Sep
28
(2006)
iUofC.com - student online campus community
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: socialsoftware, students, ucalgary.
iUofC.com is a community forum site created by students at UCalgary, offering a central off-campus student-managed place for students to share information about classes. It's currently a rather empty shell, with forums created for every class. As students find out about it, it's starting to slowly grow.
iUfoC.com Screenshot
The thing that blows me away about this "web *.0" stuff is that students are willing to take on large scale efforts completely on their own. Set up an open wiki, and students create tons of pages about what's important to them. Open up a forum system, and they fill it with topics important to them. If these tools had been provided by The University, would students be interested? It's awesome that the students don't need to wait for The University - they can come up with solutions as effective (or moreso) on their own. Power to the people. Right on.
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I tried doing something similar a couple of years back with no dice, so I gave up. UC seems to be transient in terms of people interested in participating online, at least from my vantage point at the time… and this site is an example of that. I think if the University were to provide these tools, it would help with the adoption of the tools to a great degree.. But even with weblogs and the wiki that you have going, the adoption is rather sluggish… and I think it’s sort of a chicken and egg problem… In order to have a conversation, first there must be something interesting to have a conversation about… to build that critical mass is difficult without some heavy handed marketing.
Sami - good points. I’d assume there are also groups of students on Facebook, MySpace, NoteMesh, stu.dicio.us, and gods know how many other communities are out there. Each may be well below critical mass, but it’s pretty cool that students are making/finding tools they can call their own. I’m a bit frustrated over the lack of activity on weblogs.ucalgary.ca and wiki.ucalgary.ca - but have been attributing that to the absolute lack of marketing/evangelizing I’ve been able to do. I should free up a chunk of a semester and just do a dog/pony road show on those…
Interesting– so this is completely created, managed outside the UC system? How does the Uni feel about this? Will the faculty, TAs start looking, participating?
It reminds me of when Brian found out about the UBC students setting up and running with their own wiki, outside the scope of what was being hosted internally.
Curious to see what it takes for the community to thrive, what is the critical mass? The few forums I scanned out had some moderate exchange, back and forth messages that were not more than SMS. What would engage students to bother to respond to each other?
Anyhow, it was worth learning about the SMF forum software.
Alan I have been thinking about your question and I think that it’s quite complex. In that you must first understand the needs of students, for instance notes might be one, photocopied exams may be another, some sort of goal that they can agree to — some sort of purpose. What is critical mass is when you generally have enough users available at any given time to address a topic and users to support that topic/conversation. I think looking at face book the social aspect revolves around user’s profiles, messages left on those profile. I think identity may be a significant component of web 2.0. But I mean we’re scratching the surface here, I am sure there are books out there about building and maintaing a community that can get to the crux of the matter. However, who exactly has the time or the effort required to build and maintain such a community, I don’t know… Why do people use facebook as much as they do, I don’t know, I am sure people have theories though… Those are a few of my thoughts. In terms of Pedagogy, I think catering to the social aspect of student’s interaction may be a definite step forward, but education and society, especially due to its secular, non-integrated nature, has shied away from that in that there is no social cohesiveness which binds all students. School want to pretend like the social culture is something seperate from the academic culture so other than perhaps providing clubs, there is no socially binding common denominator behind students other than perhaps classes that they attend… But are they really all that interested in the subject matter — or just the grades; I personally think its the latter… Some of these topics could be subjects of large studies, but all I can do is arm-chair philosophize about this stuff.
Meanwhile, I’ve created a wiki for UMass Amherst (population north of 26,000) and have gotten little more than transient interest out of the student body. There is one grad student teaching classes using the wiki.
Part of the problem is promotion, but I’ve saturated the Livejournal community to only mild effect.