We are delighted to be here today to report on how we are using MOOs to rethink foreign language learning and teaching at Vassar College. After becoming acquainted with MOOs in early 1998, we began developing one of the world's first bilingual German MOOs called MOOssiggang&emdash;a pun on the word Müßiggang, which means something akin to leisure, relaxation and idleness, and intended to capture the MOO's dimension of play. Although all the basic commands and computer messages in MOOssiggang are in German and allow for a relatively complete immersion experience, our motivation in creating MOOssiggang was to build an environment that enabled not only intensive practice in the target language, but also sustained intellectual inquiry into the foreign culture, virtual culture and, more broadly, the fundamental interrelationships between language and culture. This emphasis on cultural analysis at the lower level of language learning derives from our own cultural studies work and our conviction that liberal arts education in every field has a mission to pursue critical knowledge and self-reflection rather than just provide a skills-based, practical instruction.

Of course, as with English composition courses, the aims, methodologies and practices of the ideal foreign language classroom are highly contested. Even now the organization of most foreign language department curricula have been divided into two relatively separate spheres of activity and learning: introductory courses devoted to language learning, defined in terms of practical skill development and oral proficiency, and upper-level courses devoted to literary and cultural study, which are either offered after language learning has been "completed" or which are taught in the students' native language. While there have been repeated calls in the US to fuse language learning with cultural studies, we remain at a standstill over the status of culture in language courses. Even when teachers recognize that language and culture are indivisible, it is often unclear how to develop a practical classroom pedagogy that leads students to more knowledge about the target language while pursuing a cultural studies agenda. In this talk today, we will suggest how we use the MOO to accomplish both goals at the same time as interdependent pieces of each other. We will begin with a quick overview of the course that we have developed using the MOO and then mention some of the features of the MOO that make it a particularly useful tool for foreign language study. The bulk of our short presentation, however, will offer a more detailed discussion of one of our units and the theoretical framework that informs our use of the MOO.

The Course

Beginning in Fall 1998, we developed and taught a one-semester Intermediate German course (third semester), which we repeated again in Fall 1999 and which we are expanding into a two-semester course this coming academic year. Organized almost entirely around work in the MOO, this course has several distinct phases. During the first seven weeks, students get acquainted with MOO technology, initiate an intensive grammar review, and reflect upon general cultural topics. The primary focus of this phase is on exploring specific issues such as space and identity, issues that inevitably resonate in both the foreign culture and virtual environment of the MOO. These explorations are developed through literary and cultural readings, through extensive discussions in the MOO, and by having students create their own cultural spaces and identities in the MOO. In the second phase of the course, Vassar students work in small groups with students from another college or university. In 1998 and 1999, for instance, students at Vassar worked with native German speakers studying English at the University of Münster to develop and present their own research projects in the MOO. Starting this coming fall semester, we will begin by working with other students studying intermediate German at Williams College, which we think will serve as an important intermediary step before they work with native speakers again in an advanced-intermediate course.

MOO Features: The Foreign Language Dimension

The work of Cynthia Haynes, Jan Rune Holmevik and many others have attested to the versatility of the MOO as a rich learning environment with classroom applications in a variety of different academic fields. At Vassar we have invested our own time and energy in creating a broad dialogue with our colleagues in Political Science, Sociology, International Studies, Theater and Information Literacy to reflect on the possibilities that the MOO creates for what we have begun to call "experiential learning" (see MOO Workshop 2000). By using the term "experiential learning," we mean to highlight not only that virtual interaction in the MOO can be as real as interactions in "Real Life" (RL), but also that learning in the MOO can add a creative dimension of "doing"&emdash;enacting roles, building cultures and exhibiting projects&emdash;that is often more productive and satisfying than exclusively face-to-face discussions (though they are also important) and submitting papers that are typically read only by the instructor.

For us, three features of the MOO stand out as particularly productive for the foreign language classroom. First, the mediated, text-based form of discussion in the MOO makes it ideal for foreign language learners by reducing negative affective filters that often accompany oral-based classroom settings. In fact, studies show that both student participation and target language use increases dramatically in the MOO, and students are able to express their thoughts in more sophisticated ways in the target language. Second, the object-oriented programming available in the MOO allow students to create, share and subsequently analyze their own target-language learning environment. We will show you how this idiosyncratic and individualistic student-driven target-language culture can become the subject of fascinating inquiries into the relationship between language and culture. Finally, the MOO's emphasis on playful experimentation affirms the personalizable and creative dimensions to language learning, leading students to find their own unique voice as foreign language learners and make the target language part of their own growing repertoire of self-development and self-expression. As Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik remind us, "in a MOO we are what we write; our textual representations are what people see when they read us" (MOOniversity 24-25). By using the foreign language in the process of creating their identity in the MOO, students are led to explore the shifts in the linguistic instantiations of their identities that are provoked by their work in the foreign language they are studying. Such shifts in the embodiment, expression and public perception of their foreign language selves enable a Brechtian alienation effect that encourages the kind of self-reflection that lies at the heart of liberal arts education.

