Learning Unbound: Using MOOs for Classroom Collaboration

Academic discourse about curricular and pedagogical development increasingly emphasizes collaboration; this is especially true in discussions about the humanities, where traditionally scholarship and teaching have focused on the isolated scholar in the archive or in the field. Sometimes this new emphasis on collaboration is motivated by administrative pressures to hold down costs; other times it appears to be driven by anxieties over the diminishing role of humanities in an increasingly preprofessional undergraduate curriculum. For example, Reed Way Dasenbrock (2004: 67) has recently argued that "departments in languages and literatures ought to be proposing, joining, or otherwise getting involved with at least one visible, preferably highly visible, interdisciplinary project on their campus." In this way, English departments can bask in the associated glory of their partner disciplines. Many times, however, collaboration's supporters argue that there are unique pedagogical benefits inherent in the practice. As Philip E. Smith II (2001: n.p.) has noted, "Collaborative teaching, whether of general education courses in humanities and social sciences or of courses in English studies, offers a significantly different kind of educational experience for both students and teachers, an experience that puts forward more than one point of view and that lends itself to the presentation of multidisciplinary or multispecialist perspectives on a subject." From this point of view, collaboration helps students see that education is less about the acquisition and repetition of settled dogma, but rather about engagement with the life of the mind, or, at any rate, about thinking in innovative, productive ways about the world.

Concurrent with this renewed emphasis on collaboration is the call to invest (financially, of course, but also in faculty time) heavily in information technologies. Indeed, this discussion looks familiar: There are administrative arguments that information technology will help colleges realize cost savings (arguably by eroding tenure and/or academic freedom, or by increasing the dependence on part-time labor). But there is also a powerful argument to be made that the adoption of networked technologies in the classroom is, like collaboration itself, transformative. Moreover, these technologies are generally seen to be inherently collaborative—they are, after all, networked technologies. A self-conscious emphasis on collaborating through the deployment of new technologies would seem, then, to offer a kind of pedagogical two-for-one: the material conditions of the wired classroom arguably reproduce the collaborative design of the course. This is, in effect, the argument of the various contributors to Cynthia Selfe and Susan Hilligoss's Literacy and Computers (1994), an important early work in the computers-and-composition movement.

In the remainder of this essay, we defend this proposition by describing one such online collaboration, a set of paired courses exploring literary and cultural responses to the Industrial Revolution in England and the United States. In our experience, what was especially effective was not the willy-nilly adoption of technology for its own sake—Look! An online discussion board!—but rather the careful linking of the technological tool—in our case, MOOs (Multi-User Domain Object Oriented, discussed below)—with the courses' learning objectives.

While postdoctoral fellows at the Georgia Institute of Technology, we recognized the potential to engage our students and ourselves through collaboration, and we decided to formulate courses that would complement each other. We had originally planned to teach independent courses on American Romanticism and on technology and industrialism in Victorian England, but after many conversations about our respective courses, we instead decided to work closely throughout the semester so we could offer students a perspective of the Industrial Revolution by creating assignments that would allow them to collaborate as they explored the transatlantic and interdisciplinary connections between our courses. While we each created independent courses, we designed projects that would allow our students to work together to explore how issues of work, slavery, agriculture, machines, religion, and other issues were represented on either side of the Atlantic. Through such projects, we hoped our students would gain a more thorough understanding of the Industrial Revolution by drawing not only upon our individual courses, but upon the perspectives learned in the other class as well.

We...