| Build A Low-Cost Virtual
Community With Your Students Getting Started: A History of the gracie.smsu.edu WebBoard |
Through the support of Dr. Donald Landon and the Public Affairs Steering Committee, I set up an experimental World Wide Web server in his office. This server, gracie.smsu.edu, is housed on a typically configured Windows 95 computer (300 MHz Intel Pentium II processor, 64 MB RAM, 6.0 GB hard drive) and connected to the Internet through the SMSU campus network. It runs on Microsoft Personal Web Server, which comes bundled with Microsoft's Front Page 98 World Wide Web management software, and is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to anyone with Internet access.
After some testing of possible software packages, I selected O'Reilly WebBoard 2.0 and installed it in time to be tested by students in two Summer Semester 1998 classes. This version (since superseded by version 3.0) has ten "conferences" on each of two "boards," for a total of twenty possible discussion groups. After selecting a username and password, users have full privileges to read and post messages in any of the conferences. The WebBoards are administered by the proprietor of gracie.smsu.edu.
To date, there are no formal terms of service and considerable latitude is allowed, although a very small number of egregiously unsuitable articles have been deleted.
My Fall 1998 section of the Freshman Honors Seminar expressly required its students to discuss public affairs on the Internet and to create World Wide Web pages on a public affairs issue of their choice. The "UHC 110" discussion group very quickly became a popular forum for discussing issues of interest to new SMSU students, such as roommates, dorm food, and the opposite sex. For a fuller treatment of the personally oriented discussions, click here.
The "Public Affairs" discussion group, by comparison, took roughly a month to catch on. But once the class defined "Public Affairs" as including any public concern that a citizen considers worth special attention, this discussion group also developed a regular clientele. In a pleasant but somewhat unexpected development, other students, from the German discussion group and the Summer Semester discussion groups, began to take part in the "Public Affairs" group. The cadre of twenty or so regular "Public Affairs" regulars brought a wide range of backgrounds, life experiences, and belief systems to their discussions. As one could have predicted with topics such as gun control and abortion, the conversations were often heated, and more often than not, they ended with the participants agreeing to continue disagreeing. But it speaks well of the participants that a civil tone was kept at all times, and the protracted verbal feuding known on the Internet as "flaming" was all but absent.
We continue to root around for ways to recruit new participants.
Flaming and free speech issues
This is not to say that flaming was completely absent, however. Two of the regulars, "DB" and "Mags," developed (for whatever reason) such a mutual antipathy that I created a separate flame conference for them. But only three times in the last year have I deleted posts on the spot because of language issues.
Return to the Outline Page