INITIAL EXPERIENCE IN MOVING KEY ACADEMIC

DEPARTMENT FUNCTIONS TO SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

David B. Dennis

, Konstantin Läufer

and George K. Thiruvathukal

Department of History, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL 60626, U.S.A.

Department of Computer Science, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL 60611, U.S.A.

Keywords:

Academic computing, Cloud computing, Collaboration, Course management, Groupware, Software-as-a-

service.

Abstract:

We discuss our initial experience with the transition from conventional technology to social networking sites

and other cloud-backed sites for three core business functions of two academic departments, of computer

science and history, at a mid-size private university: course management, research and administrative collab-

oration, and community engagement. We ﬁrst discuss the social/cultural context that informs our technology

choices, as well as the evolution of the technology choices themselves. Then, we identify the targeted depart-

ment functions and their actors. Next, we describe the past and present technical architectures used to support

these functions. We conclude with a discussion of our preliminary experience with this transition and to what

extent our experience can be generalized into a blueprint that can be adopted by other organizations.

1 INTRODUCTION

Academic departments at colleges and universities

perform various functions that involve collaboration

among the members of its community and efforts

to expand the community by attracting new students

and, if positions are available, new faculty and staff.

To perform these functions as effectively as possible,

departments choose processes and technologies that

support these goals and are appropriate for the tar-

geted groups of users. Making these choices can ben-

eﬁt from an understanding of both the technologies

themselves and the digital culture of its users.

As new technologies emerge and digital culture

evolves, academic departments need to decide which

technologies to adopt and when to implement them

in order to continue functioning effectively. We re-

port on our experience with the recent transition of

three central department functions from conventional

approaches to new ones based on hosted social net-

working sites (Weaver and Morrison, 2008) and other

cloud-backed sites (Lenk et al., 2009):

• course management by faculty for their classes,

• research collaboration among faculty, students,

and external collaborators,

• engagementwith the communityserved by the de-

partment, including the dissemination of depart-

mental announcements, enabling students and

alumni to network, and other forms of interaction.

In the remainder of this paper, we ﬁrst discuss

the social/cultural context that informs our technol-

ogy choices (Brandtzæg and Heim, 2009), as well as

the evolution of the choices themselves (Weaver and

Morrison, 2008). Then, we identify the targeted de-

partment functionsand their actors. Next, we describe

the past and present technical architectures used to

support these functions. Finally, we discuss our pre-

liminary experience with this transition and to what

extent our experience can be generalized.

2 SOCIAL CONTEXT

It is useful to consider technology within the so-

cial/cultural context in which it is used. In particu-

lar, making technology choices can beneﬁt from an

understanding of the digital culture of the actors in-

volved. Digital culture has evolved in four major

stages among each of the post-WWII generations.

Baby Boomers (1946-1964). This generation of

post-WWII births was raised with various

types of print and broadcast media, as well as

postal mail and the telephone for communica-

tion. The internet emerged as a mainstream

185

B. Dennis D., Läufer K. and K. Thiruvathukal G..

INITIAL EXPERIENCE IN MOVING KEY ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT FUNCTIONS TO SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES.

DOI: 10.5220/0003672001850191

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software and Database Technologies (ICSOFT-2011), pages 185-191

ISBN: 978-989-8425-76-8

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

technology after this generation was well into

adulthood (Nayak et al., 2010).

Generation X (1965-1981). This post-baby-boom

generation was the ﬁrst to have widespread

access to television during its formative years

and experienced. Mobile phones and the internet

emerged as mainstream technology when mem-

bers of this generation were teenagers or in their

twenties (Tapscott, 1999).

Generation Y (1982-1995). This generation was

born into the later stages of the personal comput-

ing era and the early internet, before broadband

became widely available. Its members embraced

mobile phones and social networking as teenagers

or young adults (Tapscott, 1999).

Generation Z (1996-present). This “Internet Gen-

eration of Digital Natives” is being born into a

world of mobile smart phones connected through

social networking (Tapscott, 2009).

