The Instructor's Perspective In the MOO students can record their interactions as they brainstorm ideas for a group project, review each other's individual efforts, or work collaboratively to produce a group-authored document. Further, transcripts allow students to focus on the task at hand, yet maintain a lasting record of what was said for later review.
MOOs are all about textual interaction.
What transcripts demonstrate is that students can benefit from struggling with communication as they work collaboratively toward some pedagogically productive end. The four transcript excerpts below illustrate a MOO-based peer review session in an English 102 course. Students were asked to review each other's rough drafts of one of the major essays for the course, which is a fairly standard assignment for composition courses. The review was focused around a short series of questions provided by the teacher and answered by students in advance. These transcripts illustrate various ways in which students must negotiate rhetorically the construction of knowledge in this MOO classroom.