MOOsylvania is a project based upon 2 major premises:
1) Role playing affords observational learning, where individual behavior can be impacted through the experiences of others (1). This allows a child the opportunity to learn how to deal with overwhelming, confusing, and often frightening emotions and issues regarding self image in a safe (non-threatening environment).
and
2) The interface of a technology has the ability to create an environment of direct engagement for the user that emphasizes emotional as well as cognitive values(2).
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As a third grade teacher in an inner-city, Chicago elementary school, this researcher was amazed at how much trouble the students had working collaboratively, dealing with conflict in a non-violent manner, and behaving empathetically. Each of these abilities are characteristic of a resilient child, one who has a positive self image and a greater chance of overcoming childhood problems to become a mentally healthy, productive adult (Colorado State University 1996). 80% of the class, had been raised in an environment that fit at least three, if not more, of the factors that fall under the category of at-risk (Eggen & Kauchak ed. 1992). Most of the students came from broken families, were receiving financial assistance through the free lunch program, and had been in trouble at least once for some type of delinquent behavior. The idea of being responsible for their own behavior seemed foreign; every time there was an incident, it was always ³someone elseıs fault².
It took a lot of work and patience, but by the end of the school year, the class had grown emotionally as well as academically. As Max Weber said early in the century, ³it is an immensely moving thing when a person, no matter how young or old in years, assumes the responsibility for his [her] own actions² (McAfee & Eustace 1995), and indeed it was. Violent behavior in the classroom had ceased, loud verbal confrontations had dramatically decreased, homework was turned in on time, classroom behavior centered on accomplishing the work at hand, and the classes standardized tests scores improved noticeably from the previous year. It appeared to this researcher that it was their emotional growth that allowed the students to be more focused and thus, improve the quality of their academic work. This idea seems not only plausible, but logical when considering the strength of local cultural forces on the development of a childıs sense of morals, values, and of his/her self concept. While cultural forces influence many aspects of peopleıs lives, they have three principal effects on behavior. Cultural forces influence the kinds of skills people can exhibit, the way those skills are developed, and the purposes to which they are directed (Hatch & Gardner 1993). Children learn behaviors necessary to survive in their environment, not by being taught steadfast rules, but, just as they learn to understand language, ³through immersion in its cadences² (Turkle 1995). The knowledge acquired through what this researcher calls constructivist role playing gave the students the skills and understanding to take responsibility for their actions, thus, they came to the understanding that they alone were the ones who decided how they would react in the classroom and around their fellow students.
Constructivist role playing involves the student acting as themselves in different scenarios, discussing the results of the performed actions in small groups, and trying out different actions within the same contexts to discover how differing actions lead to differing outcomes in a non-threatening environment, one in which there were no consequences for experimenting with new or different actions to the various situations. Through this type of role playing, the students had the opportunity to identify behavioral cues and work towards identifying, not only the meaning of cues, but various ways of dealing with such cues towards resolution when they occur during conflict by doing, watching, and constructing meaning out of the experience. In the beginning of the school year, scenes from books were acted out. Students were asked to recreate particular events several times, each time a different emotion or underlying idea was added to the context and the students were able to see and experience how different actions can lead to different outcomes, and how the characters view of themself related to their choice of behavior. As the class became more comfortable with the concept, they moved onto creating and acting out their own scenes, some scripted, some improvised, created fromscenarios that began with concrete concepts and eventually became more abstract. Through role playing, students have the opportunity to identify behavioral cues, understand the attitudes and emotions behind such cues, and work towards identifying, not only the meaning of cues, but various ways of dealing with such cues towards resolution when they occur during conflict. And since "a MUD (or MOO) is a world of flux, where the real is in some ways beyond change, enveloping a 'becoming beingness' that is not usually perceived in ordinary states of consciousness"(4), the role playing in a MOO can afford a child the opportunity to try out social behaviors that may initially be uncomfortable or strange in their daily lives.
Pavel Curtis touched on role playing in a discussion of LambdaMOO:
"Given the detail and content of so many player descriptions,
one might expect to find a significant amount of role-playing,
players who adopt a coherent character with features distinct
from their real-life personalities. Such is rarely the case,
however.Most players appear to tire of such an effort quickly and simply
interact with the others more-or-less straightforwardly, at least
to the degree one does in normal discourse. One factor might be
that the roles chosen by players are usually taken from a
particular creative work and are not particularly viable as
characters outside of the context of that work; in short, the roles don't
make sense in the context of the MUD.
