• Students need to observe MOO sessions, through logs or real time, before doing it, and talk about why they will be MOOing and what could happen.  They also need clear instructions for logging in and  interacting.

• Students need clear prompts that outline what they are to discuss or build, with a clear outcome like a collaborative prewriting or a list of issues that they will present to the class later.

• Smaller groups are often more productive and on task, less chaotic than a class of twenty-five all yammering at and showing off for each other.  Many teachers who use MOOs allow or encourage students or groups of students to @dig their own rooms where they can have their own meetings and keep their own texts and objects.

One MOO session often isn't enough.  Classes need to experiment with the medium and play around a  bit before they can buckle down and get to work.  Many teachers I know have given up when it doesn't  "work" right away.  The principle of consistency in designing activities for networked classrooms would suggest that it might take a few lab sessions for a class to get used to MOOing on task.

1. Chat features
 

• Generating ideas collaboratively

People thinking together will end up spurring each other to have new ideas, or to keep building on each others' ideas, resulting in approaches that alone they might not have come up with.  We see this in class discussion sometimes, but seeing it in writing can be a heuristic aid toward pulling out more thought and exploration. Walter Ong said that writing objectifies thought and allows us to manipulate it more than the spoken word does.  Gaining distance (not much, I grant, since this is synchronous) allows internal reflection on the words and what they might mean, before one responds.
 
• Enticing students to interact, engage

In a related sense, the "here and now" pull of the chat can help some stop people stop hesitating and jump into the fray.  They may be less likely to allow the critical consciousness to kick in and stop them from saying something that's only half-baked.  However, for some students, even a half formed idea is better than no idea at all, and other students can help them tease out more of a thought by questioning and comments.  We may be more likely to see "thought coming into being" in written language in chat sessions.
 
• Exploring  alternative viewpoints

For those of us who teach argumentative writing, in which acknowledging contending views is  important, a good chat session can help class members test out claims and theses to see the challenges and modifications others might make to their ideas.  In so doing, the class enacts the multivox disputatem common in renaissance humanism, providing a range of viewpoints and possible objections to the claim at hand.  They can even role play the controversial roles of proponents in a famous debate by each taking the role of a character and arguing from that perspective.

• Skimming and diving for information

I said earlier that chat takes getting used to.  For many, it's the act of navigating that chat on screen, learning to read selectively and quickly as the screen scrolls by, and then entering the conversation without worrying about having read *everything* that's been said.  Skimming for information and knowing where and when to dive in and read carefully is a skill all of our students need to know.  After all, how did most of us survive the tons of reading we did in grad school?  Did we read every word?  In learning to navigate chat, we may be helping students develop strategies for dealing with the glut of information they find coming at them from all directions. How much you read doesn't matter so much anymore.  It's more important to figure out what to read and what to discard.
 
• Writing, writing, and more writing

No, they won't be writing in finely polished academic prose, but they will be writing.  Until the computer gurus find easier ways to enable spoken, video, VR, and telepathic CMC, we text folks are in  luck.  It's an easy step to take a chat transcript to an overhead or printout to circle or copy/paste for the class good ideas or locutions, and show students ways to move these gems into their papers/projects/webs.

• Social Construction

When we ask students to demonstrate knowledge by building and writing in the MOO, we allow them to create environments that illustrate their interaction with each other, with texts, and with the greater world around them.  Instead of delivering knowledge to them, we help them construct it in text in their MOO worlds.  The addition of a graphical interface such as Encore makes it possible for them to practice designing environments with graphical elements too.

• Community Building

When we have students build their own rooms and spaces that are connected to each other and sometimes collaboratively designed, we help them depend on each other, get to know each other, and build a sense of class community that is vitally important in most writing classes.  On the MOO, the students develop a sense of pride in group ownership of the objects and rooms they have created.

• Technopoetics and the creative imagination

To some degree, this feature depends upon the text-only version of MOO, since every character, object, and room must be described in text.  In the same way creative writers make use of the readers' creative imagination to plunge them into a setting, make them think, or inspire them with beauty, our technopoet students will work hard to create descriptions of MOO elements that will create a sense of place with specific details, often challenging the reader's imagination to leap to new possibilities.

• Getting under the hood: Coding, syntax, and proofreading

As you have noticed by now, building and programming on the MOO takes a certain amount of specialized knowledge in some of the commands and programs that bring rooms, things, and events into being in a virtual world.  Learning some of these commands and making mistakes based on typos and syntax errors helps students understand the importance of being precise and exact in writing, and a new appreciation for careful proofreading.  Just as some have claimed that programming languages should be used to satisfy foreign language requirements for degrees, we believe that students can learn much about the structure of languages by learning some rudimentary programming on the MOO. See Bradley Dilger's "The Ideology of Ease" for more about the importance of learning programming.
 
• The play's the thing

As Becky Rickly and Eric Crump have pointed out, having fun and trying out new activities in classes can make a big difference in how students respond to the subject, how much they interact with each other, and how much responsibility they take on for their own learning.  Indeed, as many educational psychologists have discovered, play and curiosity are a crucial ingredient to productive educational experiences.  Of course, we may not call our MOO activities "play," but in defining and building worlds, our students will be engaged in constructive play.  And on a side note, in an activity that begins to resemble the TV show Battlebots, some teachers have their class make "bots," automated programs that can be triggered to produce text  and even interact with each other.  Instead of students role playing a controversy or debate, they can program their bots to take on such duties.

• Pedagogies in Virtual Spaces: Writing Classes in the MOO by Sharon Cogdill, Michael Day, Leslie Harris, Cynthia Haynes, Jan Rune Holmevik, Claudine Keenan, Judi Kirkpatrick, Jane Lasarenko, and Avigail Oren

• It's Fun to Have Fun, but you Have to Know How! Or, How Cavorting on the Net Will Save the Academy by Eric Crump and Becky Rickly

• An Informal Rationale for Using Chats in the Composition Classroom by Michael Day

• Fear and Loathing in Paradise: Making use of Dissensus, Disorientation, and Discouragement on the MOO by Michael Day

• Creating a Virtual Academic Community: Scholarship and Community in Wide Area Multiple-User Synchronous Discussions by Michael Day, Eric Crump, and Becky Rickly

• The Ideology of Ease by Bradley Dilger