The famed Macalester bubble is enclosing us once again this fall, cleaving campus life from alumni, the local community and students living off campus. The less time we spend on campus, the less chance we’ll have of bumping into the odd campus event poster or hearing about official committee meetings. We are swamped with information, but the tools we use to interact here have become rickety. The online events calendar fails to list many student activities, and blizzards of mass e-mails can only do so much, while organized debate of issues is hard to find.

Meanwhile, important events around the college, like Garrison Keillor’s instant campaign speech classic a few weeks ago, pass quietly into the ether once Michael Barnes falls silent.

We can punch through the Macalester bubble that separates the college not just from the city, but from interested alumni and parents as well. Students need the opportunity to communicate dynamically over the Internet. We should not be reluctant to try new methods of exchanging information, in order to enhance academic and social activity while dissolving the bubble. The best way to do this is by setting up web server computers, administered by students, to offer a platform for experimenting with new ideas. As a step in the right direction, WMCN is on the way to broadcasting over the network, and the sooner the better.

Obviously, there should be online forums for students, faculty and alums to discuss whatever is going on. Unfortunately, CIT is reluctant to set aside server resources for such projects. When WMCN decided to set up its own online forum, it was forced to buy web hosting. Worse, when students visit this forum, they consume precious Internet bandwidth.

Two major ideas have been breaking into higher education lately: wikis and blogs (or weblogs, for the uninitiated). Imagine if every student organization had a blog, which could easily display uploaded photos, debate the issues and alert people to events. What if all the students studying abroad had their own blog? What about the Cultural House? And surely, it wouldn’t be too hard to convince some professors to write little online essays to their students. Blogs can also connect to software on student computers called RSS headline readers, so that whenever a blog post is written, a headline pops up on their desktop—an infinitely neater solution than the mass e-mails and worthless Bulletin Flashes that clog our inboxes.

Another hot new technology is the wiki, a sort of infinitely malleable digital whiteboard with a variety of uses. Wikis, drawn from the Hawaiian word for ‘fast,’ can allow anyone to add to any uniquely titled page in the system. This allows, say, a class of students to quickly write a bunch of pages (without using HTML code!), a sentence at a time, and link them together, everyone working simultaneously. Complex group brainstorming on papers becomes much easier, and if wily hackers vandalize a set of wiki pages, in a snap they can be rolled back to a previous version. This is a great, flexible way to organize huge blobs of text, photos and articles, for research purposes, of course.

Well-known wikis today include the popular Wikipedia.org, the Internet’s largest free encyclopedia, Disinfopedia.org, a compilation of people and issues manipulating the public agenda, and Dkosopedia.com, an aggregation of political information run by the popular leftie site DailyKos.com.

It’s unfortunate that Macalester’s TV equipment, not to mention its creative and productive video artists, don’t get much attention at all—a definite lack of fulfilled potential. Everyone should be able to get their video work digitized and available over the network. What is more effective for video: a TV station that only exists on a handful of televisions here, or every computer on campus? We ought to try to provide online video of important campus events, so everyone can see and hear Garrison Keillor. Recordings of MCSG meetings should be available too—that would make them behave!

No doubt, a lot of these ideas require money and precious bandwidth. However, that’s just why these things should be hosted by CIT. This way, usage from campus will not consume bandwidth.

Some alumni, led by Ola Nilsson ’02, have developed a system dubbed [around mac] that could fill many of these roles. They encourage everyone to check out their project at http://all.at/aroundmac.

So imagine, if you will, that a student org blog announces a visiting speaker, triggering an online discussion in the forum two days before. A wealthy alumnus finds out via his forum-lurking friend. HMCST students deconstruct the speaker’s hegemonic discourses and radicalize themselves. By the time the speaker gets here, everyone has heard about her and there’s an overflow crowd. Fortunately they can watch the speech online later, or via a video link into the Campus Center. The wealthy alumnus is really impressed with how engaged everyone is and spontaneously showers the whole chapel with thousands of dollars from a large burlap sack in his coat.

And so in this way, the whole plan can pay for itself. Using a couple leftover computers from CIT, we could use free, open-source software such as Linux, MediaWiki, Scoop, YaBB and WordPress to get a provisional system rolling in less than a week without spending a dime! The question is not why should we bother, but what are we waiting for?