High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs

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.