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Re: Learning MOO Programming

Just a brief message on this topic with regard to MOOs set up
primarily as educational sites for disciplines unrelated to
information sciences.

My colleagues and I at the University of Hawaii have set up a
little MOO, SeaMOO, primarily to let students experience working
in groups on projects over the Net.  We are social scientists.

Three of us initiated the MOO; one of whom actually programs rather
well, the other two of us sat down with all the downloadable info
related to MOO programming and laboriously worked through it (finding
some fatal typos in some of the exercises) and made a few stupid
mistakes and learned.  That is how I expect most people will learn
MOO programming, altho' setting up a MOO as an interactive programming
tutorial is a wonderful idea:  I'll send all our students there who
have overweening ambitions to be wizards, because promoting people
to wizard status is not the purpose of SeaMOO.

In fact, none of the three "founders" is a wizard [has a wizard-bit];
only "Nemo" has a wizard-bit.  When we want to work on the base patterns
and foundation structures of the MOO, one of us will log in as Nemo.
When we simply want to interact with students or build personal
objects, we log in as ourselves.  SeaMOO has a guest category, a
"permanent visitor" category [player status with no builder bit],
and a player/builder category.  Nemo is it as far as wizard-bits go.

Now, this is a small MOO, as I said, which we are using primarily for classes 
in political futuristics/futures studies, communications/IT majors, and 
English majors -- although it is available to all members of the university
as a meeting place.  But we constrained wizardly activities -- at least
until *we* have gotten much more experience in administering the MOO --
to put a damper on the various people who seemed to want to be wizards
just for the ego-enhancement of it [and surely we have not been the
only people to witness that phenomena].  This may seem like benevolent
dictatorship to some, but it's worked so far, and Nemo -- while a bit
schizophrenic -- has seemed a pretty laid-back captain so far.

Wendy L. Schultz                   |
Hawaii Research Center             |   It is the duty of the future
         for Futures Studies       |      to be dangerous.
wendy@hawaii.edu                   |    --  Alfred North Whitehead
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