The questions for this researcher then began to focus on the issue of broadening the spectrum. How could more children have the experience of role playing in a non-threatening environment? How could more teachers benefit from the positive behaviors that came about from this experience? Perhaps technology could provide the answer. More specifically, perhaps multiple experiences over time spent in a virtual environment could provide children with the opportunity to construct this knowledge through actually observing, practicing, and experimenting with different behaviors in different situations. This is the basis for the experimental design of this study.
MOOsylvania is being constructed in such a manner as to keep the single-mindedness of it's focus on self-image and responsible social behavior will provide the "correct context" for the role playing to become an invisible, embedded element to the experience, not an "add on" that becomes cumbersome as the user continues exploring the world.
In an educational paradigm, role playing can most clearly be understood as Observational Learning; it is comprised of four main components: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivational(6). Role playing affords a strong connection to all four components. Cognitively, it is understood that stimuli from the environment moves through the sensory registers to the working memory, where rehearsal and response allow the stimuli to proceed into the working memory. Again, role playing offers a strong method for this type of learning to take place. From a constuctionist perspective, role playing affords the student the ability to construct understanding through doing. In short, role playing can be an effective means of acquiring knowledge and understanding for a student on several different levels of learning styles. However, "while MUD's are of great value as educational tools, their prime use is as a means of social interaction. People spend time on MUD's to communicate with others. On Role Playing MUD's the theme is just for fun. On other MUD's however social interactions can be as complex as they are in real life, even spilling over into it."(7) It is that "spilling over" that we are reaching towards as the positive social climate of MOOsylvania becomes more and more familiar to "MOOsylvaineites".
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There are two components to MOOsylvania:
1) A CD ROM
and
2) An on-line MOO (Multi-Object Oriented) chat world with a graphical interface
The CD ROM introduces groups of children to the principle characters who live in this fictional town of MOOsylvania. These characters explain the basic concept of this program, the only way to have a friend is to be one, and the only way to be a friend is to be responsible with, and understand how, your actions affect others. These characters then proceed to "act out" a scene after explaining the scenario. Once the "scene" is finished, the characters instruct the students to choose their roles and role play the scene for themselves just as they did, but carrying it a bit further, and come back to the CD ROM once they have finished. When the kids do come back to the CD, the characters ask the kids to redo the scene but they add a little information about how one of the players is feeling. Again the kids, act out the scene, with this added element and come back to the CD. This goes on three times. Then the characters ask the kids several questions. How did the scene play out differently when the information was added? Did things work out differently? How could the characters have altered their words or actions to make things turn out differently? The kids are asked to write down their responses and share them in the group. Then the characters themselves discuss these very questions amongst themselves. The point they keep coming back to is that the children have the ability to think through the outcomes of their actions and choose their behavior. Towards the end of the CD, the students are introduced to the on-line world of MOOsylvania. They are informed of the rules of behavior in the MOO, their choice of avatar, their ability to explore this world, and their ability to build within MOOsylvania.
Within MOOsylvania, students find themselves in a graphical "Multi-Object Oriented" (MOO) world. This interface is still in the design phase, but the objectives are:
-the student's "chatting" will be read in a box on the bottom of the screen,
-avatars will appear on the screen see students can "see" who else is in the room with them,
-robots in the world will be based upon the characters from the CD ROM, they will look and behave in a similar vein, and students will be able to interact with them in several scenarios, these too will be like the CD scenarios,
and
-students will be able to build from a stock repertoire of objects, these objects will appear on the screen.
One main reason for the importance of the graphical element of this interface is that it allows for a customized look and feel to MOOsylvania. Seeing that the target audience for this program is the urban, at-risk student, this enables the metaphor to be clearer and act as a cognitive hook upon which a student's knowledge of the familiar, concrete objectives, and experiences can be used to give more structure and transferability to the knowledge constructed by the student as he/she experiences MOOsylvania. As children spend more time in MOOsylvania, they will have the opportunity to progress from a basic member through a hierarchy of responsibilities and privileges that will include helping newbies navigate, acting as a neutral third party in disputes that seem difficult to resolve, being a sounding board for kids who need someone to talk to, building new scenarios for the robots, and becoming wizards.
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Seeing as this study is centered around the use of technologies currently available, but rarely used in the manner necessary for this purpose, it is foreseeable that additional components to the methodology will be brought in as the study progresses.
