CSCI E-10: Assignment 4

CSCI E-10: Assignment 4, due March 4, 2002

This week, students will pick one synchronous chat community, explore it, describe it, and participate in it. Students will then report on their experiences to the class mailing list.

In clear distinction to asynchronous communities, there is no absolute necessity that you join the community a week before reporting on it, since you can begin participating immediately, and can know immediately whether you have successfully joined or not. Nevertheless, I will ask that you begin this assignment as early as possible in the week since I'd like you to really attempt to become familiar with, and a part of, the community you choose.

Your Assignment

Pick any synchronous "chat" technology you haven't used before (or haven't thought much about before). You may use an IRC channel (through Microsoft Chat or a Unix machine or any other IRC program you have access to), or an AOL chat room, or Yahoo chat, or some other web-based chat room you discover. You may even use an EBAY (www.ebay.com) or similar semi-synchronous chat room if you prefer, but you may find the assignment somewhat harder.
Write a one-page report to be shared with the class, with:
- (a) a description of the technology of your selected chat room. How does it work? How could I join if I wanted to? (be specific about what software I would need and exactly where to begin).
- (b) for each time period that you participated, specify the time of day and weekday, how many active participants there were, and how many passive participants (lurkers) if there is any way to tell.
- (c) whether there were some people driving or dominating the conversation, or whether it was more of an open discussion.
- (d) the character and tone of the group -- was it just another pickup room, or was there real conversation going on?
- (e) a comparison with asychronous communities you have visited.
Mail your report to the class mailing list, libcse10@fas.harvard.edu. As always, feel free to elaborate on anything else of interest you discovered during this exercise.

Extension Activities and Thought Experiments:

Find a chat room in which a real sense of community exists. (This may be difficult!). Join the community. How were you received? What makes it a "real" community? Do you feel as if you have in fact joined a community? Do the other participants seem to have a real community going, to which they return regularly? Do people seem to know each other?
Does the synchronous nature of the technology add or detract from the ability to form a clear, coherent community? What about the transient nature of the communication, with all discussion disappearing permanently off the screen a few moments after it has been typed?

Lab #4 Technical Information

To access IRC chat channels, you need access to an IRC client. In the lab, Microsoft Chat can be found on the Start menu (Courses -> CSCI E-10 -> Microsoft Chat) -- don't confuse it with V-Chat.
From home, you can download the Microsoft Chat software I demonstrated by going to http://fas.harvard.edu/~libcse10/software/mschat25.exe if you have Windows 95/98/Me/NT. After you download it to your desktop, double-click to install, and you should find it in Start->Programs menu. You will need to choose "ChatNet" or "UnderNet" when you start up; the Microsoft servers appear to be down.
Microsoft Chat 2.5 is not Macintosh-compatible, but there are many other IRC clients available (see http://www.chatnet.org/Software.htm for a list).
To access EBAY semi-synchronous chat boards, visit http://pages.ebay.com/community/chat/index.html and choose a discussion board of interest to you. To post, you will need to register a userid, but you can read the boards without registering.
To read AOL or WELL postings, you must join their services (and pay them money). If you choose to do so, or have already done so, they will provide you with information on joining conversations.
Some sites that provide on-web chatting include:
- http://chat.yahoo.com (free, but registration required)
- http://www.chatting.com (no registration needed)
- http://www.chatters.com (costs money to register)
and zillions of others. Just do a few web searches and you'll find many more. Some sites require that Java be enabled in your browser, and due to incompatibilities between various versions may limit you to Internet Explorer, or Netscape, or specific version numbers of one or both of the above. So if you find an interesting-sounding chat site but it doesn't work for you, try another one. If you find one of these that doesn't work at all, please let me know. As you have seen already, things change fast around here.
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David Albert - albert@fas.harvard.edu - Last updated February 2000