Diversity University

Diversity University was the first MOO dedicated specifically for educational use.. Like other Multi-User Dungeons, it was an online realm that allowed people to interact in real time by connecting to a central server, assuming a virtual identity within that realm, "teleporting" (in other words, transporting your character) to virtual rooms, and holding text-based conversations with everyone else who has "teleported" to the same virtual room. The MOO server kept track of which characters were in each virtual "room," so that the comments of each character would be sent back to the computers of every other person whose character was "in" the same virtual "room." What distinguished Diversity University from other MOOs was its central structuring metaphor as a virtual university campus, as well as its pioneering use for actual online classes.

History and Purpose of Diversity University

Diversity University was created in summer 1993 by its founder (and original "arch-wizard"), Jeanne McWhorter, then a sociology graduate student at the University of Houston. In an interview with a reporter, she described her initial purpose in creating the online educational environment: "It all began when I got interested in getting social workers online. . . . Social workers all tend to be computerphobes - part of it is that we have it in our mind that computers dehumanize. I think computers do anything but - I think people are much more open and willing to talk about themselves when they're online." Quittner continues, "McWhorter figured that Diversity University would be a way to attract educators and students to computing as a communications medium."." The overarching idea was a virtual, online university space, allowing teachers and students to interact in real time. Diversity University was originally hosted on a server at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, although it moved to two other server environments during its life, since it often struggled for financial support and institutional backing. It's final homes were Marshall University and the University of Wisconsin - Parkside.

Diversity University did not charge any hosting fees to faculty members and other educators who brought classes onto the MOO. Because the text-based interface required minimal computing resources for people to access the MOO, Diversity University espoused an egalitarian mission, which they articulated on their Web site: "The mission of Diversity University is to develop, support and maintain creative and innovative environments and tools for teaching, learning and research through the Internet and other distributed computing systems, and to guide and educate people in the use of these and other tools, to foster collaboration in a synergistic climate, and to explore and utilize applications of emerging technology to these ends in a manner friendly to people who are disabled, geographically isolated or technologically limited.".

Structure of Diversity University

Although MOOs are virtual spaces - basically computer objects in a database - they are usually organized around a central spacial metaphor. For Diversity University, that metaphor was a physical university campus, with buildings that represented the various subject fields of the participants on DU, along with other types of buildings that you might find at a university. In his master's thesis on "Design in Virtual Environments Using Architectural Metaphor," Dace A. Campbell used Diversity University's campus as an example of virtual architecture. You can thus still see DU's "campus" structure as Figure 1.3 in that thesis.

Guests who connected to Diversity University landed in a "room" in the "Student Union," in a kind of orientation space, while registered characters would land in whatever "room" was their virtual home in that environment. Once in a room, characters could use various commands to navigate around the virtual space. For example, they could type "out" to exit from the room to an adjoining room or hallway, and they could also use the cardinal directions (n, s, e, w) to "move" in those directions from room to room, building to street, street to connected street, and also into other virtual buildings on the campus. When creating "rooms," therefore, people who had buidling rights on the MOO were encouraged to use the appropriate version of the command (@dig) so that they would create not a free-floating, unconnected room, but a room that was joined to another room (or hallway), in the appropriate virtual building, allowing users to "walk" around the MOO. (See Guide to Basic MOO Commands and Advanced MOO Commands for a list of these and other commands used when working with Diversity University MOO.)

Because the overarching structure was metaphorical, characters and guests on the MOO had the "magical" ability to "teleport" (or jump) from a room in one virtual building to another room "somewhere else" by using commands such as @go (to go to a room by its object number or name) and @join (to join another character in a room). Rooms could be open or locked, to allow (or prevent) people from joining you in that virtual space. Programmers on the MOO could also create "virtual objects" that had the ability to move characters from room to room, such as virtual cars, a magical tour globe that provided you with a guided tour of English-related rooms in the environment, and a Points of Interest Board that served as a kind of portal to every site listed on the board, among others. Many of these features have been incorporated into newer, three-dimensional versions of Multi-User Virtual Environments, such as Second Life.

Sample Educational Projects

Josh Quittner's March 1994 article about Diversity University described one of the first uses of DU as a space to hold actual university classes. In Spring 1994, Leslie Harris (then an assistant professor at Susquehanna University) and Cynthia Wambeam (working as a composition instructor at the University of Wyoming) paired their English composition classes and held inter-class discussions of shared readings within Diversity University. Because the MOO environment was text-based, it offered students practice in articulating ideas in writing, which was reinforced in an inter-class LISTSERV. Harris and Wambeam discussed their experience and its effect on student writing skills in an article in Computers and Composition.

Because the MOO created a virtual reality by describing its environment, it provided an excellent space for reenactments of literary texts, in which visitors can be "immersed" in the world of the novel or fictional work. One such project was a recreation of Dante's Inferno (the first book of Dante's Divine Comedy, also by Leslie Harris. Students recreated some of the circles of Hell within the MOO, populated with virtual robots that could interact with one another and with visitors to the site. Since the rooms were interconnected, visitors could go down from level to level, experiencing parts of Dante and Virgil's journey. See MUDS, MOOS, WOOS, and IRC for a description of the fifth circle of hell as depicted by students in Professor Harris' course.