As teachers, like many other professionals, we are always searching for better ways to accomplish our goals, and we are always searching for methods and materials that improve upon our delivery, especially of writing instruction, which has redefined itself several times over to readjust to paradigm shifts in our views of what composition is over the past several decades. Basically, we can all agree that writing is the tangible expression of ideas, concepts, and abstractions. We wish for teaching methods that could somehow capture the collaborative process of idea exchange through discussion and synthesize these conversations with written texts to create objects more quickly, more comprehensively, and more easily, while at the same time, extending the boundaries of the traditional classroom to include students who may not be able to make it to campus because of a sick child, or a business trip, or a physical disablility, and to include audiences who are not part of our traditional classroom.
MUDs are interactive in real-time.
When one says something on the MUD, all the intended recipients see it immediately. They can answer in the amount of time it takes to type their response. MUDs are a networked service. Clients and servers simply need to be on the same network in order to connect to each other. Thus one need not be logged into the same computer as the people with whom one is communicating.