MOO--The Second Decade?

C&W Online 2005, Lennie Irvin

MOOs--Where We've Been; Where We Are

MOO, or Multi-User Object Oriented Domains, were one of the first real time synchronous tools that connected "online" users within composition classrooms or virtual communities in the early 1990s before the Internet. But the text-based origins of MOO have not weathered well the growth of the Internet and the blog-era. Other online tools like blogs, CMS platforms like Drupal, and course platforms like WebCT or Blackboard have dominated the online teaching space for writing teachers in recent years. Some question has been raised whether (as Tari Fanderclai stated) "MOO is dead." Last year saw a number of MOO decline landmarks—the shift of the Computers & Writing Online synchronous discussions to another platform than a MOO and the death of Connections MOO.

Can MOO evolve to fit a modern Internet environment?

Is MOO still relevant for the field of Composition and Rhetoric and why?

Want to see the decline in Educational MOOs yourself?
--visit Rachel's Super MOO ListEducational MOOs last updated April 2002
--visit Portfolio of enCore MOOs, last updated Jan. 2004

See how many of these MOOs are not gone...