Diversity University

» see du.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The campus had a floor plan and no building. Diversity University was a MOO, a text world you reached over telnet, and its organizing idea was that the space you were moving through was a university. Guests landed in a room inside the Student Union. From there you typed a compass direction to get to the next room, or "out" to reach the hallway, and you kept typing until you arrived at the building that held the class you were looking for.

Jeanne McWhorter built it in the summer of 1993, while she was a sociology graduate student at the University of Houston, and she was its first arch-wizard. Her stated reason was getting social workers online: her field was full of people who believed computers made human contact worse, and she thought the opposite, that people say more about themselves when they are typing. MOOs already existed by then, LambdaMOO had opened in 1990, but they were social spaces or games. This was the first one built to teach in.

By the middle of the decade it carried over four thousand educators and students. It charged faculty nothing, and it did not need to charge them much, because a text world runs on almost no hardware and a student on a slow line can still read text. That was written into the mission statement in so many words, an environment meant to stay usable for people who were disabled or working with limited technology. Whatever else it was, it was cheap to reach.

The years here do not overlap with mine at any useful point. In 1993 I was nine and this country's internet was a single research link; by the time I was on a modem at home in 1998, DU was five years old and the web had already taken everything a text world could do and put pictures on it. This was a tool for the person running the class, not the person sitting in it, and it needed an American faculty account in 1994 to be any use. I was on the wrong side of the desk and the wrong side of the ocean.

~ the record ~

~ the campus had a floor plan ~

The spatial metaphor was not decoration. When somebody with building rights made a new room, they were told to use @dig properly so the room attached to an existing hallway rather than floating loose, which meant the campus stayed walkable as it grew. An architecture master's thesis on virtual environments used DU's campus as its worked example of the idea.

The magic part sat on top of the realism. You could teleport with @go or jump straight to a person with @join, and rooms could be locked against that. Somebody built a tour globe that walked visitors through the English department's rooms on its own. Second Life and every 3D campus that came later are running this same set of ideas with a rendering engine bolted on.

~ what the teachers built in there ~

In spring 1994 Leslie Harris at Susquehanna University and Cynthia Wambeam at the University of Wyoming paired their composition classes and held joint discussions inside the MOO. The pedagogical argument was almost too neat: a text world forces students to make their point in writing or not make it at all.

Then it got stranger and better. Harris's students rebuilt circles of Dante's Inferno as connected rooms you descended through, populated with bots. Somebody made an interactive Waste Land. R. J. LaRoe built a Moby-Dick world called MOO Bedford. Tom Danford at West Virginia Northern Community College taught microbiology by assigning each group a pathogen and making them build a room that accurately described it, so a student learning the structure of an organism was also documenting it for everyone who walked in later. Marcus Speh ran an eight-week C++ course in there with about eighty registrants, and it took a Best of the Web award at the first World Wide Web conference in 1994.

~ nobody would carry the server ~

DU started on a machine at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and did not stay there. It moved twice more, to Marshall University and then the University of Wisconsin at Parkside, because it kept running short of money and institutional backing. The nonprofit that eventually ran it was called DU Educational Technology Services.

This is the part that killed it, and it is worth being blunt about the mechanism. Free to the people using it is not the same as free. Somebody was always paying for the box and the bandwidth, and that somebody was a university department doing a favor, and favors end when the person who granted them changes jobs. Thirteen years of that is a long run. The site went dark in 2006 and du.org was allowed to lapse on 26 October that year.

~ what came after it ~

The wizards had built a set of classroom objects that reads like a feature list somebody is selling you today. A Generic Slide Projector pushed prepared text at everyone in the room so the instructor did not have to type it live. A $note worked as a blackboard students could read on arrival. A Generic Recording Device transcribed the session for review afterward. A faculty member with no programming background could make one by creating an object from the parent class and inheriting everything.

Tari Fanderclai's criticism at the time was that faculty kept trying to make the MOO behave like a lecture hall instead of using what it could actually do, and that argument has been rerun in every online teaching platform since. What DU proved is that the tools are not the hard part. The hard part is that somebody has to keep the machine on, and for thirteen years nobody would commit to doing that.

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