Exemplary Unit: Exploring Space

Rather than continue to talk about the MOO in general terms, we would now like to briefly walk you through one of our units. Though many of these steps will demonstrate how we achieve better language learning, we hope that they will also show the extent to which this MOO-driven merger of language learning and cultural studies has enabled us to rethink what language learning might really mean in a liberal arts context.

Now according to Star Trek, space is the final frontier. In the MOO, however, space is just the beginning. The goal of our space unit is relatively modest: we want students to understand that space is part of social practice and discourse. Over the first several weeks, students read and discuss short, German-language texts in which space figures prominently, such as an excerpt from Kafka's story "Der Bau," which portrays a mole's neurotically charged relation to his burrow, and a letter written by the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, in which she juxtaposes the dull confines of her World War I prison cell with the beautiful, emotionally liberating spaces of her memory and imagination. We then ask students to compare the construction of space in the text to their understanding of space in the MOO (see example discussion). By moving from the German text to the MOO, we hope that students will be able to reach more abstract insights into the way language can construct spatial reality, since space in the MOO is constructed almost entirely through language. Though the MOO uses content-based activities to promote meaningful communication between students, we want to stress that these kinds of discussions go beyond linguistic practice or even reading comprehension to promote a basic kind of literacy about both German culture and virtual culture.

At the same time these readings and discussions also prepare students for the second way we use MOOs: to explore culture by creating it. Thus, we ask students to translate into practice their insights about space by creating their own rooms in MOOssiggang. Though we only have time to show you one of the rooms our students produced this year (see also additional rooms in MOOssiggang), we are continually impressed by the ingenuity of our students' efforts, which demonstrate an impressive willingness to experiment with the foreign language, apply insights from their readings, explore issues of style and voice, and enter into a dialogue with their audience. Of course, at this level every writing assignment in the target language brings up issues of grammar and vocabulary, and we continue to work with students to achieve writing proficiency. Nevertheless, in this assignment we primarily sought to foreground the students' own positionality vis-à-vis the cultural documents they were studying, what Russell Berman has called the "relation between here and there."

As Berman notes, such relationality to the cultural artifacts of the foreign culture should structure a core agenda in the cultural studies classroom. The production of culture in a virtual system, however, offers several unique pedagogical avenues to thematizing that relationship. First, the virtual authenticity of MOO rooms, objects and identities raises the stakes of target-language use to the level of cultural production. Second, by creating a culture from scratch in the target language, students experience first-hand that culture is neither neutral nor "naturally" available to members of a national culture. Indeed, we believe that the activity helped them appreciate how culture emerges through negotiations of various discourses that claim to represent aspects of reality. Finally, the virtual culture disrupts the easy bifurcation of I/Other or we/them that sits at the heart of cultural studies program (even as such programs work to question such easy divisions). In the virtual reality of the MOO, it quickly becomes difficult to decide what is "here" and what is "there." Though students construct their virtual culture in the target language, there is never any intention to reproduce or even approximate some "authentic" foreign culture. Indeed, such assignments easily encourage students to use language to test the linguistic and conceptual limits of their own culture as well as the foreign culture.

Since we wanted our students to have even more opportunities for sophisticated reflection about the complex process of producing and receiving culture, the next assignment in this unit asks students to analyze each other's rooms and leave their owners a virtual note with a "reading" of that room. Sarah's and Debbie's analysis of Jean's room demonstrates how seriously students took this task of responding to their fellow student's writing. In the first part of their note, Sarah and Debbie comment on the kinds of things that they saw in the room&emdash;the fancy carpet and the number of books&emdash;and draw solid conclusions about what these objects might indicate about the owner&emdash;in this case, an intellectual disposition and a penchant for extravagance. Yet these two readers also proved sophisticated enough in the foreign language to read against the grain of Jean's text. Though Jean portrays her room in a thoroughly positive light, Sarah and Debbie also read an underlying tenor of sadness or aloneness conveyed by the room's serene atmosphere. In this sense, they recognize the same ambivalence in Jean's room that many students found in Rosa Luxemburg's phantasmatic optimism.

