Creating an Academic Online Community
Posted by Sean Gardinier on October 29th, 2007
My former website has recently joined the discarded static html virtual dump. Though my trash can be someone else’s treasure, I kicked my old teaching resource to the curb. Having students access the web for content is a thing of the past. It simply is not “cool” anymore. Want to know what’s cool? Ask a group of teenagers. Never ask just one teenager or a number of teenagers individually - you’ll only hear what they think you want to hear. Ask a group of teenagers what they like to do on the internet. Surrounded by peers, they’ll tell you what is in and what is cool on the internet.
Ignoring specifics, my students tell me they engage in four different activities: gaming, downloading media, messaging, and social networking. Static html pages just can’t compete with this!
After experiences with participating in online interest communities over the past many years, I wanted to give it a try in my classroom. 2 years ago, MrG-Online.com got a side-kick: phpBB. Introducing online forums to students is one of the coolest things that can happen to a classroom. phpBB is a world-class internet forum component that is open source and written in php. It was an easy transition for the MySpace users and a surprisingly fun way to interact as a class. Internet forums have been out for a very long time and are very popular with online interest groups. For two years, my static site, though highly utilized for class news, assignments, and document downloads, was becoming an entry point to our developing online academic community in the forums.
Rare things happened in the forums. Students wrote more, gathered after hours to discuss homework, and some students logged in after they left our middle school for high school to help other students and just to say hi!
Moving to a website, I knew a completely interactive site would have potential to do more of the other things teenagers like to do like social networking and sharing media (I squeeze gaming in there but for now, I link them to outside science and math games). phpBB would be the heart of our new community. It is the classroom and the lunch court.
…more to follow