Diversity University was the first MOO dedicated specifically for educational use. Like other MUDs, 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) or "walking" to virtual rooms, and holding text-based conversations with everyone else who had entered 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.
Read more about Diversity University: History and Purpose of Diversity University, Structure of Diversity University, Sample Educational Projects, Educational Tools in The MOO, Closing
Famous quotes containing the words diversity and/or university:
“The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)