I'm Jay Hurvitz, and I've been bitten by this MUD pest as well. I keep scratching and scratching, but it doesn't seem to want to go away. One of the main questions which I find myself asking myself if whether or not MUD people divide into two categories -- those who participate in them, and those who study them.

Here at Tel Aviv University we have an ongoing problem of not succeeding in establishing contact when the computers are available to us. So instead of getting hands-on experience most of what we know is filtered through the reactions and analyses of the people who write the articles that we read. Is this a special problem related to the fact that we're so far away from the center of action, or have others encountered similar difficulties. (Another possibility is that we're not that young anymore and have to devote time to our families -- time that as undergraduates we might otherwise devote to MUDding.)

And would somebody please tell me -- how do you use MUDs as part of an educational (actually, I means school-related) experience. I have no doubt that one can learn quite a lot about him/herself through MUDding, and building my own objects can be enlightening, but in the literature I still haven't found anything that explains how children can learn about history or social studies through a MUD.

The published literature on MOOs seem to me heavily weighted toward their social aspects, and less toward the educational. All too often it seems that "educational" is used as a euphemism for "learning about ourselves", and though there's a lot to be said for that, school-based education doesn't concentrate solely (or primarily) on that aspect of learning. Two articles that at least touch on the more traditional aspects of schooling are:

The MediaMOO Project by Amy Bruckman and Mitchel Resnick and

MUDs in Education: New Environments, New Pedagogies by Tari Lin Fanderclai. Fanderclai makes it clear that to her mind the goal of MUDs in education has to be "to exploit the potential of MUDs to provide new learning experiences for students".

Let's say that we've built a history simulation MUD which permits childen to get a feel for, say, the middle ages in Europe. I don't understand what stops a kid from building a tank and driving down the main drag, Rambo-style, changing totally the basic atmosphere of a middle ages city, not to mention being so far out of character that actually learning something concrete from the expierence is close to impossible.

If anyone has experience with situations like the ones I've described, I'd be happy to learn about them:

Jay Hurvitz: jayh@zoot.tau.ac.il

These pages, as you've probably already noticed, are part of a group project. Chances are good that whoever is reading this has found them well after the project has been completed and most of us have forgotten about our flirt with this rather esoteric educational tool. On the other hand, as opposed to a term paper which can be kept as a secret between the student and the professor, a project which finds its way to cyberspace has an existence of its own. A number of us may continue to modify and add to our pages until they become substantially different from what they were when they were "handed in" for a grade. This means that web pages can also be used as an educational tool. This subject has already come up in numerous universities in the States. For a brief taste of some of the possibilities inherent in substituting HTML pages for traditional term papers try:

Brooks Landon's Horizon of Invisibility Homestead and the

Poetic Conversations Home Page.

and if you really want to know more personal information about me.....more info

on the other hand, more information isn't really that important, so you can also return to the group