[Edu-sig] Articles of possible interest

[John Maxwell]

David Scherer wrote:

> Let me make a specific, if rough around the edges, suggestion: a
> Python-based MUD/MOO.

Yow! Ther's an interesting idea. But you know, I want to argue against it
-- LambdaMOO is such a nice system already, and has a very, very nice
language (though, appropriately, much more limited in domain than Python),
what I think we maybe need is Python-MOO integration... maybe a MOO-Zope
integration. THAT would be truly cool.


> I don't have a lot of experience with MUDs, and I don't feel like I can make
> the case for this as well as it should be made.  However, I don't think this
> would require boys and girls to go off in separate corners.

Absolutely! As Amy Bruckman's copious writings (not to mention a goodly
amount of the rest of the MOO/MUD literature) point out, there is
relatively little gender barrier in MOO. If anyone is interested in this,
Bruckman's dissertation (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/thesis) has some
amazing material covering adolescent girls programming interactive agents.
The CP4E community really needs to be aware of this work.



  - John Maxwell                  jmax@portal.ca
------------------------------------------------
 Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab (MERLin)
 University of British Columbia, Canada