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. Its 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".
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