Why so serious, Firball?

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So mainly, we want to have something to roll out before the new school year starts.  We thought about and considered our four main stakeholders groups, the potential users who will be using Claremont Conversation Onlin:

1) The Freshmen, who don't know anything about the schools, CGU life, etc.
2) Students who are in their coursework, who know the school but are really busy
3) For students finished with coursework, who have more time, and are looking for different kinds of resesarch, research questions, etc.
4) Faculty

To us, the most important of these four user groups to target are the Freshmen.  Not that we aren't taking the other three groups into consideration, but we're aware that the longer one has been at Claremont, the harder it will be to convert them into a steady user of CCO: They're already ingrained in their ways, and are unlikely willing to learn to adopt something like CCO into a daily or weekly routine.  We agree that if we get the Freshmen as they come it, and get them to use the system from the very start of their time here at CGU, then we can hold onto them and count on their continued participation in the system.  We can focus on functionality targeting the Freshmen first, and focus on the other requirements afterwards.

Again, the four major ideas we had for CCO were the following:
-User Groups (for any topics from new students who want to find out about free lunch on campus, which courses to register for their first year, what they should know about their professors, health insurance for Claremont students, what are good restuarants around/near to campus etc.; to more advanced students who want to know how about to get published, conferences, grant opportunities, etc.).
-Peer Review (for students who want to post their research and get feedback from their peers)
-CCO Classifieds (for students looking to sell/buy furniture, text books, cars, etc. Ex: A student might be moving out of a dorm, and would like to sell his/her furniture, or a student might want to sell textbooks from a previous semester, or a recent grad might want to sell his/her car before s/he has to move back home)
-Research Partner Finder (for students searching for a specific skill for their research, e.g. "I have a resesarch idea, but I'm not good at stats, and I need a stats person." "I have a system I would like to develop, but I need to find someone who can program in PHP.")

Of these, the functionality we saw that would most likely appeal to new students coming in next year would be
User Groups and CCO Classifieds.  User groups would benefit new students coming in - especially those who aren't from Claremont or Califronia - who want to know about campus life, what they should know about courses in advance, what they can do around Claremont in their free time etc.  And CCO Classifieds would be a good place for new students moving in who might want to buy furniture/vehicles/textbooks from current or outgoing students.

We singled out these two requirements as the ones to focus on implementing before the Fall semester.  We will need to move fast, as summer's almost over, and we only have around 4 weeks before Orientation, where we will make our push to convert new users to CCO right from the start.  There are two obstacles we need to overcome with CCO before we can have it prepared for Orientation: A software obstacle, and a people obstacle.

The software obstacle involves implementing these requirements within CCO.  Now, CCO as it is (ELGG platform) is very Blog & Wiki-centric.  For User Groups, ELGG already has groups ('communities') that users can join.  However, Classifieds seems like something that would best be done in a Bulletin Board/Message Board system...  Since CCO has been Nathan and Brian's blood, sweat, and tears, I'll probably have to ask them what lies in CCO's potential (hell, Brian's probably reading this right now. Hey Brian, how's your summer?).

The people obstacle involves motivating people to actually use the system.  Our big fear is that come September, new students will login to see what's in CCO, and be greeted to empty barren user groups with no content.  So our first order of business on the people side would be to populate the system with initial content that we predict new users would want to see (i.e. for user groups, what should we know about our professors, our first classes, campus life, etc.).  Our current idea to overcoming this obstacle is to get GSC members to provide this initial info.  However, according to Bradley, the GSC population has decreased this year, and participation in this endeavor might be hard to find.  So, we're currently thinking of setting up a Committee solely for the purpose of prepping CCO (a la the Social Events Committee, the Constitution Committee. All GSC members must be part of 2 Committees, so...).  Another idea would to be to get the respective student councils (or labs... SL^2) of each department to populate the system with data.

Current plan is to work on the software side for the next two weeks, when a stutus update will be provided at the next meeting.

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First question of the day, on the lack of wireless Internet access in the new student housing: What would it cost to link it [campus housing] to our [wireless] network here?

Answer: Not on the scale of any of the other things we do. It’s not like they need to lay fiber across the road.
There’s nothing in the capital budget for that, so if it’s five-figures’ worth, it [the cost] is still non-trivial, though to not provide it for the students is (again, Dr. Ryan’s phrase_ penny-wise and pound-foolish.

So if it’s a load issue, with 200 residents sitting on their laptops, on the network, they’re off the grid here... It can’t be a load issue, it’s gotta be hardware.
“How’re we gonna run the fiber optics across Foothill?”