These public reflections on each other's work alerts students to the third critical dimension of using the MOO for cultural studies. As you know, in the MOO all the cultural artifacts are "public," that is, anything that students produce can be viewed by other users of the MOO at any time (unless students choose to lock or encrypt their objects). We believe that the public nature of work in the MOO refashions the classroom into a community of learners operating within a limited public sphere. In fact, our efforts to think about the learning environment students construct in MOOssiggang as a type of limited public sphere has helped us to emphasize the self-reflexive and political aspects of language learning. Though we only implicitly state this message, one student this semester characterized its impact on her own learning in her first self-assessment:

I really like the MOO. I am getting used to the fact that every object dropped by me is on display for all to see. The knowledge certainly puts pressure on me to write good German with interesting content, but it also makes me proud of the better pieces I've written. I think that once we begin to share our MOO space with real Germans, some of my paranoia will return, but at the moment I'm flourishing in the friendly, informal atmosphere of our MOO Räume. I find it interesting that in a chatroom environment, people drop their pretense of disinterest and become more immediately involved in discussions. The college student mentality helps in this case (we're here to work, so let's concentrate now and later we can socialize), but there's more to it: a feeling that they don't have an appearance to uphold, since no one can see what they look like anyway. I've always been more comfortable with writing than with talking, and the MOO lets me communicate in an interesting combination of conversation and essay… The knowledge that I'm under scrutiny isn't as restricting as I thought it would be; I can say pretty much what I mean, within the limits of my German.

As this student makes clear, the public nature of student work in the MOO contributes directly to language learning by raising the stakes of every utterance. Here, we see two important aspects. First, the MOO helps establish a strong democratic and inclusive learning environment, which is completely in line with the political project of cultural studies. This happens at the most basic level of class participation, since the decentralized structure of communication in the MOO allows everyone to participate, especially shy students or those with relatively weak oral skills. But, as this student's self-reflection also points out, in addition to increasing student participation in class discussions, the MOO also transforms student attitudes towards participation. Thus, the publicness of student work combined with the semi-anonymous nature of the space has the paradoxical effect of letting them drop their concern with appearance and perceive the space as friendly, informal and conducive to learning. Students indeed grow into a community of learners in the MOO, as Haynes and Holmevik have pointed out. Our students have spoken enthusiastically about the friendships that developed in the MOO, and several have been encouraged to participate in a JYA program or even go to Münster and visit MOO partners.

But in addition to these testimonies to the "community-building" aspects of the MOO, our efforts to reflect upon the cultural spaces in the MOO as limited public spheres produces a similar publicness about classroom practices, making them the site for critical self-reflection. As Jeff Peck theorizes, the metacritical aims of the "foreign" language classroom can only be realized when classroom practices become explicit and enable students to "recognize them as subjects of critical reflection that are ideologically rooted in particular political agendas" (12). To some extent, assignments asking students to articulate their learning goals and assess their learning led many to make the kind of reflective observations that we cited above. But we found other evidence (and unfortunately we don't have time to show it to you) that the decentered nature of work in the MOO also intuitively led students to thematize the classroom dynamics during their work in the MOO. Next year we hope to include additional activities that will help deepen these kinds of ethnographic reflections about our course and the roles that students and faculty play.

Conclusion

This type of public sphere-based, collaborative learning transforms many long-term language learning goals: First, by producing what Haynes and Holmevik call "cyphertexts" to characterize the multidimensional nature of writing in the MOO, students think of foreign language writing less as a mechanical process defined above all by grammatical accuracy and more as experiments in cultural analysis or in developing their own voices in the foreign language. Second, by allowing students to produce meaningful culture in a foreign language unsettles student expectations about the supposedly "natural" connections between language and culture and quickly removes the authority of the native speaker as a stable reference. Finally, focusing on the intellectual insights that can be gained from learning in the MOO pushes students to think about language less as a "practical skill" or tool and more as an adventure in learning. Ultimately, then, integrating the MOO into foreign language classes has helped us begin to shift the meaning of foreign language learning at Vassar College away from a sole focus on linguistic proficiency to language study, that is, a broader intellectual engagement with the foreign language and culture. In this way, we hope that our foreign language courses now offer students the same kinds of intellectual challenges they seek in other introductory courses across the curriculum&emdash;whether they be in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.

We thought that we would close this presentation with another short clip that gives some insight into how our students reacted to this project. This segment focuses on the transatlantic projects that the students completed with their Münster partners&emdash;something that we didn't get a chance to talk about in any detail in this talk. (Note: Video not yet available on the web.)

Works Cited

Berman, Russell. "Global Thinking, Local Teaching: Departments, Curricula and Culture." ADFL Bulletin 26.1 (1994): 7-11.

Holmevik, Jan Rune, and Cynthia Haynes. MOOniversity. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Kafka, Franz. "Der Bau." Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Max Brod. Vol. V. New York: Schocken Books, 1946. 172-214.

Luxemburg, Rosa. "Letter from the middle of December 1917." Deutsches Lesebuch. Von Luther bis Liebknecht. Ed. Stephan Hermlin. Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., 1976. 567-571.

Peck, Jeffrey M. "Toward a Cultural Hermeneutics of the 'Foreign' Language Classroom: Notes for a Critical and Political Pedagogy." ADFL Bulletin 23.3 (1992): 11-17.

[Updated: 4 June 2000]