LIS Launches New Platform For Discussions

On Monday, Oct. 29 Library and Information Services (LIS) announced the launch of a new online discussion board.

The online forum is intended to serve as a way for the campus to communicate through a less formal medium than all-school emails. The forum allows for members of the college community to create topics and add comments to online conversations.

The College has been experimenting with new forms of all-school communication over the past year. In the past, it was possible for students to simply hit “reply all” to emails sent to the college community, allowing students the capability to send emails to over 5,000 recipients.

In 2009, the College implemented policies requiring students, faculty and administrators to obtain permission before sending out emails to the large all-campus distribution lists. LIS later enacted technological restrictions to prevent all-school emails.

Despite these restrictions, some groups — such as participants in the Hunt and more recently, members of the Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee — have nonetheless found ways to access large all-campus listservs.

Even with the serious limitations on all-campus emails, students continued to complain about the high volume of messages flooding their inboxes. These complaints, and a desire for improved forms of all-campus communication, led to the creation of the Portal system.

LIS launched Portal in January 2012. The platform combines campus news, sports scores, dining menus and quick access to other pages on the College’s website. Despite LIS’s attempts to make Portal an interactive and customized experience, students failed to embrace the platform, citing the site’s lack of user-friendliness and accessibility.

Since Portal proved to be an ineffective way to reach many members of the community, the College took a new approach to all-student emails this fall through the introduction of MiddNotes.

MiddNotes, which aggregates and summarizes campus-wide announcements into a weekly email sent out to students and faculty, aims to broadcast campus announcements while decreasing the overall number of all-school emails.

In addition to limiting the number of emails students receive, Dean of LIS and Chief Information Officer Michael Roy hopes MiddNotes will address a current gap in communication on campus.

“For the very personal, there’s things like Facebook; for the purely academic, there are things like Moodle, but there’s this space that bridges between those two worlds,” said Roy. “There’s a gap there, and this [discussion platform] could potentially fill that gap.”

Last spring, in an effort to try and fill this space, Brian Foster ’13 sought funding first from the College and later from the Student Government Association (SGA) for the creation and implementation of a new site, EdLiberty.

Foster’s site would have included a ThinkTank discussion board feature, a virtual bulletin board events platform and a Newsroom function for sharing web content. While Foster’s EdLiberty failed by a vote of 10-7 in the SGA, due in part to the large sum of funding the project required, Foster maintains that the institutional need for this platform still exists at the College.

“We have so many students working independently on amazing projects, art and businesses,” said Foster. “But there is no go-to way for them to collaborate and communicate. This is where great technology can make all the difference. It can connect, inspire and accelerate.”

Roy cited Foster’s original proposal as part of the genesis for the concept at the administrative level.

Roy described the new discussion board, which can be found at go/discuss, as a forum for announcements, discussions or debates.

“In many ways, its an open question to the student body to see what are the things [they] want to talk about,” said Roy.