“I’m sure there’s some plausible explanation on the face of it.”
Who knows if it’s a reasonable explanation?  They said there would be wireless Internet access in the community room, so they’ve already got something in there.  “In the current student dorms (the Gulags), I was arranging for two people to set up routers, but the administration got ticked off and said that’s leeching/stealing. They promised that the new student housing would have it.”

Dr. Ryan: That’s technically not stealing.

The Claremont Conversation is a great idea, some of which can happen online, but some of which should happen face-to-face.  Since 2001 it’s been mainly face-to-face.  GSC has been trying to put on some events to encourage conversation: President’s Coffee Hours, Townhall Meetings with the Administration, more recently/prominently the GSC Conference.  The life of the Claremont Conversation is determined by the extent that a community/conversation springs up that people use.

Dr. Ryan: We need an action plan for the summer, so that we can see someone at orientation talking about Claremont Conversation Online, and talking about putting a shortcut to student life stuff on CCO.  That’d be a start, if each school’s sub-homepage had a link that went to CCO.  My point is, we have people, who have to - as part of their research - talk at orientations, etc.  In terms of an Action Plan, I’ll have to leave that up to you.

Ask Klitgaard to…
There’s a content management system that makes the web portals similar for every school/department, i.e. the menus on the left hand side that makes it easy to say “put a link on the left-hand side”

Terry Krandall: For any initiative, we need both a top-down and a bottom-up approach.  That pressure should be coming in from both angles. 

Dr. Ryan: Have you seen the new version of the homepage?  (www.cgu.edu) If the GSC was to say, “Give me one of those themes. We want it to be intellectual community, etc.”, they’d listen.  That would give you the top-down, because everyone looks at that page eventually.  You have to have a story for President Klitgaard.  He’s very narrative oriented.  Tell him a compelling story, he’ll get exited, he’ll tell everybody.  Work on what that story, what our narrative, should be.

Shabnam: What’s the next step?  Do we have any activities planned?  Do we have anything to get them engaged, involved?

Dr. Ryan: That has to be another component of our work for the summer.  What is its [CCO] goal?  We have these online tools, but how do we involve people, and what do we want out of it?

Terry Krandall: If we were to develop, in CCO, practical close-to-everyone usage for everyone, would the branches grow into deep thought issues, or do we set aside the campus events everyday, student stuff aside, and let the conversation/community building happen on its own? And just focus on the INTELLECTUAL part?

Bradley: The idea brought up at the previous meeting: T-Talks.  Kind of like Coffee Hours, but more of a discussion period.  Can be done in Albrecht auditorium, with free food to attract students to come, etc.

Should we podcasts the T-Talks?  What would it look like if we had an intellectual community?  Buzzword from previous meeting: Like a *Salaam*, but a little more structured.
Terry Krandall: We have musicians, we have artists, we can mix it up!
And preserve the T-Talks as podcasts.  CCO is for setting up an identity, our interests.  Faculty asking around “I didn’t know anyone was interested in that.”

The current GSC office is way too small.  In the past we had a house that was underutilized…  We’re looking at one of the back houses 700 sq ft.  It would be what we’ve framed as a *Conversation Space* - a hub for a conversation(s).  We haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but they’re working on finding us a space, whether a basement or house where we can facilitate these.  You need to have an anchor in three dimensional space for these conversations to grow.

Dr. Ryan: UTNE. A magazine, an intellectual magazine, exists to have people throw out and react to ideas.  They did a variation on Salaams, tried to get them started up in cities around the US.  Google that, and you can find a good model of what could happen at the GSC House/Conversation Space.  One of the big things you could do would be to reach out to alumns.  I’m not sure they’d have an excuse to come, but I bet they would. 

Shabnam: A couple ideas for the next meeting.  To design a better idea of what we’re gonna do, maybe we can define our user characteristics and requirements and goals.  For users of this CCO, I think we have our 1) Freshmen, and then we have 2) our students who are in their coursework, who know the school but are really busy, and then we have the 3) students who are done with their coursework doing their research, and then 4) faculty.  So those are our four groups I can see at the moment, and then these four groups have different characteristics to give us a better map to see if we can meet their interests and needs.  Freshmen: They don’t know anything about the schools, CGU life, etc.  For the students in coursework: They are busy, looking for specific types of activities.  For students finished with coursework: They have more time, and are looking for different kinds of research, research questions, etc.  From that, we can define their needs and goals, and a good prescription for each user group.  At least the main goals for each group.

