MOO has become accepted as viable tool for facilitating discussion, promoting collaboration, and providing distance learning. The educational use of MOO has spawned several collections of scholarly articles (Day et al.; Haynes and Holmevik, High Wired; Barber and Grigar) and even a textbook (Holmevik and Haynes, MOOniversity). More generally, MOOs have featured prominently in critical discussions of such issues as identity construction online (Turkle, Stone, Bruckman), the formation and dynamics of virtual communities (Rheingold, Dibble), the performative quality of electronic communication (Murray), and the debate over the role race plays in virtual reality (Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman). Virtually all of this work, then, has been "sociological" in nature. The interest in MOO-spaces has been focused on the interactions that take place within the space and not on the qualities of the space itself. (BillCole)

References

Barber, John F. and Dene Grigar, eds. New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing About and in Electronic Environments. Research and Teaching in Rhetoric and Composition. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001.
Bruckman, Amy. Identity Workshop: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality. MIT Media Laboratory. 1992. Available FTP: ftp://ftp.cc.gatech.edu/pub/people/asb/papers/identity-workshop.rtf.
Day, Michael, et al. "CoverWeb: Pedagogies in Virtual Spaces: Writing Classes in the MOO." Kairos: A Journal for Teachers in Webbed Environments 1.2 (Summer 1996). http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/coverweb/bridge.html.
Dibble, Julian. "A rape in cyberspace; or how an evil clown, a Haitian trickster spirit, two wizards, and a cast of dozens turned a database into a society." 1993. Rpt. in Peter Ludlow, ed. High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. 375-95.
Haynes, Cynthia and Jan Rune Holmevik, eds. High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Holmevik, Jan Rune and Cynthia Haynes. MOOniversity: A Student's Guide to Online Learning Environments. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.
Kolko, Beth, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, eds. Race in Cyberspace. London: Routledge, 2000.
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodek: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. 1997. Rpt. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Virtual Frontier. Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Stone, Allucquère Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

-- Last edited September 4, 2002

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Moo Criticism Has Been Sociological

References