Tower Christian School Student Forum Help
For anyone that might not be familiar with internet forums, here is an overview. Forums have been a big step forward in building a sense of community and collaboration on the internet. They are based on the dialup electronic bulletin boards of ages past, which were the first places that computer users began to meet to share information. Forums allow the easy sharing of information, and provide an excellent platform for interaction between members in many different forms. Discussions can begin on virtually any subject, where members can choose to read and learn or they can choose to jump right into the discussion and share their insights and knowledge. The forums provide a wide variety of tools for gathering feedback in easy to understand methods. Online communities grow up around the shared learning and growing knowledgebase, and provide an “incognito” method for otherwise shy people to participate in a vast ocean of interaction.
Some of those strengths, however, also tend to be drawbacks. While shy people can appreciate the “incognito” aspects, others choose to exploit those same things. People that tend to be reserved in face to face communication can often become exceedingly rude and abrasive when using electronic communications. This can be seen quite easily in e-mail, where people often live to regret things that they send and would never had said verbally to someone else. The Tower Christian School Students Forum is very careful about controlling access, not only for the easily understood issue of fencing out predators, but also so that older more experienced members can help protect younger inexperienced members. We are in this together, and the sense of community that grows from that practice becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy in making the community that much safer for novices. And a great place for everyone to learn and grow.
Forums were the predecessors to the second generation of social web tools such as MySpace and Facebook. However, unlike those tools, a controlled forum still represents an excellent tool for students to learn and explore the capabilities without encountering the multitude of problems that exist for regular users of the second generation of tools. Many larger businesses have turned to marketing through MySpace and Facebook, but then turn around and internally forbid their employees from accessing those tools with company PCs. As of the end of 2008, Facebook represented one of the largest sources of infections and system problems for corporate computer support departments. The benefits of the tools simply do not match up to the total cost of using them. While the case can be made that this is an education problem at its core, the problem for these organizations is that people too often assume that they have nothing to learn. Ironically, those are usually the most infected systems, but the users do not understand that they do not understand (a common problem in most things).
Our hope is that the Tower Christian School Student site will help educate and develop our families so that they can safely navigate the new generation of social tools securely and knowledgeably, without the headaches of systems that no longer function, friends that get bombarded with spam and worse, nor the exposure of private and personal information.