Dr. Mark Jordan ~ ENGL 1301: Composition & Rhetoric

What's Nicenet?

Nicenet is a bulletin board on the World Wide Web. It is not part of our Web site; it is a non-profit service offered to high school and college classes. It is not a chat room and it is not live. We will use it in severa; basic ways:

• As a discussion area where we will have asynchronous classroom discussions. "Asynchronous" means that not everyone will be online at once, so responses are not immediate. It is like email in that responses trickle in over several days, but unlike regular email, when you use the Conference function, everyone on the class roster will receive your message. By contrast, "synchronous" discussions are what you probably are familiar with as "chat." Usually, I will allow about one week for these asynchronous discussions to take place on any given topic.
• As a place where you will leave many of your daily assignments. This is especially handy if I want you to write several paragraphs on some topic, as a minor grade in itself, perhaps leading up to your major essay or other major assignment. If sent to Nicenet, these papers can be read by everyone in the class; this creates a sense of a real audience which is lacking in a traditional classroom. In essence, you are publishing your writing on the World Wide Web.

Private email such as questions you wish to ask me personally, rather than address to the class as a whole, should still be sent to me; these direct emails to me do not go through Nicenet.

Registering on Nicenet

You will need to register on Nicenet to take part in the group discussions for this class. These discussions make up part of your participation grade, and occasionally I may also choose to count such a discussion as a minor assignment in itself, such as for Assignment #2, now posted in my Assignments Calendar. To register, follow these steps:

(1) If you have not already done so, send me a personal email message including your responses to the Getting Started questions, so you can get the Nicenet class key from me. You will need this key code in order to register for the correct class. My class is listed as ENGL1301.web.

(2) Next, read this note:

IMPORTANT: Remember the exact way you enter your user name and your password. If you don't remember them precisely you won't be able to sign back on. (Spaces and capital letters do make a difference.) You may also be asked for your email address during registration. Also, you cannot remain anonymous. I will give no credit to anonymous postings. If you don't list your actual name, or some form of it, as your username, you will have to remember to sign each and every posting.

(3) Once you have the class key and have decided on your password, please click on the URL below and follow the instructions on the screen.

Here is the Nicenet URL: http://www.nicenet.org/

After you list your email address during the registration process, the Roster function of Nicenet will automatically list all members of our class along with their email addresses. This will allow students in the class to communicate with each other as much as possible, even outside the boundaries of the assignments. I encourage this sort of communication because it can build the familiarity with each other than makes it more comfortable for you to collaborate with one another on assignments. If you fail to list your email address, your messages to your classmates will not bear your name. I require that all our class discussion be personalized rather than anonymous. Anonymity invites abuse.

Feel free to use the Personal Message function. However, please realize that any messages you send as personal messages can only be read by the person who receives them, so please do not use personal messages in regard to any of our assigned class discussions. Your entries should be posted as regular messages that the whole class can read. If you want to communicate with me, use my normal email address, as I mentioned above.

How To Make an Original Entry on Nicenet

(1) Sign in with your user name and password.

(2) Click "Conferencing" on the left side of screen to enter the area set aside for class discussions.

(3) Select the topic you want by clicking the appropriate word.

(4) Select "Post Message to [topic name]".

(5) The message window appears.

(6) Enter your name in the "From" box.

(7) Enter the message in the message box. If you are sending brief messages as part of a class discussion, you can best capture the "feel" of an oral discussion by composing directly into the message box. However, do be mindful of what I said in the Email section about how easily one's tone can be mistaken in email.

If you want to make a more considered response, or if you are writing a brief paper of several paragraphs such as I described above, you may want to compose it offline in your word processor program, copy it, enter Nicenet, create a message, then paste your paragraphs into the message box.

(8) Finally, click the "Post New Message" button near the bottom to send your message.

How To Make a Response on Nicenet

(1) Go to the Conference and topic you want.

(2) When you reach the chosen topic, make sure you are looking at the full messages, not just a list of the titles. (Click "View Entire Messages" if you see only the titles.)

(3) Read all the messages and find the one you want to respond to.

(4) IMPORTANT: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the message when you're done. DO NOT click "Send a Personal Message to...."

(5) The message window appears.

(6) Fill in an appropriate subject or title in the top box.

(7) Compose your response into the text box.

(8) Click the "Post New Message" button at the bottom.

(9) There is no need to enter your own name anywhere. However, if you are responding to what another specific classmate has said, you should mention that person's name in the body of your message, being mindful that unless you do that, no one will know who you are responding to. Forgetting to do this is a common oversight for those who have never used this kind of electronic conferencing.

How often should you check Nicenet?

If we are having an assigned discussion, I would prefer that you check it every weekday.