Behind the Scenes

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I've been training folks for the last few years to use MOO, both as a writing tutoring tool and for instructional purposes. Along the way, I've encountered a lot of resistance. So few people follow through. Training sessions usually occur over the course of three hours in one day. Meanwhile, I've routinely used MOO in my composition classrooms for an hour per week over the course of ten weeks. At first, students react in similar ways, later they acclimate to the new environment.

Easier is not always better. I feel that resistance to the environment is probably a result of our comfort with traditional methods of instructions, i.e. the f2f classroom.

I was teaching Dillard, Thoreau, and Emerson last summer to some high school students. I'd taught the nature essays before in a junior composition class. On a whim, I took the students outside for a freewriting activity focused on the natural environment and related to the essays we've read. I was impressed by the effect of the change of environment as it related to our subject matter and task. Before then, I would never teach class outside, although it is easily done on our campus. It always felt easier to stick with the environment I was acclimated to.

Maybe, we need to articulate, then, how the MOO environment relates to the activities we are performing there and how those relate to the subject matter being covered in the class.