any kind of academic work without the Internet, the MOO, and and his Telnet to the UT system libraries.
March, 1998:
Randall Donaldson has taught German language and literature at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, for the last twenty-five years. He earned his doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University and wrote a dissertation on Robert Reitzel, a German-American of the latter part of the last century, but spends most of his classroom time teaching German language at the beginning and intermediate levels. For the last ten years he has been active as well in training and consulting on issues of software applications and development for business and industry. His interests come together in the use of the computer to augment and enhance language learning. He has developed some HyperCard applications for teaching reading to intermediate and advanced students and published with colleagues on several related issues. In the fall of 1997 he was surfing the net in search of innovative ideas to excite his fourth-semester German students in the upcoming semester when he saw Markus' request for a potential partner in tandem language learning in the MOO. The idea was intriguing, so he answered Markus, and a partnership was born.
Markus Koetter is a doctoral candidate at the University of Muenster, Germany. Inspired by his 1996 thesis about the place of e-mail communication on the continuum of spoken and written discourse, he began to take a systematic interest in the potential of the new media for language learning. Thus, in 1997, he joined various MOOs and began to develop a project for intermediate-language learners which combines the benefits of off-line e-mail-based tandem learning with the advantages of on-line communication in a text-based virtual community of native speakers of the target language. The working hypothesis is that the MOO offers the best possible substitute for a face-to-face contact or a visit to the target-language community because of its capacity to offer simulations of a variety of real-life situations, the ability to consult resources such as reference works, and the possible of studying and manipulating e-texts, etc.
This project is now up and running. Since January 1998, Markus' German
EFL learners and Randy's German class of American college students meet
on-line once a week for two hours to collaborate on a variety of intercultural
and linguistic projects. Following the guidelines of tandem learning, the
participants alternate between their mother tongue and L2 (after half of
the session or from week to week) in order to both to benefit from the
input of native speakers and to practice the TL skills while having the
additional option of taking recourse to their L1 without having to interrupt
the interaction. This pilot study will last until early-May. The hope and
the expectation is that students will gain improved communication skills
through exposure to authentic discourse, increased sensitivity to language
in their roles as experts for L1, and enhanced awareness of their improved
and improving language skills from feedback about their performance in
L2. With the permission of the participants, all exchanges during the two-hour
sessions are logged. Each participant receives a file of all interactions
as a means of assessing and evaluating his or her own skills, by re-reading
the TL input provided by the respective partners, and/or systematically
researching the e-texts in further off-line studies. Markus and Randy will
present the results of this project this summer at the annual ALLC/ACH
conference in Debrecen, Hungary, and in a co-authored essay to appear in
early 1999.
February, 1998:
Sue Thomasis a novelist whose books include CORRESPONDENCE, about machine consciousness and identity; WATER, an inorganic romance, and WILD WOMEN: Contemporary Short Stories by Women for Women. She recently completed her third novel THE [+]NET[+] OF DESIRE which is set in virtuality, and features a parallel site at LambdaMOO (lambda.moo.mud.org 8888, @go #87887). Although based at Nottingham Trent University, England, she is currently spending the Spring Semester at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. She is Director of the trAce International Online Writing Community which was recently awarded a substantial grant by the Arts Council of England to establish an internet-based community for readers and writers. Aided by students at Umass, trAce is currently building its virtual base at LinguaMOO, and by Summer 1998 it will be open to writers and readers around the world. The beta version will be launched at the Computers & Writing Conference in Florida this May.
January, 1998:
Natalie Delker is an academic reference librarian at Collin County Community College in Frisco, Tx, where she is a selector for materials in business, anthropology, communications and the social sciences. Natalie is also pursuing an additional masters degree in the History of Ideas at the University of Texas at Dallas. A mere two years ago, Natalie was introduced to the graphically enhanced version of the WWW and began teaching herself how to create web pages. Now it is hard for Natalie to imagine a career in information service or academia without the Internet. This revelation is evident in her personal and professional interests which include Computers, Culture and Society, Science Fiction Studies and Digital Imaging and Access. Natalie's project located in Lingua's Tower of Babble represents the kind of contribution to the Lingua community we like to encourage. Check out her 'Vertical File' there. It is a tutorial on how to contribute to a collective annotated bibliography. "This Vertical File was created by Natalie Delker (Nov. 1997) as a project designed to promote the collection of annoted citations related to the interests of LINGUAMOO. Contributions may be single book reviews or subject bibliographies. Documents should include a statement of authorship and citations should conform to a standardized format (MLA, APA, etc.)." Congratulations to Natalie!