The ideal demographic for a participant in this study will be a child, living in an urban environment, who meets a minimum of four of the variables listed above. The age of the participant will be between 10 and 12, so as to attempt to reach the child before the statistical jump in delinquent behavior as documented by the FBI in the 1995 Crime In The US Report. The total number of participants can vary from 16 to 20, in both the intervention and control groups, but each group should be comprised of equal numbers of males and females to avoid any skewing of the data in regards to gender differences. In terms of ethnicity, an equal representation of the demographic make-up of the school as a whole will suffice, but is not a major issue. Students must come from a minimum of four different schools to minimize the amount of time they can spend conversing outside the virtual environment about the experience with each other. Parental permission must be gained before a student may be accepted into the study. All standards of the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct will be strictly adhered to at all times.
Other materials that are needed for this study are listed below and described in greater detail in the procedure section of this research.
The experiment will actually begin about a month into the school year, after the teacher has had an opportunity to get to know the individual students and has an idea of each childıs typical behavior in the classroom. This is when the final selection will be made as to which students will be in the experimental and control groups.
All subjects will then be administered a test created to measure three components. Component A will be based on the self-reported delinquency method, introduced by Nye and Short (1957). It represents an economical way to uncover the distribution of delinquent behaviors and activities, even if some of them are officially undetected (Hindelang, Hirschi, & Weis, 1981).
Component B will be formulated from Mak's (1987) Liking for School Scale. This 20-item scale surveys the extent of secondary students' liking for various aspects of school life, including relationship with teachers and peers, discipline, curriculum, workload, assessment, extracurricular activities, and relevance to future employment. Mak (1987) demonstrated that the scale has satisfactory construct and criterion-related validity and test-retest reliability over a 1-month period (r = .82) (Mak 1991).
Component C will be based upon the Self-Esteem Inventory (SEI) (Coopersmith, 1981). This personal inventory looks at individual variables such as depression, self-esteem, school achievement, and how the subject spends his/her time (Salts, Lindholm, and et al 1995).
This same test will be given after the experimental group has had approximately 6 to 8 months to work in the MOO. The results will then be measured against the pre test. Subjects will not put their names on the test, but the researcher will code them to ensure that the pre and post test can be measured along an individual basis.
The entire class will be informed that a small number of students will be selected to participate in a study to test the validity of an new technology in a school setting. This introduction will lessen the anxiety that it is the student being tested, putting the focus instead on the technology.
The experimental group will be pulled from the rest of the class to view an interactive CD Rom that introduces them to the world of MOOing. One of the main focuses of the CD is the culture of the MOO and how the participants are indeed the ones who literally create their own world inside this environment. The subjects will be likened to colonists, creating their own community where none currently exists. The goal that the subjects will be working towards will be to create a society in which they and the other MOOerıs, at other unknown locations, can ³live² happily and productively. A brief, hands on tutorial will then take place with the researcher guiding the subjects through the basic commands for moving and communicating in the MOO environment and stressing the fact that the MOO is common ground is a jointly inhabited ³space² where meaning takes shape through the collaboration and successive approximations of the participants (Brennan 1990).
All four location sites will receive the same introduction and tutorial. A script will be used to ensure that the researcher shares the same information with each group of subjects. As the collaborative nature of a MOO feeds off numbers of participants, the goal is to get all four groups up and running with two days. After the initial introduction session, successive MOO times will be scheduled to allow for all subjects to be in the environment concurrently.
The MOO used for this study is called MOOsylvania. It is housed inside a server run by The Lanning Group, a loose-knit consortium of technical and educational professionals working together via telecommunications technology and the Internet. Only three people, the researcher and two individuals from The Lanning Group, have the ability to open the MOO. The Lanning people have agreed that throughout the course of the study, the MOOsylvania will solely be under the control of the researcher who will keep it closed except for scheduled subject time.
Already built inside MOOsylvania is an alley that serves as the entry point. Directly in front of the alley is a small building, the MOOsylvania Meeting Hall & Library. Inside this building there is minimal furniture, only a few chairs, a table, and a bookshelf with a couple of books about MOO programming. The subjects will be introduced to each other as their MOO characters, or avatars in this building. The researcher will act as a guide throughout the first few sessions, assisting the subjects with movement, communication, and finding the commands to create inside the MOO. As the subjects become more independent and more interdependent with each other, the researcher will refrain from being visibly in the environment, while still monitoring the activities taking place. The subjects will be in control of setting up their rules of conduct and the consequences for not behaving according to the code. There is only one law that the researcher will lay down and enforce without fail, subjects are not to share any real life identification information, no names, addresses, schools, or phone numbers. Any subject caught sharing this information will be removed from the study and ³toaded², removed, from MOOsylvania. The scarcity of objects waiting for the subjects in the MOO relates to Fanderclaiıs (1995) explanation of how best to use MOOs in an educational setting:
A MUD is not an environment that can be controlled; to use MUDs effectively, educators must replace control with structure. Students need clear goals, and knowledge of the tools and methods they might use to accomplish those goals. And then they need for us to stand out of the way and let them learn. Perhaps as MUDs become more accepted in education and we make better uses of their potential as learning environments, we'll even take a few of those lessons about empowering students and staying out of the way of their learning back to our real life classrooms. And that, it seems to me, might be the most important thing any of us could learn from educational MUDding.