The boundaries among generations are blurred, and

many individuals fall into more than one generation in

terms of their technology-related behavior and habits.

As we learned in our departments, engaging the

different generations can be challenging (Pfeil et al.,

2009; Waycott et al., 2009). Baby boomers and even

gen-Xers tend to be suspicious of new technologies as

fad, whereas gen-Yers are more open, and gen-Zers

appear to be fully digital in orientation. More impor-

tantly, gen-Yers and gen-Zers are increasingly willing

to live more “public” private lives, much more com-

fortable with sharing their personal data with others.

Given that generation Y represents all current col-

lege students, and the Digital Natives of generation Z

are now entering college and will constitute the vast

majority of users over the next ten years, this cultural

shift will have profound implications for the future of

academic management processes.

3 EVOLVING INTERACTION

In this section, we describe the transition undergone

by the online interaction technology used to support

the academic functions outlined above.

3.1 The Distant Pre-web Past

The distant past, by internet standards, refers to the

pre-web era. Even though the web had been in exis-

tence since 1989 in the form of hyperlinked text doc-

uments, this era effectively continued until the wider

commercial adoption of the web in the mid-1990s.

During this period, various disjointed mechanisms

were used to provide content in a read-only fashion:

e.g., FTP, Gopher, WAIS, etc.

This period also saw the development of various

means of interaction, though these were likewise dis-

associated. Asynchronous communication with indi-

viduals occurred via email. Public and internal dis-

cussion was supported by USENET groups. Docu-

ment submission was provided by FTP upload. Ac-

cordingly, online interaction among the various ac-

tors described above was limited mostly to email and

USENET, and even that was possible only among the

few people who had access to these mechanisms.

3.2 The Recent Web and Email Past

In the mid-1990s, commercial adoption of the web in-

creased tremendously, and content dissemination was

consolidated on the web in the form of read-onlysites.

Interactive offerings included interactive discus-

sion fora, some ﬁrst-generation consumer-oriented

websites for photo sharing, driving directions, etc.,

and some developer-oriented sites for collaborative

development. Fueled by the dramatic growth in inter-

net access among the general population, email sky-

rocketed as the main means of nonpublic interaction.

3.3 The Social Networking Present

The early 2000s saw the emergence of a phenomenon

often called web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2007; Jahnke and

Koch, 2009). The major change brought about by web

2.0 has been to engage users in the creation and clas-

siﬁcation of content. Examples are community-based

content creation efforts such as Wikipedia and the

widespread use of tags instead of preset categories.

Furthermore, while ﬁrst-generation interactive

websites have been designed as silos that required

screen-scraping for programmatic interaction, most

second-generation functionality is service-oriented

and exposes a documented API for programmatic

interaction (Weiss and Gangadharan, 2010). This

change is technologically signiﬁcant because it allows

individual applications to focus on performing fewer

functions better and supporting cross-integration.

The middle of this past decade gave birth to two

related trends: social networking and cloud comput-

ing. The former typically are software-as-a-service

(SaaS) offerings in cloud terminology. Based on the

SaaS paradigm, a wide range of well-known cloud-

backed offerings have emerged, such as:

• general social networking sites such as Facebook

and Orkut;

• specialized professional networking sites such as

LinkedIn and XING;

ICSOFT 2011 - 6th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies

186

• hosted conventional and lightweight blogs such as

Blogger and Tumblr, respectively;

• microblogging sites such as Twitter;

• social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and

StumbleUpon;

• web content management sites such as Google

Sites;

• online document management and groupware

sites such as Google Docs and Zoho;

• social coding sites such as Bitbucket and GitHub;

4 TARGETED FUNCTIONS

Our study of how recent and ongoing transition to

technologies based on hosted social-networking has

impacted management of academic affairs focuses

on the following three fundamental department func-

tions. In this section, we brieﬂy deﬁne these functions

and the associated workﬂows, scenarios, and actors.

