Stephen Downes

Speaking of games, I had the happiest discovery the other day - archive.org has captured my personal site from six years ago, including a great deal of material I thought was long lost. Included in this material is the full set of background and discussion transcripts for a CADE seminar Jeff McLaughlin, Terry Anderson and I hosted on a MUD in 1996. If you follow some of the other links you can see the genesis of what is Stephen's Web today - following the Brandon link, for example, takes you to an early (1997) version of what would now be called blog software. The Certificate in Adult Education course from 1996 is present in its entirety. Clicking on Old Home takes you to my archives from 1997, displaying even earlier versions of my web page. None of the backgrounds display through archive.org but they can be retrieved, so I'm now in the process of reconstructing this lost material.

CRLFNow when I talk about learning objects today, you should always keep in mind my background. McLaughlin and I, along with István Berkeley (who also shared with me a passion for neural nets) and Wes Cooper, did a lot of work on MUDs in the early 90s - 1992, 93 and 94. I ran a MUD called Atahabsca MUD, which was removed from that university's servers in 1995, and Jeff and I collaborated on the Painted Porch MAUD, site of the CADE conference. When I think of an object, it is always with this in the back of my mind. On a MUD, everything is an object - the rooms are objects, the people are objects, the goblets are objects. They are things that are located in an environment which can be explored, examined, read, displayed, or whatever. This is still the mental image I have of objects, and the MUD gaming environment is still the model I keep in my mind for learning of the future.

CRLFI wish I could take everybody back ten years, back to the days when we were all virtual beings in a virtual world, with what we know today, and then talk about the potential. A lot has happened since then - people didn't want 'games' they wanted courses (like the CAE course), then they wanted course portals, then the concept of an 'object' was twisted and bent out of shape so that it came more to represent a chapter in a textbook than it did a next-generation learning tool. I wish I could show you my I Ching guru, the quests that I built, my simulation of Plato's Cave. Even today, the projects I work on are quite literally pulled back into the horse-and-buggy era of educational design. I can't stop people from thinking that learning is about universities, and that online is about the LMS or LCMS, but I can cling to the vision and wait for a more enlightened age.