on why I'm a horrible student....

There's any number of reasons why I'm a horrible student. For one, I hold my professors to the same standards I hold myself as an instructor, so when it's been 3 months since I took a training course in hybrid teaching and the teacher still hasn't caught up on grading--I'm irate. I complain a lot. I hate students that complain a lot. I realize that this smacks of irony, and I make no move to change.

But I am also a horrible student because if you put a computer in front of me, I will most likely not be doing whatever the heck it is you want me to do in class. I'll do it, and rather than sitting there waiting for further instruction, I'll be the kid with another window open putzing around, checking my e-mail, answering my own student's questions, redesigning my website, or... you know... whatever. No, I'm not going to browse to myspace or facebook, but really, is doing other work any better? And if multi tasking attracts me this much, and I know it does, how am I supposed to say "no! bad student! no cookie!" when one of them does it?

I was in a course my first year of Masters work that was all about using technology in the classroom and nothing else. I signed up for the course because technology was my concentration and it "fit." What didn't fit was how many hours we spent in a lab, listening to lecture, and being encouraged to use the software/hardware we were discussing at the same time.

One day, our class was learning how to create MOO pages on LinguaMOO. MOOS are multi user role playing systems that have also been used successfully to emulate classrooms. They're a synchronous chat tool, and you can also record conversations and leave notes and use them like message boards. The latest versions employ HTML, though when I learned to use one back in 1998-1999 they were strictly text based only (go left, walk north, read notice, and so on).

I decorated my room in the MOO, and then quickly grew bored. See, when I was a senior in high school a friend from my future school had made me an account on the MOO system. He knew I liked computers, and he said I could play around and learn MOO programming. I learned to make objects that people could play with. For example, one of the first objects most people make is a bottle of pepsi (or whatever) that can be drank a certain number of times by other users (so you have a variable built in called number of drinks, and each time you subtract 1, and when it's all "gone" you can auto change the description to be an empty bottle of whatever). Objects can be picked up and moved, or move themselves. Objects can also imitate people and respond as people (and oh, this will be important later).

But that day, I started dorking around with creating objects. Julie had woken up that morning to a bat hanging over her futon, and guano on her futon. So I made a little bat that would make noise periodically ("The bat goes EEK!" would then punctuate our discussion online, as well as the overhead projection running of the MOO--nice). It flew around, oh, and left a big pile of poo every hour or so (which was set to disappear after 3 just so that poo wouldn't build up all over the MOO). She was amused. I made a little dog, and then I designed a car (for vehicles can be made to warp into private rooms).

Essentially, I wanted to show my teacher that students can do all SORTS of things on MOOs that we don't really want them to do. Sadly enough, I'm not sure he got that. He was just all "nifty!" while I was sort of peeved that he wasn't worried that I had gotten access to his private room where grades and documents were kept. Sorry, but sometimes students DO know how to do these things, and even if they don't, there's great directions on how to do it online.

So, class is coming to a close, and we decide to meet from home for the next class period. Everyone is to log on at 7 in the morning...

7... in the ... freaking .... morning.

Ha. Yeah the heck right.

Soooo, I read the readings very very completely and wrote up some very good responses to them. I created a copy of my character in the MOO. I put this "fake me" into the classroom. And then I set it to respond to certain words in other people's posts. (Again, it was programmed to only say each thing once, and it did manage to respond to several direct questions. I already knew this class turned into a clusterfuq as soon as conversation started, personal questions were often not answered).

And then I slept right through class.

And nobody noticed.

Now, some people I've told this story to said that any student that did that had done the assignment. They had studied more and worked harder than potentionally anybody else in the class, and earned the sleep. I still consider it cheating, and I wouldn't want my students to do it. If I want to have a synchronous chat I want them there, not some parrot of themselves there. And so ultimately this use of technology wasn't fair.

But, you get me near technology and that's what happens. I become the bad kid. I just can't help it.