4.1 Course Management

Course management is the process used by faculty

to manage the various aspects of teaching a course

to a class of students (Gauthier and Impey, 2004).

This function is complex but consists of several well-

understood scenarios.

• dissemination of course materials;

• group discussions;

• submission and evaluation of written homework;

• submission and evaluation of code examples;

• student presentations and their evaluation;

• test taking and evaluation;

• sharing grades with students;

• conducting polls on students.

4.2 Research Collaboration

Research collaboration among computer science fac-

ulty, students, and external collaborators can be de-

scribed as a workﬂow that involves the following ac-

tivities (Kraut et al., 1987; Ding et al., 2010).

1. knowledge gathering;

2. project planning;

3. collaborative writing and software development;

4. bibliography management;

5. formal publication;

6. other types of dissemination.

4.3 Community Engagement

The community served by a department includes its

current students, faculty, and staff, prospective stu-

dents, alumni (former students), employers, candi-

dates for faculty or staff positions, as well as more

loosely connected groups such as the parents of cur-

rent students. The complex, amorphous function of

engaging this community comprises several scenar-

ios, including the following (Waters et al., 2009).

• maintaining the department’s ofﬁcial public web

content;

• maintaining the department’s internal content (in-

tranet);

• facilitating the department’s internal processes,

such as faculty meetings, committee decisions,

etc.;

• enabling faculty to maintain web content speciﬁc

to their teaching and research activities;

• disseminating of various types of departmental

announcements to current and former students;

• enabling current students to network with each

other and departmental faculty and staff;

• enabling alumni (former students) to network

with each other and departmental faculty and

staff;

• disseminating entry-level job postings to current

students;

• disseminating advanced job postings to alumni.

4.4 Actors

The following actors are involved in these workﬂows

and scenarios:

Faculty in their roles as teachers and researchers

belong mostly to the baby boomer and X gen-

erations. As computer scientists and scholars

exposed to university information technologies,

they tend to be more technology-savvy than other

members of these generations but still display

some of their characteristics, such as privacy con-

cerns, reluctance to participate in social network-

ing, etc. Younger faculty are being hired only very

slowly in these departments.

Staff in their job-speciﬁc roles such as secretary, sys-

tem administrator, etc. are predominantly baby

boomers and gen-Xers. They tend to understand

the technology they use to perform their jobs, but

in many cases require training—especially in the

case of upgrades or new systems.

INITIAL EXPERIENCE IN MOVING KEY ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT FUNCTIONS TO SOCIAL NETWORKING

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187

Current Students undergraduateand graduate alike,

almost overwhelmingly belong to generation Y.

Most members of these groups are regular social

networking users and have some expectations that

the organizations they interact with participate in

social networking as well.

Prospective Students will overwhelmingly belong

to generation Z and beyond. They will have even

higher expectations of managing their interactions

through social networking. In particular, they will

expect their initial engagement with academic in-

stitutions or departments to occur through social

networking tools (Lindbeck and Fodrey, 2010).

Alumni (former students) span multiple generations

and use social networking accordingly. They

are particularly interested in networking for so-

cial reasons or in search of employment and

will engage in technology that supports these

goals (Goetchius, 2008).

External Users such as employers, candidates for

faculty or staff positions, students’ parents, etc.,

are a highly diverse group in terms of age and

level of education. Nevertheless, as these individ-

uals belong to more and more recent generations,

their expectations of using social networking for

their interactions with academic institutions or de-

partments will continue to increase.

5 EVOLVING ARCHITECTURE

In this section, we describe how our technical archi-

tecture in support of the above-mentionedtargetedde-

partment functions have evolved along with the avail-

able technologies themselves.

5.1 Course Management

In the distant pre-web past, there was very little course

management technology available. Instructors pro-

vided printed copies of their course materials, col-

lected homework and project submissions on paper

and/or removable media (ﬂoppy disks), and posted

grades on their ofﬁce doors. Using email to interact

with students was then considered an innovation.

