Case study #2: Community-building
Wayne MacPhail, Mohawk College
I stress understanding the community-building aspect of online. If you don't
create a sense of community around your content, via feedback or discussion
forums or audio feedback, then you're really not effectively making use
of the web.
When Wayne MacPhail first taught the Online Writing courses at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ont., some students wanted to build their own websites for the main course assignment. He was skeptical of the learning value, but he agreed to see what they could produce.
"It was a mistake," he admits dryly. "As students who are first experimenting with the web tend to do, they produced sort of ransom-note sites. Dreadful colours -- it was really awful. They wasted their time on it."
The experience strengthened MacPhail's resolve to turn students' attention away from graphic design and focus it on text and interactivity based on text. The result is a course in which students produce all of their assignments with only about 20 minutes of software instruction.
The students' collaborative websites don't have Flash content or video clips. Even photos are optional.
"I'm very focused on the words in the classes," he says. "We're designing a site in a usability and information architecture sense. So we're paying attention to the words we use for navigation buttons and links, and for heads and subheads. We're not worrying about colours and pictures."
MacPhail's focus draws from an extensive career as an educator and consultant, not from any lack of experience with content creation tools. He has a distinguished work history as a newspaper and magazine editor. His experience in the online news industry includes content production for organizations including CANOE and Sympatico-Lycos. In addition to his part-time teaching at Mohawk, he runs a communications company that targets the education sector.
MacPhail instructs the students in using a powerful piece of collaboration software -- a wiki [user-editable website] called Project Forum. The product has an extensive set of community-building features that allow content creators to activate discussion forums, track activity and syndicate headlines.
He urges his students to use tools such as these to pursue the course's primary goal of engaging a community and using the relationship to produce superior journalism.
"I stress understanding the community-building aspect of online," he says. "If you don't create a sense of community around your content, via feedback or discussion forums or audio feedback -- if it's a podcast, whatever -- then you're really not effectively making use of the web."
The students complete only a single assignment for the course, but MacPhail grades them on stages of their preparation as they conceive of their project and ultimately execute it. He begins the course by describing the differences between online content and print content. He engages them in discussing effective uses of text in headlines, subheads and quotations. He then progresses to such topics as site usability, building a prototype and testing it from the user perspective.
The course instruction is preparation for a seven-week assignment that involves creating an interactive website of at least five stories focused on a target community. MacPhail says an important part of the assignment is for students get outside of their own experiences. So he requires them to focus on a community they aren't part of.
"I really stress that -- and get them early on building a website for a specific target audience." he says. "They come up with a list of survey questions that they either do in person or online. They ask the user base, test the assumptions that they have about them and start learning about [the kind of site the community] would be interested in seeing designed."
MacPhail says the students learn a lot when they finally "wash" the results of their interviews with their early assumptions. He says the assignment and the class discussions are effective lessons in acknowledging diversity and responding to a community. He adds that a crucial part of the assignment is for students to demonstrate that they have learned from their interactions with the audience.
"What are you going to change about how you communicate with that group based on what you now know?" he asks the students. "I need to see that growth and development -- and then see that translated into actual language and information architecture that makes me realize that they've talked to this group."
Currently, MacPhail expects students to use fairly traditional means of expressing data generated from their research. As an example, he says a typical website topic uses text to explore the experience of Muslim students attending Mohawk College. ("So, what would be of interest to Muslim students? What mosques are available in town? Or Halal foods?"). But next year he says he'd like to experiment with journalistic applications of Web 2.0 tools. Using interactive technologies such as mapping software the students could chart the mosques in Hamilton and then link the data to an overview of Muslim sects to determine how far various communities must travel to attend prayer. Or create an interactive map of Halal meat stores in town.
"There is tremendous potential in terms of mapping technologies, discussion forums, shared pictures and tagging, and RSS feeds. Most students, apart from what tools they know about from [social networking site] MySpace[.com], really aren't aware of things like folksonomic tagging [user-generated categorizations of content] or Rich Site Summaries [headline syndication]. It's not in their vocabulary," he says.
Right now his teaching eschews production skills such as HTML in favor of enhancing students' ability to collaborate effectively online.
"Those are things like the ability to moderate a discussion forum without bias -- and also an understanding of what libel online is in terms of due diligence required by discussion [moderators]," he says.
And if that means student websites continue to have little visual flash -- including Flash -- that's quite all right with him.
"They look very plain vanilla and that's exactly what they are meant to look like."