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The MOO is more than an online discussion space. It is also a place where students create and analyze their own target-language culture: they build rooms, represent their own (virtual) personality, and enact role plays. These activities are not just pretend exercises that students hand in and then forget, but instead become part of the environment that the students themselves construct and use for their language learning. They also become tools for analyzing the way language constructs culture and reality--virtual and otherwise. For instance, as part of the fourth-semester course, students explore historical and intellectual issues related to space by reading and studying a variety of short, authentic texts from authors active during the Weimar Republic. These include an excerpt from a story by Franz Kafka, a letter written by the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg while in jail during World War I, poems by Else Lasker-Schüler and Rainer Maria Rilke, the manifesto by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and an analysis of utopia by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch. As students discuss the linguistic constructions of space in these texts, they also translate into practice their insights by creating their own spaces in the MOO. In addition to providing important language practice, such assignments primarily seek to foreground the students' own positionality vis-à-vis the cultural documents they are studying. Indeed, students begin to take their own work seriously by subjecting it to the same kind of analyses they practiced on the published texts by famous German authors. Students also store much of their written work in their rooms or in other project rooms in MOOssiggang. All rooms and objects created by students remain active in the MOO until or unless students decide to delete them. Visit some student rooms:
[Updated: 14 April 2003] |