In the more recent past, the central Information

Technology Services unit at our university acquired a

major commercial course management system (Gau-

thier and Impey, 2004) that was intended to provide

all required functionality online. Although accep-

tance was widely encouraged and continual training

has been provided, the system itself has been criti-

cized by numerous faculty for its inﬂexibility, poor

usability, regular and enforced “course deletion” re-

quirements (owing to space limits) and occasional

data loss (often associated with the preceding).

At present, the authors have abandoned the cen-

tral system in favor of a combination of several care-

fully chosen, free, partially integrated “best-of-breed”

cloud-backed technologies:

• Dissemination of course materials occurs via

cloud-backed solutions such as Google Sites and

hosted blogs.

• Group discussions take place in Google Groups or

closed Facebook groups.

• Submission of code examples takes place through

social coding sites such as Bitbucket, which pro-

vide shared private code repositories that support

standard version control software such as Mercu-

rial. In addition, these sites allow students to cre-

ate a project wiki, set up an issue tracker, etc.

• Written work is submitted through Google Docs.

• Gradebook functionality is provided through

Google Docs spreadsheets. Summer work is in

progress to have a gradebook with support for var-

ious roles, i.e., instructor, student, TA.

• Some online test taking and polls are conducted

using Google Forms.

The authors have already been following this ap-

proach on several of their sites for computer science

and history courses.

5.2 Research Collaboration

In the distant past, research collaboration was largely

ad-hoc (Kraut et al., 1987; Ding et al., 2010). Code

and documents were exchanged by email or remov-

able media, although early version control systems

such as SCCS and RCS were used for more system-

atic collaborativedocument authoring and code devel-

opment. Knowledge gathering and interaction took

place in meetings, by email, phone, and/or Unix talk.

In the recent past, more modern version con-

trol systems such as CVS and Subversion were

adopted, often with Secure Shell-based setups that

supported collaboration across institutions. Interac-

tion remained largely the same, except that Unix talk

was replaced by newer forms of instant messaging.

At present, numerous collaborative research ef-

forts, including the authors’ own, have transitioned to

a combination of cloud-backed technologies. Speciﬁ-

cally, the authors use these (free) systems:

• Knowledge gathering occurs on project-speciﬁc

Wikis hosted on Google Sites, which supports

ﬁne-grained access control.

ICSOFT 2011 - 6th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies

188

• Project planning takes place with the help of Base-

camp, a simple, effective, and highly usable site.

• Collaborative software development is supported

effectively by distributed version control systems

(DVCS) such as Git or Mercurial. Various social

coding sites, such as GitHub and Bitbucket, sup-

port these DVCS. We use Bitbucket for nonpublic

development because of its free private reposito-

ries and GitHub for open-source projects because

of its high visibility and social coding features.

• Collaborative writing is the ﬁrst of two writing

phases. In this phase, the authors use Google

Docs until they have a coherent draft. Then they

switch to an appropriate formal publication mech-

anism as discussed below.

• Bibliography management can greatly beneﬁt

from sharing and centralization. We have iden-

tiﬁed CiteULike as the most effective option for

sharing bibliographic information among collab-

orators and publicly.

• Before formal publication can occur, suitable

venues have to be identiﬁed. WikiCFP allows us

to manage a list of conferences and workshop to

which we plan to submit. Twitter is also useful for

receiving announcements from conferences, such

as postponed submission deadlines.

• Formal publication itself is the second of two writ-

ing phases. In this phase, the authors use La-

TeX or LyX to satisfy the envisioned publisher’s

formatting requirements, and version control sys-

tems, as described above, enable collaboration.

• Other types of dissemination include announc-

ing the publication of a paper on a blog such as

Tumblr, which can automatically send short ver-

sions of posts to Twitter, inclusion in one’s CiteU-

Like bibliography, and email to speciﬁc individu-

als. Disqus is a discussion mechanism that inte-

grates with Tumblr, among other sites. Gravatar

is a service used by various other sites for map-

ping of email addresses to avatar pictures. Finally,

Google Analytics provides various types of web-

site access data (including blogs) that are useful in

estimating the impact of a project or publication.