December, 1997:
Johan Utne Poppe is currently a student of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, where he has previously studied history. He says that he has been fascinated by computers since childhood, but did not go beyond gaming and a little word processing before he started his studies in Humanistic Informatics in January of this year. He plans to continue with history studies, and hopes to find a field involving computers - either as tool or subject.
Johan says that when he is not working and playing at the computer, he also enjoys hiking and skiing in the Norwegian mountains. He also spends some time working at "Det Akademiske Kvarter" - a student cafe, pub and concert place in Bergen.
This semester Johan has written an Object-Oriented Programming tutorial in Lingua MOO as his term paper project. We encourage everyone to check out Johan's excellent tutorial by typing @go OOP and take his Flying Floppy for a spin. We want to thank Johan for this most valuable contribution to the MOO.
November, 1997
John Fallon is an assistant professor of English at Lima Technical College (Ohio). His interest in computers and writing, including MOO's, dates to his participation in a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on "Technology in the Humanities" in the summer of 1995. Rich Higgason, a Lingua veteran and John's partner at NEH, introduced John and many others to the MOO. Along with his students, John takes advantage of the learning opportunities in Lingua whenever he is out of town. Active in community and college politics, John is currently president-elect of the Ohio Association of Two-Year Colleges and moderates two listservs, one for his Lima Tech writing students and one for Ohio high school and college writing teachers.
Scott Limbert is one of John's former students, who continues to help other Lima Tech students navigate Lingua and become comfortable with the online environment. Scott works in the campus Marketing and Recruiting Office and occasionally gives campus tours to prospective students, which is similar to what he has done for fellow students in Lingua--give Lingua campus tours. Scott's a marketing major at Lima Tech and an avid runner. He is an assistant track and cross country coach at his old high school, and he's active in Special Olympics and the St. Jude Bike-A-Thon. He's also a volunteer at his church, taking kids on the annual trip to King's Island (Ohio amusement park).
October, 1997
Tim Morris works at The University of Texas at Arlington. An associate professor of English, he has been at UTA since 1988, teaching American poetry, literary theory, gay and lesbian literature, and sport literature. Tim has been a Lingua resident since December 1995. He is probably best known in LinguaMOO for his virtual Basset Hounds, Bessie and Lucy. When not finding new ways to reproduce Basset behavior electronically, Tim edits two Internet lists, the Emily Dickinson List and H-Arete, the H-Net list for sport literature. His new book, Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction, is published by University of Illinois Press. Tim uses Lingua as a space for on-line classes, office hours, tutoring, and writing; he has been a participant in and moderator for C-Fest. Tim and Lingua resident Lisa Rathert of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently co-authored and presented a paper on fox hunting in the novels of Trollope--a paper notable because it was composed and revised entirely at LinguaMOO.
September, 1997
Sindre Sørensenis a student of psychology at the University of Bergen , Norway. He has been interested in interaction through computers since the mid eighties when he used all of his savings to buy a 2400 bps modem, and used most of his dads earnings to connect to remote BBSes. He has been a regular at LinguaMOO since fall of 1996, (when he was a pupil of Jan Rune Holmevik at "Humanistisk informatikk" in Bergen). Currently he is doing a small research project / thesis in cooperation with Thomas Bjørgo Laukli. Writing three papers is a part of the theoretical education in psychology at the University of Bergen. In this project they will have a look at how MOOs generally, and LinguaMOO particularly, are used in education. Other of his interests include artificial intelligence research, HCI (Human-Computer-Interaction), Music, Music and computers, and computer programming.
