MOOville needs to provide a MOO environment that allows a wide variety of instructors to teach the way they want. Historically, our system administrators have taken great pains to enable many teaching possibilities in the Networked Writing Environment. Though some classrooms seem to privilege a more traditional model of teaching, others allow a great deal of working space and make collaborative work easy for students and teachers alike. However, just as many instructors ask their students use the MOO as a writing tool, and require digging and construction of spaces which follow a logic of argument more than one of architecture. For these instructors, the presence of the wrong sort of metaphor can make it difficult to acclimate students to the styles needed for completing assignments for the class.
Collaboration needs to be more practical.
Of course, the MOO assumes every room is private, and it does not allow one person to create an entrance and exit in another's room. But it DOES create the room, without connecting it to anything, and assumes that the student will connect it later. Soon there are multiple rooms and exits connected to nothing, creating a technical problem for the 'walk' verb, and frustrating the students. System maintenance can be a nightmare. The final major problem comes at the end of every semester, when the 1700 student accounts on our Unix system are deleted.