Dr. Ryan:  That’s such a good idea, we’ve been trying to do that all along.  CCO is an ongoing thing.  How can this service us better: CCO is primarily about conversation: This is who I am, what do I think, etc.  By all means GSC should do that and cycle back to the SL^2 members.  Once again, I do want to encourage you to follow up on your idea that’s exciting to potential stakeholders.  The online would be used to leverage this stuff, but not replace it, and it won’t do anything in and within itself.  It’s to hook up with people worth hooking up with.  It provides tools if you have a project.  What can the GSC do? Dream, set the vision for what a good hybrid environment is?  But don’t count on it to be entertaining enough in and of itself. 

Suggestion: A seminar series, in conjunction with the TransT course, maybe meet 4 times, but in between you meet via the Intellectual Community [CCO] to discuss the topics.  It’s a question of deciding if that’s what you’d like to do.  That’d be good to do over summer…

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Terry: SL^2 has done a ton of work for this, has got the framework down, but if we do all this market research, have a polished program, I can picture other institutions wanting something like this.

Shabnam: Look for best practices from others.

Terry: But if I’m the Oxford of the East… then am I going to pay for this type of system to be brought over to my network?  If you guys spend the next couple months...

Terry: About the GSC Conference, we can publish the proceedings on CCO. Make them available online, if we can convince the discussants to continue the conversation online.  “Get back onboard, if there’s stuff you haven’t thought of in the meantime, put that on there, and keep check on there.”  Mention that in the physical published volume itself: “it’s online TO BE EXPLORED FURTHER.”

Bradley: We talked about these student groups, and an idea is that CCO can be used as an opportunity for students to post their research online and get feedback from their peers.

Shabnam: I’d like something like that! Some place to put up research for peer review. 

Terry: Remember Google Questions?  You could bid on that, bid on those Answers.  There’s a bunch of communities...

Bradley: Or how about ideas that you have the idea for, but not the skills.  Maybe a sort of CCO Classifieds that you can put out there and ask for skills.  A lot of Stats people who are good with Stats aren’t good with coming up with ideas.  A place where a student can with an idea can ask “I need someone to do some statistical analysis, etc. I have the lit review, methodology, I can’t do it myself.”

Terry: The whole Council’s on CCO, every Representative has a page that says come to me, find me, etc.  Maybe we podcast our meetings, require our Representatives to make announcements, provide announcements, tell them “This is what needs to be in your CCO page,” Copy, paste, and send it out.  Make it this information dissemination forum, and branch it to our GSC Conference every year.  If we can alternate conference semesters with MMP…

Three branches (ideas): User groups (for the new guys), i.e. where to find free lunch?  The scholastic part, i.e. Check my research (peer review).  And CCO Classifieds (Can I have your skills?).  This is straight business plan.

Bradley: This is something we can do over the summer, get buy-in from the Freshman come Fall Semester.

Terry: I wanna FORCE the freshmen to use it.  You can’t force us.  We’ve been here too long and are too set in our ways, but the freshmen don’t know any better.  Like rate your professor: It’s dangerous, but it’s fair, from the students’ stand point. I’d rather know who’s a jerk, and who’s not.

Council meeting at start of summer.  We’re gonna plan out the year, and I think maybe a week after that, we’d like to meet SL^2 to organize our goals and every two weeks meet.

Terry: The alumni office needs to be in on this.  I think there needs to be a University wide orientation that splits off into different schools, just like how at Commencement there’s a University-wide ceremony that splits into each departments’ reception.  But NOT THE FRIDAY BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS! 

Bradley: Or another idea, this can even be used for selling books.  e.g. “I have these books, I need to unload them, maybe I could sell them on CCO.”  Maybe a Classifieds section where we could see stuff, books, and cars for sale, say for international students going home.

Terry: Maybe we could get I-Place into it.  The more directions we get into this, if we want this to last, it’s got to be more than just about the students.  We might get one generation to use it, but if there’s a slump...  We need all these groups to be on this to sustain it.  The Offices, the Alumni, CASE, FEC, I-Place, MMP

Next meeting in early summer.  REALLY make it a strategic planning session, i.e. set an Action Plan for the whole summer.  Budget a couple hours for that at the next meeting.
 

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Our theme: thinking about what is intellectual community, how to promote it, how IT can help.

The President has been doing some work with our lab on online community at CGU, and “intellectual community” is the current target:
The previous target was “just friends” – networking between students, fostering friendship, etc.
We decided we should push intellectual community given the nature of the school

Shamani: How much use is Claremont Conversation Online getting?

