Collaborative Spaces and Education
MU*s
MU*space offers the unique opportunity to transform ideas into reality, at least virtually. For the instructor, to let the students run around Medieval England, Ancient Greece, A Faulknerian hotel, or a contruct of the human brain can often do more for discussion cultural and societal structures and constraints than an hour of lecturing. Students can interact with characters, people, structures, situations, and placed artifacts of times past, or present, for that matter.

Students can also create spaces of their own which may reflect ideas learned during the course of a term. These spaces can be representations of rhetorical situations and information, or a continuation of the spaces begun by the instructor which continue classwork. Either way, MU*space is an advantage for the creative student and instructor.

For the researcher examining classroom interactions or other pursuits, MU*space can present a new avenue for work in social science, textual studies, cognitive theory, rhetorical strategies, and creative writing. Not unlike the the changes that happened in early print cultures, the new computer culture asks many of the same questions but for an audience never before imagined, and also question the micro-dynamics of local arenas as well.

First off, however, the creation of the space itself is the concern for whichever interest. Careful planning and clearly articulated goals for the instructor and classroom are primary.

Opening Teaching Theory The Web MU*S Conversation

Daniel Anderson
Joi Lynne Chevalier
2/26/97