[Edu-sig] RE: Articles of possible interest

[John Maxwell]

David Scherer wrote:


Stephen R. Figgins wrote:

> Has anyone metioned POO yet?  Maybe I missed it.
 
> Ah, and one more, MOOP, this one found lurking in the vaults. 

Haha. Same project! Good decision to change the acronym, methinks!


> That said, I find news forums a more interesting place to meet others
> and learn about programming, and it has the added benefit of being
> archived.  In a chat or moo, the conversation is often lost, and
> because of when you logged on, or what room you are in at the moment,
> your questions might not reach the right eyes. 

Precisely the reason for my earlier plea for a Zope-MOO integration (or a
Zope-Poo integration, I guess). We used to have a MOO project for teachers
where they could build website objects (essentially just URLs) that could
be used to show webpages to groups of people in real time (like a
synchronized slide show) or like books in a library that you could look
at on your own. The idea was to try to leverage the MOO for both
synchronous (chat-like) and asynchronous (mail- or list-like) purposes.
Now, MOO does an unparalled job (IMHO) of the synchronous stuff, but
something like Zope has it hands down for asynchronous groupwork. To be
able to merge the functionality would be fabulous.


> And if I am to take the time building interactive objects in Python, I
> think I would like them to be more visible to the world.  What if we
> thought of the web itself as a giant moo?  With each site as its own
> sort of room?  Or, perhaps think of the web as a medium for delivering
> a moo?  The moo could be built in a distributed environment, all that
> would be needed is some sort of moo servlet that can pass on state to
> other moo servlets running on the web...

OK, right, exactly, and -- to actually bring it back to relevance for CP4E
-- the big picture is an object-based distributed environment for our
programming tasks. Both your synchronous and asynchronous interactions
(and the objects that make them go) are *situated* -- you're not working
on your hard drive or your desktop, you're working in a virtual
environment. I think this is the feature that makes Amy Bruckman's
adolescent programmers tick... that they're not coding scripts to do
things on a desktop or a disk, but rather within a shared virtual space.

The Web is such a space (though rather flat). MOOs and MUDs are much
richer environments. I'm loving working with Zope right now, because it
starts to look like these two things are getting closer together... it's
not just pages and files, it's objects and behaviours. If it
actually can be distributed across servers -- Python being the glue --
then we'd really have something. My standard_html_header object should
be able to refer to my player object, right? And vice-versa?



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