Mr. Schweller created CollegeTown in 1994 to bring more of an academic flavor to the MOO environment. As a professor of computer science and psychology, he has published several papers on how computers and students can interact more effectively. They received three credits for the class. I wanted to give my students a taste of the world they will be inhabiting in the next millennium. He acknowledges that MOOs are still primitive models of networked communication.
Conversations overlap, especially when more than three people try to talk in one room.
It's sometimes hard to connect the various lines of conversation. Interactions in a MOO also may slide into rowdiness, as users experiment with the new technology. At the end of the recent poetry reading, for example, several students jumped into the fireplace. But Ms. Inglis credits Mr. Schweller with making CollegeTown a true learning environment. He makes it fun yet keeps it from slipping off into mere games.