Back · Programme · Home

Carmen Elena·Boon·Bartolozzi·New School University·USA

MediaMOO, an online professional community as a model for use in the Media Studies Academy

Download paper

The growing use of virtual environments in educational settings during the 1990's was based on the assumption that active learning provides a superior experience to passive learning, a notion that can be traced back at least as far as John Dewey's Democracy and Education. Students who participate in responsive learning environments in which they become engaged in full body-mind bond learning not only retain more information but also show a fuller understanding of the information presented. In virtual environments some fundamental applications exist: visualization, that is, seeing connections and relationships that would otherwise be difficult to comprehend, reproduction of Real Life (RL) professional and academic experiences and construction of participatory tools and techniques. When students play a role in a group, their newly acquired knowledge can be effectively translated into a field setting. Back in 1968, computer science pioneer J.C.R. Licklider, who was deeply concerned about the role of technology in education, compelled us to appreciate the importance of the new computer-aided communication by understanding the dynamics of "critical mass", as it applies to cooperation in creative endeavor. He claimed that Society rightly distrusts the modeling done by a single mind. Society demands consensus, agreement, at least majority. Fundamentally, this amounts to the requirement that individual models be compared and brought into some degree of accord. Licklider states that the main requirement is for communication, which we now define concisely as "cooperative modeling" cooperation in the construction, maintenance and use of a model. In this research paper I have endorsed Licklider's thesis about the challenge that is involved in the visualization and eventually in the implementation, of a model to understanding media communications. The model lets practitioners to carry out the social construction of the duality community-communication through creative informational activities. A model, as Licklider says, can change the nature or the usual practices related to communication: "When communicators have no such common framework, they merely make speeches at each other, but when they have a manipulable model before them, they utter a few words, point, sketch, nod or object". Licklider also claimed that the dynamics of media communication are so model-centered as to suggest that perhaps the reason present-day two-way telecommunication falls so far short of face-to-face communication is simply because it fails to provide facilities for externalizing models. This way, inspired by the idea of pursuing "modeling" experiences in media communications education, this research took the form of a case study that sought to learn the circumstances surrounding the phenomenon of MediaMOO, an on-line virtual community launched in 1992 at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by professor Amy Bruckman, built by media researchers and devoted for the most part to the discussion of Media issues. My main objective was to look at it as an experience to be integrated into the academic Media community as a model and as a project worth studying in programs' courses. By requesting former participants of MediaMOO to comment on its heydays and pitfalls and its influence in subsequent professional projects, my main objective was to analyze if what happened in this one-of-a-kind on-line environment that mixed educational and professional Media cultures, could happen in a similar agency set up in a university domain. While my main concentration has been on MediaMOO as a microcosm of virtual culture and of Media professional culture, from beginning to end, I have tailored my research as a possibility for improving Media Studies by means of the Internet. Specifically, I have looked closely into the class situation formed by a small group of participants (the usual class size in Graduate Studies) who would be effectively able to carry out collective projects on such a system. With this, I do not pretend to place my study as proposing an unique idea but as integrating my professional field both in theory and in practice, into the large spectrum of educational on-line communities that has been going on for over a decade. I have envisioned a model based on MediaMOO as an on-going lab for graduate Media students to interact with their equals and assemble their projects in a highly detailed practical fashion. The range of correspondences between the foundation of both Media Studies and MediaMOO strikes me as worthy of intellectual study. My hypothesis for depicting this model was based on the assumption that MediaMOO clearly fits in the organization of Media Studies (as an academic discipline) as a playground where students would go to be trained as better mediators of the mass communication processes they are taught to manage in class. For many members, MediaMOO, as a whole, was a Media Project run by a collective. This way, I have suggested that a model based on MediaMOO for use in Media Studies would integrate different types of organizations according to areas with differing cultures and communication needs such as film, TV production or media management could also be developed. Students can try working in a short film project or a magazine endeavor on the MOO from the very first semester of their programs. A potential model based on the MediaMOO's lessons is meant to be a superior learning environment that would accompany courses and that would let the Media community to better explore the Internet as a media format that opens up possibilities to explore other Media.