The Zarathustra Project

There is a widespread demand for general, all-purpose platforms for e-teaching. It is argued that such platforms are ill suited to explore the wide range of possibilities opened up by digital communication technologies, in particular by object oriented MOO servers. Drawing on the author’s use of a LambdaMOO server in teaching Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” the innovative potential of interactive, virtual text-worlds is explored. Computer assisted teaching is an increasingly popular research topic. Recently I’ve been interviewed by journalists as well as graduate students collecting material for radio features or M.A. reports. It has been a painful experience. One is, of course, accustomed to the rule of slogans in media society. But it is difficult to surpass the simple-mindedness shown by self-appointed experts on e-teaching. The repertoire of questions one is usually asked is extremely limited: “What tools are you using?” “Which features are missing?” “How much time do you spend?” And technical expertise is often lacking. Vienna University, Austria’s largest, has just awarded its top prize for innovative teaching to a project based on a MSN community’s site running in the Seattle area. According to several participants recurring breakdowns of the remote server were quite frustrating. So, why did they pick this service in the first place? The reason given is instructive: Because Vienna University still lacks a single, comprehensive e-learning system. [1] This is the stuff disasters are made of. The superficiality of such attitudes is, if I may say so, deeply disturbing. E-learning is considered on a par with e-mail or e-banking: you need one, or at most a few, global standards governing a limited number of relevant transactions. In case your university cannot yet supply the necessary tools just join a convenient subnet somewhere else on the planet. It makes good sense to users of “hotmail.com”, but it is a problematic move when it comes to university teaching. One would expect academic teachers to show more concern for the uniqueness of context in learning environments. Scholarly freedom does, after all, imply autonomy in picking and transforming the required methodological apparatus. University-wide teaching systems should, therefore, be regarded with extreme caution. It does not follow that, just because all courses are (helpfully) registered in a database and graded according to (hopefully) common criteria, they conform to some set of simple pedagogical principles implemented by an all-purpose software platform.