Faculty life seems to bounce between creating and grading assignments one moment and reading and writing professional texts the next. Activities move back and forth from teaching to research with the frantic energy of a flickering flame. When the movement is broken, it’s usually some administrative logjam (or, worse, bit of minutiae) to be gotten unstuck. So, what a joy it’s been to be working lately on a new school project, advising the English majors and their student organization.

Most departments have a club or association for their undergraduate majors. Ours has languished for several years, and I’ve been given the reigns. I quickly decided that we could use some social networking software to facilitate the group interactions. I’ve learned a couple of things.

First, there is no substitute for behind the scenes organization on the part of the members of a group. This is not new information, but it’s always helpful to have the knowledge reinforced. Setting up meetings, tracking down keys, sending e-mails, taking notes, following up—all the usual managing must be in place before anything happens. Fortunately, there is an untapped reservoir of interest among our majors; (many) students want more than just to take courses; they want to make connections, share their love of literature, learn outside of the classroom. So, we’ve got the baseline organizational structure and personal investments in place.

That means that building the social networking site has been more fun than I could have imagined. I’m always glad to tinker with technology, but it’s much more rewarding if a group of people use what you make. I’ve spent the last few weeks taking my relationship with Drupal to the next level; we’ve moved past that glowing-get-to-know-each-other stage, spent some time in the I-just-don’t-think-this-is-going-to-work-out stage, and seem to have settled into the boy-I-wish-I’d-known-about-some-of-these-quirks-but-I-guess-I-can-live-with-them-and-I-sure-feel-comfortable-together stage.

The main focus has been adding community-building modules to create the social structures. At first I focused on things like the birthday module or the avatar module, little touches that add a community feel to the site. I put up an events module/calendar to share information about readings and such. I then set up the organic groups module—a set of tools that allows the creation of sub-groups on the site—you can limit access to blog postings to members of a group, post group-limited announcements, and send messages to group members. My thinking was that the practical groups and events modules would be the most useful.

But then, earlier this week, students in my first year seminar complained that it’s difficult to read all of the postings and comments on the class blog without being able to attach a face to a name. Enter the avatar module. Why I didn’t think of this earlier, I can only attribute to thinking that the face-to-face time we had in class each week obviated the need to add the community-building measures to the class site. My bad. The avatars on the class Web site have gone up more quickly than those on the SOUL site. The students then asked to have their pictures appended to their postings and comments, which I set up.

I’m glad they set me straight, because I’ve been trying to study ways that the studio teaching model that I favor might translate into online spaces. I guess, though, this pokes a hole in my theory that working with the English majors organization was a break from the usual routine; my dabbling with the majors site quickly bounced into the classroom; and now it seems to be moving back toward scholarship. Fickle flame.

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