OurSpace

by Evelyn Beck

On a recent trip chaperoning my college’s honor society, I asked some of the younger students about MySpace, which recently surpassed eBay to become one of the most popular places on the Web. An astonishing 26.7 million users pointed their browsers to www.myspace.com in November 2005, quintupling the number a year earlier. The students I talked to are among that number, and they admitted spending about two hours a day on the site.

“Two hours?” I asked. “Doing what?” Students face such a time crush; are they really giving up two hours a day of their limited time to a website?

Yes, they are. And what they do at this site is meet people with similar interests, a process that has been described as “friending.” Users of MySpace update their own carefully crafted sites and check them for short messages, or “bulletins,” left by friends; they look to see if they’ve got any new people who’ve labeled themselves friends; they visit friends’ sites to leave messages; and they might find new friends by clicking on links to the sites of friends of their friends. It sounds both simple and dull. But it’s the current rage, and quite addictive.

The exploding popularity of such social networking sites, most notably MySpace, got me thinking about whether any of their attractions might transfer into the online-education environment. We certainly don’t want to invite students to share their most private thoughts in personal blogs or to post revealing photos, as can happen on MySpace and similar sites (e.g., Facebook and Xanga). And we don’t want to encourage dishonesty, which can run rampant on these sites. I have encountered a fake page attributed to the principal of my son’s high school, and I discovered that my twelve-year-old nephew had presented himself as a twenty-one-year-old man.

But how can we resist the urge to tap into the enthusiasm these destinations generate? Allowing students to create personalized spaces and encouraging them to build a social network are two ways we might channel this zest constructively in the online academic landscape.

Personalized spaces

Giving our students a space within the class to personalize allows them to show their personality and makes them feel that they have a home in our class. It’s also a welcome addition to the standard course introductions, which are usually just blocks of text that all look alike. Our students thrive in a visual culture and are drawn to websites that let them express visually who they are.

With most courseware, unfortunately, this sort of self-expression is neither encouraged nor easily facilitated. In WebCT, for example, students can create a “homepage,” but this is really only a URL link to a page created by another site. Students can add text blocks and change the colors of their homepages, but doing so isn’t particularly easy, and the results aren’t very eye catching, especially for students who have manipulated web space much more dramatically on sites like MySpace.

So what are the alternatives? Perhaps the easiest solution is to allow students to create a site on MySpace (if they don’t already have one) and then link to that site from the course. The danger of such outside links is that they can lead students far from your course and expose them to things that are objectionable on less-regulated public spaces. And if your course provides links to objectionable material, that can reflect poorly on your course. It could even land you in hot water.

You can also lobby your courseware provider to get with the times and design features to let students inject their personalities into the course. The easiest way to make your voice heard is to post on a discussion board hosted by the courseware provider. This, of course, is the long view and offers no immediate solution to how you can encourage student self-expression.

So what can be done now? You might encourage the use of emoticons, silly icons that can be easily added to discussion board postings. (Just type “emoticons” into a search engine to lead you to codes for smiley faces, dancing candy, and more.) Or you might allow students to create and monitor their own discussion forums within the course on subjects of personal interest.

Social networking
One of the greatest pleasures of college is its social aspect. When students attend virtual classrooms, they often miss the social dimension. But given that so much interaction nowadays happens online, those of who teach via computer need to make it easier for students to connect this way.

One method for facilitating social networking is to use instant messaging, which is how many younger students prefer to contact one another. You might create a discussion thread in which students are invited to give their IM user names, if they are willing to be contacted this way by classmates. When students are online
late at night as a deadline looms, instant messaging can be a way to seek guidance for a last-minute question or simply agonize together on the assignment they’re all working on at the same time. Even if students’ use of IM has nothing to do with the course, it can foster a class community.

Team projects encourage smaller groups of students to get to know one another. Depending on whether you monitor team interactions or allow students privacy, most coursewares have a chat feature that allows students the option of recording a transcript of a chat session.

Finally, be sure students know how to use your courseware system’s internal email, which makes it easy to email a classmate. And be sure they know how to check email and recognize the icon that alerts them to new mail. Anything you can do to help online classmates get to know one other will transfer over into the more formal classroom exchanges.

The ultimate goal of emulating MySpace in the online classroom is to foster a sense of connection among students, to help them feel that our class is our space. It’s ironic that MySpace languished in its previous incarnation, which was as a site offering online storage space. When another company bought the URL, the meaning of “space” was re-imagined to become a “place” in the most personal
and desirable sense of the term. This distinction in meaning between “My Space” as a place to dump data that might be needed later and “My Space” as the place to be is illuminating. It’s an apt analogy for the difference between an online course, where students dutifully do what needs to be done, and an online course where students enjoy stopping by, never knowing what they might find.