Two senior students at Johns Hopkins University, Asheesh Laroia and Christopher Chan, noticed a lack of communication among people at Johns Hopkins University and decided to do something about it. In order to facilitate greater exchange among members of the Hopkins community, Laroia and Chan created a site called Hopkins Weblogs (http://www.blogs.jhu.edu). Blogs (or Web logs) are sites on the Web that users can personalize and update with thoughts and ideas as an online journal that may be accessed by the public. The Hopkins Web logs site features social software of the type used to create popular websites like Facebook and LiveJournal to allow Hopkins users to create and update their own personal Web logs.
According to Laroia, the idea for Hopkins Web logs was inspired by a blog entry by David Sifry, a Hopkins alumnus and the founder and CEO of Technorati (a popular blog search engine). In his January 2003 entry, Sifry writes, "I've been back at Johns Hopkins, my alma mater. ... I've got a suggestion: Give every faculty member, graduate student, undergraduate, and employee at the university a blog. ...Some would talk about their current research, some would write about daily life, some would post poetry and writings, who knows. The conversation would be phenomenal. ...It would open a window to the entire world of the interests, knowledge, and thoughts of 100 of the world's finest professors, students and administrators in higher education today."
Laroia says that Sifry's idea motivated him and Christopher Chan to create the blog site. Sifry's concept takes blogging beyond the idea conveyed by the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of blogs as, "Web logs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers." Although Laroia indicates that such blogs may be created through the JHU blog site, like Sifry, he has a much broader vision for the types of blogs that can be created through Hopkins Weblogs.
"I'd really like to see student groups creating and regularly updating their own blogs," says Laroia. According to him, beyond the Student Activities Fair, it is hard to track the activities of the multitude of on-campus student organizations without actually becoming a member. The Student Council already runs its own blog site, not through Hopkins Weblogs, and Laroia sees this as an example for other groups to follow.
Students who are studying or working abroad can also use Hopkins Weblogs to share their experiences with the Hopkins community. Laroia says that one user, Emily Kumpel, a mechanical engineering major, is using a Hopkins Web log to share her experiences doing community service work in Africa.
Another potential application, which was suggested by Sifry and is one that Laroia hopes will expand, is the creation of Web logs by faculty members. Such Web logs will not only help students find faculty members whose research they find interesting, they would also help faculty post their thoughts and research progress so that they can be accessed by professors at other universities, thus providing another medium for inter-university exchange. Laroia says, "What's great about this system is that it is so easy to update a Web log. You just type your idea and hit submit. Also, unlike e-mail or phone conversations, blog entries are not transient and they can be easily accessed by the public at later dates."
Laroia and Chan have another Web site to expand the realm of communication at Hopkins, JHUWiki (wiki.jhu.edu). JHUWiki uses technology similar to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, where users can create and alter encyclopedia entries, to provide useful information to the Hopkins community.
Laroia was inspired to create JHUWiki by a Daily Jolt post where a user was asking for the nearest place to cut his hair. "I thought, why not put this information online, where people can access and update it? We have the compendium in print form, but what I'd really like to see is that kind of information online where users can modify it and it can be easily accessed." As of now, there are a variety of guides available through JHUWiki, addressing issues such as accessing JHU resources off campus, ways to buy cheap textbooks, options for off-campus dining and eyebrow waxing.
By creating the Hopkins Weblogs and JHUWiki, Asheesh Laroia and Christopher Chan hope to ameliorate the lack of communication within the Hopkins community. "I feel that we have very poor communication within the University right now, probably due to the lack of social meeting places and since the university has expanded dramatically within the past few years," says Laroia.
In the words of David Sifry, "[Blogs] make it easy for people to talk, easy to post. Imagine the connections that would happen just by doing a Google search -- researchers across the world that could find each other. ...It would light fires of interest, collaboration, and involvement," Sifry said. "The key thing is to create incentives for people to communicate."
