I Speak For Most, If Not All, Or At Least Some, But Definitely Me: A Manifesto

I must confess - I am not particularly interested in the falling of leaves upon northerly nations or the ethereal qualities of snowflakes or even the nighttime activities of our dear St. Nicholas. As such this post will consist of none of those, nor Johnny Depp, but a little in-house political activism. Let's address ACADEMY PET PEEVES.

THE NING

Why do we hate the Ning?

Well, it's fundamentally a monstrous, counter-intuitive Gordian knot of a redundancy. Going to the 'Benefits of the Ning' discussion (Go to the homepage, click Glenbrook Academy Freshmen, scroll down, click View All in discussions, try to find it on the first page, fail, try to find it on the second, 'succeed', click), we find such benefits as:

"Posting and discussing for homework!"
"Its nice to have a resource base open to me 24/7."
"In times of confusion, I have something to turn to for clarification."

(As well as the nicely post-ironic "I think integrating technology with education is GOLD." and the rather obvious "The Ning is a good backup for me.")

So: the Ning is a place to find homework, discuss homework, and complain about homework. The problem is:

It doesn't work.

* It's a sprawling, bloated mess of a Facebook ripoff. (On paper, this thing must have looked wonderful - full-featured, free, distinct from the social complexities of Facebook, but you didn't try setting thirty people loose on this thing beforehand.)

* It's hard to navigate - see parenthetical small-text statement above.

* It's badly designed from an aesthetic standpoint.

* It has a confusingly convergent feature set - discussion vs comment wall?

* It offends us whenever we get a homework clarification (in the form of a discussion?) at seven after checking the Ning at six-thirty.

* The redundancy aspect isn't inherently bad, but it is poorly executed. When we get a Greek Mania worksheet in-class but have to start discussions on the Ning and a couple of days later get our partner quiz entirely on the Ning and are confused about its content because it was barely mentioned in class, it just makes your students more disillusioned with the site than they already are. (Sorry, Mr. Williams, you're not the problem - you're just caught in the maelstrom.)

* The 'Freshman Academy HW' discussion is probably the most important thing on the Ning. Yet teachers often circumvent it for larger assignments, it's often used for proclamations other than straight assignments, and it's irregularly updated. Confusion.

* EVERYTHING WE DO IS IN THE GROUP 'GLENBROOK ACADEMY FRESHMEN'. Why do we have to take that extra step whenever we go on the website? Futhermore, constraining everything to one group robs us of functionality - hence the discussions instead of Greek Mania Group A. We almost never communicate with upperclassmen, and when we do it's for social reasons that can be covered dans Facebook - the one time it was necessary, TED, we created a Google Site and overrode the Ning for a few weeks. How about an 'Academy Freshmen' Ning site, at the very least? (I'm going to disregard the redundancy in the title - if we're on the Ning, we're most certainly in the Academy.)

*It lacks chat, so if you want to get something done right away you have to go elsewhere regardless of personal feelings towards the site.

*It went down for 4+ hours Tuesday, and it'll do it again.

* The communication tools it provides are already offered, in a better way, elsewhere. Without the Ning, we'd all IM and use email for projects - sure, it's not strictly a school-only format, but we use them anyway and they work better.

And on and on and on.

The Ning has its benefits, to be sure - most were listed before the rant began. Let's not throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. (I flatter myself, of course, by suggesting anything will be thrown out at all.) So instead of making quiet, snide remarks on the Comment Wall, a plan:

1. Give more power to our Gmails. They form the basis of all we do scholastically, be it providing a log-in for the Wikispaces and Blogger or trading info in-class or on the go. These little @-signs are more powerful than the Ning could ever hope to be.

2. Either find a MIRACULOUSLY PERFECT alternative site or streamline by finding a more pure information-dissemination tool. Assignments are always printouts - so put up a final-word PDF on a cleaner, more simplistic website. That's all we need. Really. Enable comments if absolutely necessary but otherwise rely on students emailing teachers with questions (the old-fashioned way). Bonus - that's less work for you.

3. Why did we all have to use Blogger for our personal blogs? Google Reader can subscribe to anything with RSS or Atom enabled - limiting us to Blogger just makes us more resentful when it lacks a feature (for example, I got pretty frustrated a couple paragraphs ago when I couldn't double-indent my lists and eventually had to rely on asterisks). Give us more electronic freedom - this stuff is really tangential to actual coursework anyway.

4. Give us all our assignments in class. No exceptions. If you want to give us a link online, fine, but tell us it's going to be there. As a rule: we don't like surprises.

5. Get total teacher support. Mr. Field needs to be on board with this too - I don't care if we have an entire section of the website entirely en francais, it's insane to have all these one-stop sources for homework floating around. It's a testament to the impotency of the Ning that a teacher needs to set up an entirely different site to put up vocab, calendars, and some widgets. (Actually, though, Mr. Field's site is the most functional of all our resources - a template, perhaps.)

6. And while we're on Mr. Field, he's hit upon something marvelous - sharing homework assignments as public Google Docs. It's worth noting that despite our inability to comment on or discuss French homework on-site, we've never had any questions about it. If you're more explicit in the beginning you'll have less trouble later.

Little of this will happen this year, and certainly no fundamental change will occur until the next freshman class enters. But, hey, we are the largest test group you've got. Let us help decide what'll be best for the class of 2013.

(If I've misrepresented anyone's opinions, tell me in the comments. Tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me why I'm right. Tell me what we should do instead. We'll change the post - heck, we could even make a discussion on the Ning - how ironic. This should be an ongoing discussion with professorial input.)