Dr. Ryan: Tons.  Most people who start using it start because of the T-course. Most T-courses involve fairly intense use of CCO. Most stop using it after the end of the course, which is not unusual for most online communities: Usage drops when they’re no longer required to use it.  But we have had successful adoption of the tool, around 8-10%.  It’s branching out into the ‘what-works” community, the board of visitors, etc.. I’d like alums to use it.  If you’re talking about int. community, you need all to get involved. Students are a hard sell: They already have work, homework, research, family, etc.  It’s a hard sell: we’re asking them to do more in some ways.  If they want to play, we have to pitch the idea of intellectual community.  One of the things can do is CCO (new name).  For an analogy, some religions have the salaam(?) where they get people together on a broad topic and sit around and talk..  CGU might use CCO to do something along those lines.

Terry (GSC):  We’re proposing something we call T-Talks (T as in Trans-D, and as in the Tea that Brits drink).  So in the new courtyard, when the weather’s nice, there’ll be talks of panels of professors, students, a mix of school departments, etc. Through this we’d be trying to get TransD from the top down.  We’re also holding our conference, and through that we’re gonna try to work it from the bottom up.  We’re trying to have momentum from both directions – Create reasons for continued use.  One of the barriers to this: Most students say their email inbox is overstuffed.  Nick in the PR department: He works on the front page of the CGU website. Terry’s talking to him to develop a Main Page with just the goings on.  You’d have an event, we put it up and categorize it.  We can do that in CCO:

The tool we developed at SISAT, SISATSpace, was just like this: It had a main thread on the very front page that would have announcements of department activities, as well as interviews with faculty and other students to promote interconnections, and give students an opportunity to know their classmates’ research interests, etc.

Terry (GSC): The Main Page is a reason for continued use.  Internet access is another barrier: The current housing doesn’t have it.  The new housing developments are wired for it, but its not free.  We need all the faculty to know this (Ex. Dr. Ryan didn’t know, and was extremely shocked to discover this).  Terry’s idea: Picture a cool-looking kiosk at Hagelbarger’s.  A kiosk where students…(missed this part).  The kiosk can have that Main Page on a plasma up on the wall, a terminal to access it.  And we should also have internet everywhere on campus: Botanical gardens, dorms, etc.

Terry (GSC): Currently wireless access stops at about 11th street.  The new housing is ridiculous: New housing is wired-accessible, but not for free.  They made $600,000 a year off the gulags.  They’re making $0 on the new housing.  If this is how they’re breaking even, then that’s (Dr. Ryan’s phrase) “Penny-wise, Pound-foolish.”  It runs contrary to all our expensive efforts, to build community and have everyone feel welcome.  We want students to have a sense that this is “My community.”  There will be wireless internet in one common room for the housing area (the ~*community*~ lounge HA!), but that’s inconvenient.

Dr. Ryan:  CCO should be the background of everything that we do.  The Main thread, the Blogger generation: It all happens naturally: We’re revamping the website.  If we can get the CCO theme in to every aspect that we do…  SL^2 takes care of the software end. But how do we get people excited?  CCO is a vehicle towards that.  T-Talks is exactly the kind of thing that needs to happen.

Terry (GSC): We’re pressuring the president into giving the students their own space.  A small house behind Black Student Affairs house 700 sq feet.  We want a student space, where the conversations can start face-to-face, and then continue online.

Dr. Ryan: The challenges of online community: I’ve friends I’ve never met, and it’s harder to maintain those friendships.  We’re built as a species for face-to-face conversation.  You have to be passionate about something to be involved in a community.  Let’s try to foment an excitement about CGU as and Intellectual Community.  That’s why we pay the big bucks to come here: To not be another number. There will be connections.  Everyway we can make connections that are intellectual. What we want to say is “You can come to know who I am as a scholar, and vice verca.” Nicole Garcia from our department is part of an Online Community to exchange information what books we’re reading.  CCO can do something like that: “What I’ve read recently, etc.” Can we find a tool that works like Match.com, but works based on what we’ve read, our research focus, our major, our undergrad major, and after these answers, it says “you might like, want to work with, such and such.”  That would be unusual (in a good way): I don’t know of any universities that does that.

Shamani: Intellectual user groups: I always work on a Mac, and nobody can help me, so I go to the user groups.  Can we have a user group for publishing?  Ex: “How am I gonna get published?” “How am I gonna do my dissertation?” “How am I gonna get a job?” Even “How am I gonna find time to play WoW while working on my dissertation?” Etc.