June, July, and August, 1997
Mick Doherty is completing doctoral candidacy preparation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. His dissertation will examine the kinds of academic knowledge-making that occur in electronic environments by engaging and developing interpretive tools developed by Porter (the forum analysis) and Brent (dialogic criticism). Doherty is the founding editor of Kairos: A Journal For Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments, sponsored by the Alliance for Computers and Writing. He is also the chair of the NCTE/ITC subcommittee on Tenure, Promotion and Technology. While at RPI he has developed and taught the school's initial "Writing to the Web" class, and brought the program's Expository Writing class and Technical & Professional Communications course upweb. He is in the process of moving to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to marry Sandye Thompson. Mick has also been facilitating a series of highly successful C-Fest meetings on tenure and promotion this past spring. We thank Mick for his work with C-Fest and hope to see many follow his initiative when the C-Fest series starts up again this summer and fall.
May 1997
Cheryl Lucia is a high school math and programming teacher in Southington, CT who is working on her master's degree from the University of Hartford in Educational Computing and Technoloy. For her final project she decided to create a virtual town (Our Town) where students could play a simulation game which required them to use basic math skills. The class she had in mind when designing this is a consumer math class. The students are of low level abilities. To win the game a player must choose a job, rent an apartment, make certain purchases, set up a budget, and 'live' for 12 weeks. Winning involves a combination of accummulated money and quality of life points. Cheryl's project exemplifies the kind of creative approach to learning that we hope to honor as we name her Linguarian of the Month. We pay tribute to Cheryl and thank her for her contributions to our community!
April 1997
Isabel Danforth is truly one of the gems in the educational MOO world. Known as "Ringer" to most people, Isabel works her wizardry on several MOOs and Internet services: Diversity University MOO, Meridian MOO, and L.O.S.T.(see below). At Lingua MOO, Ringer has helped new users, offered insights as a programmer, and provided invaluable support to Lingua MOO's wizard team. Ringer is also an active member of the network of educational MOO administrators known as the GNA-net. It's always comforting to know Ringer is online, that she's just one channel away and ready to help. We salute Ringer this month and thank her for all her help at Lingua MOO!
(The Librarian's On-Line Support Team (L.O.S.T.) is a newly formed organization that is coordinated by a steering committee consisting of academic, research, public, and K- 12 librarians from wide-spread locations. The group provides space for librarians, many of whom are being thrust into cyberspace with minimal training and support, to get both formal and informal instruction and mentoring. Librarians with all levels of experience can meet to share ideas and experiences informally.)
March 1997
Joel A. English is a doctoral student and assistant to the Director in the English Department at Ball State University. After completeing his Master's Degree at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, where he worked with Barry Maid on the cyber-tutoring project there, Joel moved to Ball State to work in a similar writing project. Joel's interests involve, as he puts it at Lingua MOO, "Writers. Working with writers. Working with workers with writers. Writing." We couldn't be happier to have Joel at Lingua MOO, as well as the other tutors who use Lingua for tutoring writing in the new Ball State Writer's Workshop, which you can find in the Scriptorium in the Library at Lingua MOO. We salute Joel for his commitment to writing instruction and for helping to make Lingua MOO a pleasant and productive community!
February 1997
Dr. D.Diane Davis is Assistant professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Old Dominion University where she teaches critical/cultural theory, (post)feminist theory, rhetorical and composition theory, and techno-subjectivity. Diane's PhD is in Humanities--with a concentration in rhetoric, composition, and critical theory--from the University of Texas at Arlington where she studied under Victor J. Vitanza. Diane has used Lingua MOO in her teaching for the past two years, and set up a very special Seminar room at Lingua off the Agora (in the Library). Due to her commitment to teaching and building community at Lingua, and the enthusiasm she brings to all her endeavors, on Feb 9, 1997, Diane became our newest wizard on Lingua MOO. We want to take this time to salute Diane and her contributions to Lingua MOO!
January 1997
Dr. Brian Clements is Senior Lecturer at University of Texas at Dallas. In every way, Brian exhibits the qualities of a committed rhetoric and cyber-teacher. Brian uses Lingua MOO to hold much of the discussion among students about reading and writing assignments. Brian is also a talented poet, and his newest book, Essays Against Ruin, is due out this Spring. In addition, Brian was commissioned to write 4 poems for our forthcoming collection of essays on educational MOOs, HIGH WIRED (University of Michigan Press). In short, we appreciate Brian's work and his contributions to the community at Lingua MOO. Thank you Brian!
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