Indeed, knowledge of the tools available for building is available from the books on the bookshelf; however, the idea is that the disinhibition that is so imbedded into the make-up of this technology will lead to collaboration. The fact that MOO provides easy interaction between people, and that MOO information tools, programmed in MOO code, can be easily manipulated from within an interactive session, means bugs can be fixed and new features and tools added very quickly. It is usually difficult for the implementor of a software tool to observe, first hand, how the tool is being used. In MOO, this kind of interaction is frequent: by observing the errors and misunderstandings of novice users, the implementor can see the ways in which a user interface is confusing or awkward. It's often hard for an ordinary user of a piece of software to provide adequate information for the programmer to locate a bug. But in MOO sessions, the users can talk about problems, the developers can work with them, possibly adding debugging information to the code as it's being used, to figure out what exactly is going on. And often the problems can be located and fixed on the fly, in a matter of a few minutes (Masinter and Ostrom 1993).
One other area will be created and waiting for the subjects when they first enter MOOsylvania; inside the meeting hall, there will be a small back room that is called Gallery. This is a place for subjects to create objects they want to show off or share. The only objects inside the Gallery at the opening of MOOsylvania will be a costume rack and a bot, an object created to behave as if it were another human character, who is the costumier. The costumier will be able to guide the subjects through the steps of creating a costume to place on the rack for others to try. This device was originally created by Amy Bruckman for use inside MediaMOO. Resnick and Bruckman (1993) explain the concept behind this type of object:
Building amusing and/or useful MUD objects is a means of creative expression for the designer, and completed objects promote social interaction for the community. One design paradigm which has proved particularly successful is the idea of a contributory object. For example, in the dressing rooms of the MediaMOO Ballroom, it is possible to design new costumes for the clothing racks: Contributory objects offer a lower threshold to participation than actually programming a new object. The user has a sense of having taken a first step towards mastering the computational environment, and a sense of having contributed something to the community.
There are a variety of contributory objects around MediaMOO, including bartenders that you can teach new drinks, a talking picture that you can teach to come alive when it is looked at, statues of famous sociologists and historians of science that you scribble on (designed to promote discussion of their work), and a projects chalkboard for ideas for new objects and places. The majority of users asked to name one of their favorite objects on MediaMOO cited one of these items. It is interesting to note that attributing the contribution to a person is an essential feature-it allows the person to take pride in what they have done, and discourages virtual vandalism.
The phenomena of disinhibition is hoped to have the same sort of disarming affect that has been documented on several other MOOıs. Rosenbergıs 1992 ethnography of WolfMOO reports on disinhibition as a very strong and powerful force within the environment:
Although a lot of players don't like to talk about their real lives, others are quite willing to talk about who they really are and often only want to talk about their real lives. It seems that fairly often, two players who are physically located far apart will hit it off very well and end up confiding in each other all of their problems and stresses. This is one of the major features that seems to keep players on the MOO. It can be very useful to have someone completely outside of your normal life, to whom you can tell what's bothering you, because the people who are in your life are often the cause of what's bothering you. This is one of the reasons why WolfMOO is so addictive to some people. It offers a relief from the stresses of their normal life. It can offer you someone to talk to and complain to who is outside of your problems, people who have no expectations from you, and the opportunity to do almost anything that you can imagine and might not be able to do in real life. It offers freedom.
One of the mentors at MicroMuse states that the advantage of interacting with these virtual reality tools includes an increased language arts skill, greater confidence, creativity, improved social skills, assertiveness and conflict resolution skills (McCloy 1995). That is exactly what the goal of this study is all about; the hope is that the post test will indeed show that through the knowledge constructed in this virtual environment, subjects will have gained great social and conflict resolution skills, and this will translate into increased positive, observable behaviors in the classroom.
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Please keep in mind that this project is an evolving concept. Your ideas and opinions are indeed appreciated.
Kimberly Weiner
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