Anybody who’s got a CCO account can start as many groups as they want.  That’s the kind of thing that makes it a valuable tool.  What do we mean when we say “intellectual community” from a student standpoint? What kind of real-life things can we do to promote that?

Shabnam: Since our last meeting: I did a bit of research. Kind of the summary of what I found was: Dr. Kraner thinks we should define it, our expected outcomes: education outcomes AND community outcomes,.  We need BOTH outcomes.  Can we do a pre-test/post-test of grades, dropout rates, of students who’ve used CCO.  We need to define this stuff.  How do we measure success of the community, report it, show it, and get students to join, because we can show that students who used the community received a better quality experience.  “How comfortable do you feel in this place?” We should look up research on: Attitudes.  Sense-of-Community scale.  Measures that we use to measure Sense of Community.  How to measures success of Knowledge Management Systems.  Quality of knowledge that is shared.

Terry: CCO is not a KMS, but there is some overlap.

Shabnam: It’s not the same, but we’re looking at how to get people to use the system.  For the people, they’re there for content, absolutely.  First content, and also ~*Usability*~.

Terry: Usability, Ease of Use is a factor that for decades IS researchers have found as a barrier to using systems.  Social Norms too.  Theory of Action.  Theory of Planned Behavior.  What are your beliefs that are gonna head towards use:  “Hey, is this gonna do anything for me?” “Is it possible for me to use it?” We pay attention to that as design/action researchers.  It’s important to think about (as with Action research) the goals the organization cares about (what the President wants), Publications (Shabnam’s point: Conceptual goals, variables to measure), Primary Motives: We’ve found out what CGU wants to do, but we have to think about the problem and work backwards from there to find a solution. Then find out how to measure that, what the current state of affairs is, interventions, how to time them. Etc.

Shabnam.  How they’re gonna use it: Courses? Personal use? What’s the user behaviors. 

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Summary: Two main conversations from this meeting: 1) How and Why we are gonna have this. 2) How are we gonna measure it. Both important things.  I was thinking that this is a long-term goal of the university. First adopters are either uber trendy (the iPhone crowd) or they’re doing it cuz they have to.  So what if we made each department make their first year core classes have a component on the CCO, and all of your entrance information comes to you via CCO?  Here’s our blogs on student life, here’s etc. etc. etc.

Shamani: It’s on the website, why move it?

Terry: Because CCO has to be the backbone.

Shabnam: Still experimental. When I got admitted they sent us all these bulletins (nice restaurants around campus, nice places around campus, etc. Really useful, little details.)

Terry: It’s a very difficult goal to accomplish. It would be very hard for students. In all my core classes, we had a TA.  Imagine your interactions with the TA. We could make those interactions primarily through the CCO.

Shabnam: What about Sakai?

Terry: We should find synergies between Sakai and CCO.

Shamani: There’s professors who have said “I don’t even use Sakai, why use CCO?”

Terry: If it could be a conglomeration of your Sakai, facebook, CCO, etc.  I envision, if you could have your Facebook homepage as an image (i.e. software where you can see the website as a thumbnail by hovering your mouse over the link before you click it)…  If you had something like that in our CCO page, where there’s a thumbnail of your MySpace, your Facebook, all your online communities, where your CCO page could be a hub for all of them…  You’re not gonna persuade people by forcing them.  There has to be a fundamental shift in how you conduct yourself, like when Professors adopted e-mail (and had to adapt to sending out the syllabus through e-mail instead of just going to Kinkos).  You’re only gonna get the first adopters, but it’s gonna be hard to convince the masses.  Every generation uses it more and more until you get 50% penetration.  There’s a huge potential with every new batch of students.  What are we doing with these tools to reach to the new people?

Shabnam: CCO still lacks some things: Features, Templates, skins, etc. CCO still has its cracks.

Shamani: It IS clean – ex. it’s got no advertizing – but there’s so many important things you can’t do.  I want quicklinks, I want to access a lot of things easily.

Terry: We have to identify how we’ll use it.  A list, a focus group.  What do you like about it?  How can it be improved?  Find the bugs that way.  Figure out the ways it can grow and get trimmed and figure that out.  You’re not gonna get the school or professors to jump on board a test.  It has to be ready like Sakai being used by 3 other schools.  Entrenched faculty, they need to see a need for it.  Bob needs to wedge it into the school’s experience.  At the same time we can’t get caught up in the normal academic timeline.  This is much larger than the market timeline.  We’re not only minding the short term goals, we have to look at the large-scale picture.

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