5.3 Community Engagement

In the distant past, community engagement occurred

mostly through conventional channels such as mail-

ings, poster advertisements, on-campus meetings, etc.

USENET groups also played a role in allowing mem-

bers of an academic community to interact.

In the recent past, universities attempted to move

large parts of their conventional community engage-

ment efforts to web and email, with mixed results.

The department of computer science maintains an of-

ﬁcial website and uses Google Groups for reaching

current students by email. There was no systematic

way to reach our alumni.

At present, the departments of computer science

and history at the authors’ institution have estab-

lished a social networking presence almost overnight

by picking and integrating a few speciﬁc technolo-

gies. Our initial focus has been on engaging stu-

dents and alumni, which in turn requires that students

and alumni be allowed to participate actively and con-

tribute (Waters et al., 2009; Goetchius, 2008).

• To engage our students, we have created a Face-

book page with a custom URL that is easy to

remember. This page allows our current, for-

mer, and prospectivestudents to interact with each

other and department faculty informally. This

choice was based on the observation that virtually

every one of our students already had a Facebook

account. We have also set up a Tumblr blog for all

public departmental announcements, thereby de-

centralizing the process of content creation among

department faculty. All blog posts automatically

feed into a departmental Twitter handle we set up.

Discussions are enabled through Disqus. We are

currently evaluating how to pipe the blog posts

back into the existing Google Groups-based email

lists using cloud-backed technology.

• To engage our alumni, we have created a LinkedIn

group so as to underscore the professional nature

of this effort. We were able to populate this group

quickly based on departmental information and

one of the authors’ personal alumni contacts on

LinkedIn and via email. We periodically ask the

members of this group to spread the word to other

alumni who are not members yet.

6 CONCLUSIONS

We have discussed the way members of the succes-

sive postwar social “generations” relate to technology

and the evolution of the technology itself. Within this

context, we discussed our initial experience with the

corresponding technological transition of several core

functions of academic departments at a mid-size pri-

vate university: course management, research collab-

oration, and community engagement.

Our cloud-backed course management approach

has already been used successfully but continues to

INITIAL EXPERIENCE IN MOVING KEY ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT FUNCTIONS TO SOCIAL NETWORKING

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undergo reﬁnement in technology and process. Our

cloud-backed approach to research collaboration has

functioned effectively as well and continues to evolve

as we evaluate new technologies. We believe that both

approaches can already be used as starting points for

other departments and research groups.

Our social-networking-basedapproach to commu-

nity engagement has been well received and, accord-

ing to Google Analytics, drawn more trafﬁc to the de-

partmental website. It has focused on connecting stu-

dents and alumni so far but needs to be extended to

include the various other aspects of this function.

The related work we have surveyed is either de-

scriptive (Lockyer and Patterson, 2008; Hung and

Yuen, 2010), focuses on one particular technol-

ogy (Selwyn, 2009; Roblyer et al., 2010; Ractham

and Firpo, 2011), or proposes to build an educational

social networking site from scratch (Conole and Cul-

ver, 2010). By contrast, our approach focuses on the

integration of existing, mature “best-of-breed” sites.

To understand how our observations relate to on-

going efforts by government agencies to broaden the

participation in computing, further data is needed on

social networking participation across other demo-

graphic aspects besides age, such as gender, ethnic-

ity, level of education. In addition, further data on

social networking participation across different coun-

tries (Mislove et al., 2007) would be useful for gener-

alization across national boundaries.

We conclude by observing that technology con-

tinues to evolve very rapidly. Requirements also tend

to evolve as the target users change with respect to

demographics and use of technology. Therefore in-

formation technology decision makers at the various

levels of an academic organization need to collabo-

rate closely on requirements and evaluate the avail-

able choices very carefully.

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