From: Barry Kort Subject: MuseNet Collaborations To: ednet@noc1.oit.umass.edu Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 15:12:13 -0400 (EDT) Cc: bkort@musenet.org (Barry Kort) Greetings, EdNetters. This is the 4th installment in my saga on innovations in educational technology. I want to mention one of the spinoffs of the MicroMuse Project that is of special interest. I mentioned before that the teenage daughter of MIT Prof Hal Abelson started a Muse on her father's machine at the AI Lab at MIT. TimeMuse was the first Muse run entirely by and for high school students with virtually no supervision by adults. I have no doubt that 'Aries' sought advice from her parents from time to time, but she and her hand-selected cadre of Wizards ran TimeMuse pretty much on their own. TimeMuse never drafted a Social Contract, and at times it was a wild and wooly place. Someday I hope 'Aries' and her parents will share with us their experience from the operation of TimeMuse. One of the more enterprising projects on TimeMuse was 'Oceana', a section where people could construct islands with arbitrary political systems. Oceana was defined as an experiment in alternative systems of governance ranging from anarchy to democracy and everything in between and beyond. Eventually the Oceana section of TimeMuse grew too large to remain part of TimeMuse, and it was moved to a new site. It was a rocky road. The SysOp of the first site tried to steal Oceana from the students operating it, and then tried to destroy it. Oceana then moved to a stable platform at CNIDR (Consortium for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval) in North Carolina, under the sponsorship of 'Eri' (Jane Smith), the professional Cybrarian there. Oceana now runs on a DEC Alpha at the San Diego Supercomputer Center under the supervision of Hans-Werner Braun. DEC donated the Alpha partly to support OceanaMuse. The students who built and managed Oceana have gained enormous experience from their venture. They lay claim to being the largest Muse in the MuseNet system (and running on one of the most powerful host systems). Look for the names 'Morgoth' and 'Keymaster' on Oceana. They made it happen. Late in 1994, Wally Feurzeig (our Senior Scientist at BBN) visited Kirstie Bellman at ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency). He planned to tell her about the Muse. He didn't have to. She already knew about Muds and Muses and had been frequenting one called DragonMud at San Diego State. It turns out that Kirstie's professional colleagues at Atlantic Aerospace (A Federally Funded Research and Development Center) had stumbled onto Muds about the same time I had. Because of the their technical work in Artificial Intelligence (in particular, Intelligent Agents), they were impressed with the AI Robot characters found on the Muds. Michael Mauldin (Dr. Fuzzy) was a grad student at Carnegie-Mellon when he created 'Julia', the first of a line of 'Maas-Neotek Robots' which inhabited the Muds created by co-researcher Jim Aspnes. It was the robots who got the folks at Atlantic Aerospace hooked. They ended up co-administering DragonMud which operates to this day. But I digress. Wally knew all about MicroMuse, and Kirstie knew all about DragonMud, but our two camps had never met. So they conceived the first ARPA MudShop to explore the educational possibilities of the Muds and Muses. The first ARPA MudShop was held at MIT's off-campus retreat, Endicott House, in Needham MA. About 50 professional researchers attended. We had been discovered by The Establishment. The second ARPA MudShop is scheduled for late summer in San Diego. Real people are interested. We have serious researchers from Xerox PARC, BBN, MIT, Northeastern Univ., and various defense-industry research agencies. My oh my. Meantime, the National Science Foundation has shown interest, too. The NSF Directorate on the Applications of Advance Technology wants to see the technology envelope pushed, and has begun to fund some work in Distributed Architecture Muds. That means a Mud or Muse could outgrow the limits of a single machine and run on a network of distributed hosts. This is techie and non-trivial. It's also important for a variety of reasons that are best left to the interior paragraphs of a tightly-worded 15-page proposal. Finally we get to WhaleNet. The NSF had funded a planning grant at Simmons and Wheelock colleges to bring together the world-wide community of researchers in whales and marine habitats, and to provide a way for them to collectively develop and disseminate educational materials and modules to the K12 community. I met the WhaleNet folks through a mutual friend who had attended the ARPA MudShop. They had spent some of their NSF dollars to buy a Sparc machine for their Web and Gopher Server for WhaleNet. There was only one problem. The folks in the Biology Department at Simmons College were not Unix gurus. They needed help with the Sparc. "No problem," I said, "I have a cadre of Unix geniuses on MuseNet. Let me ask them." And I did. Immediately, 'Frnkzk' and 'Zephyr' (both 16 and wizards on MicroMuse) volunteered. Within 2 1/2 weeks, Frnkzk, Zephyr, and I had that Sparc up and running with Web and Gopher servers, E-Mail service, and Domain Name Service. This is akin to assembling a car from parts, where the car arrives disassembled and half the desired options are missing. I attended the NSF site visit to WhaleNet last month. Some of the participating researchers operate ocean-going research vessels which track whale migrations. Satellite connectivity from these marine labs costs a tidy 1 cent per character for E-Mail. Ouch. So I suggested we look into Internet Packet Radio. I put out a call for volunteers on the UseNet NewsGroup, rec.radio.amateur. And lo and behold, within 24 hours I had several responses including one from a researcher at Xerox who was doing Internet Packet Radio and just happened to be doing her own recordings of humpback whales on the side. I invited her to post her research and recordings on the whalenet Web server. Ain't networking wonderful? This weekend, I'm going on the annual Cape Cod Bike Trip with some folks from MIT and from Cognex (a Boston high-tech company). Guess what? One of the MIT bikers is gonna bring his amateur radio/TV gear, complete with Internet capability. Another win. It's hard to foresee the many opportunities for collaboration and learning which the Internet provides. In many ways, this work is an act of faith, that unimagined payoffs await the intrepid cybernaut. In the next installment, I'll switch gears and talk about the theoretical underpinnings of Project-Based Learning, and I'll share with you my Spiritual Model of 'Communitas'. Barry