First, I'll introduce myself in the fashion approved by our fearless
leader. I'm a Brit with Canadian citizenship living in New Jersey. I
worked around the world as a civil engineer before getting married and
settling down as a computer consultant in Montreal, 15 years ago, which is
how I still continue to support myself. I am currently a Ph.D candidate in
international business at Rutgers, writing my dissertation on the topic of
the international operations of management consultants, and will be
teaching three sections of an intro course in international business
starting this month.
I have been looking at web conferencing systems as an alternative to a
listserv for class communication and discussion. The selection criteria were
a) ease of use
b) ease of administration
c) free or very low cost
d) UNIX based.
The advantages of a good conferencing system (wcs) over a listserv are:
* Richer content - wcs accept postings in either text or HTML,
including graphics, etc.
* Threaded discussions - postings are grouped chronologically
by topic.
* Moderator has control - topics can be closed off from
further discussion, reopened, deleted etc.
* Bloopers can be avoided or corrected. How many of us have
sent out a private and sometimes embarrassing message over
the listserv by mistake?
* Scatology check (net.Thread)
* Everything stays on the web server and doesn't clutter
up your hard disk.
* Conferences may be password-protected for security. This
helps to avoid the problem of copyright infringement(the
publisher is less likely to find out) and to help the
defense of fair use if she does.
I examined three in fair detail: COW Conferencing On the Web from San
Francisco State (Free), WebThread from Emaze ($49.95), and net.Thread from
eShare ($249). COW is written in Perl4, the other two are Perl5.
COW -
http://thecity.sfsu.edu/COW2/
This was developed specifically for classroom applications and the price
was right, so it seemed like the first choice. It runs well at SFS and has
been around long enough to be fairly stable. The main problem from my
point of view was installation. It is designed to be administered by the
host system administrator, and requires that files be placed in the perl
and cgi_bin system directories. I neither had, nor wanted, access to
these. Also, when I emailed the developer, Eric Klavins, about the
problems I was having he let me know that a certain amount of code
"tweaking" was required and it was not for the faint-hearted. As I didn't
intend to make a career out of the project I decided to look at a
commercially-supported package.
WebThread -
http://www.emaze.com/
At $50 this is a real bargain. It is easy to install and use, and support
during the installation (by email) was rapid and helpful. The reason I
decided not to go with it was because, while it supports multiple
conferences, each conference is limited to two levels, a topic level and a
message level. This would have required setting up separate projects for
class info, student groups, class projects etc. and I could see having to
set up and maintain 30-40 different conferences - an administrative
nightmare. This thing was supposed to make my life easier. Where I
probably will use it is to support our local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.
net.Thread -
http://www.eshare.com/eshare/net_thread/index.html
This is the package I finally settled on. It supports a stem-and-leaf
hierarchy of topics of unlimited depth, so I can accommodate all my
requirements in a single conference, and boasts an impressive list of
clients including the Boston Globe. I am in the process of installing it
on a server, and I'll let you all know how I get on as the course
progresses.
Further reading -- Conferencing on the World Wide Web
http://freenet.msp.mn.us/people/drwool/webconf.html
================================================================
Dermod Wood Email:
wood@andromeda.rutgers.edu
International Business/Business Environment
Faculty of Management Tel: 908.534.6555
Rutgers University, Newark 07102 Fax: 908.534.4761