Soon after arriving, Professor Bill Stone set up a web server on his office desktop system. Bill brought along all of his class materials as web pages and his early successes in this new medium impressed his departmental colleagues. When it came time to review the departmental web page, which had been the same since 1946, it was Bill who stepped forward to lead this redesign effort.
After working sporadically on the project through the month of July, Bill announced that he and his student, Jack, had completed a highly interactive web site for the Department of Geology. The buttons and framed pages of the site were designed to coordinate with the color of the natural rock backgrounds Sam scanned from the GEOL 3 textbook. There were several pages of images of faculty, faculty research projects and field trips, links to other sites of interest to the department, several interactive forms to gather information about visitors to the site, animated banners with news about courses (written in Javascript) and a departmental calendar with news for each week. Anyone who revisits the site is welcomed back, a crafty personal touch. The department was thrilled with the result!
Bill had the LBIS staff set up an alias for his computer, which was named K19845 but with the alias could be found as geology.kenyon.edu. He asked the webmaster to have the official College web page for the department point to the new departmental page. He was in business!
Two years later, after Bill found out just how much time is consumed in teaching at Kenyon, the registrar published summary statistics about student interests. There had been a very significant decline in the interest of new students in geology. There had been a decline as well in the number of new majors. These were disturbing trends deserving of investigation. The registrar, dean of admissions and the chair of the science division gathered some of the students to learn that:
The geology departmental web page was always out of date. No one seem to have maintained it. None of the calendar entries were current. Some were two years out of date!
The link to the departmental pages was often "broken" since it seemed that the web server it was running on was often turned off at nights and on weekends.
Some students dismissed geology at Kenyon since the web page they saw at home with their old web browser software was garbled at best, and often blank and took nearly 3 minutes to download. "I can only assume that the geologists aren't very careful folks" said one first year student. "The Department of Geology at Kenyon? I didn't know they had one....this site looked so different from the rest of the Kenyon web site."
"I filled out one of those online forms at the geology web site, but no one ever responded to me. I asked about the major, but heard nothing."
Some students complained about the use of cookies, a technology that made it possible for the geology web site to welcome returning visitors. "I don't like it when a web site writes a file to my hard drive without my permission! How do I know what's going on?" Jack had incorporated this technology into the departmental web site without Bill knowing about it.
Several prospective geology majors reported that their interest in the discipline waned when they did reach the web page only to find that its emphasis was on faculty research, not teaching. One student said "This web page made it clear what this department is all about, and it's not working with students." This of course puzzled the division chairperson who noted the strong track record the department had in popular classes and research involving students.
When confronted with these issues, Bill Stone, who was fast approaching his second year reappointment review, lamented the situation but declared that he simply had too little time to keep up the web site.