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By Yusuf Kurniawan

Abstract

Research evidence shows that people from all walks of life have started to use personal website for strategic and elaborate self-presentation. This paper discusses the feasibilities of making use of personal website as the medium of teaching. The ever-changing number of personal websites on the Internet became one of the evidence that personal website is one of the new media that could attract mass appeals. There have been a lot of personal websites posting personal information, CV, family pictures and personal interests. However, there are only a few that display academic things, such as the name of subject taught by the author, the module description and its assessments. The personal website can become the emancipatory and strategic place for the author to have a more-extended self-presentation. The author can carefully select the parts of his ‘self’ to be presented on his personal website. In addition, the ease of having personal academic websites to academicians can produce many advantages both for the owners themselves and for their students. Regardless the reality constraints of building the personal websites, the needs for such personal websites are very crucial. Needless to say, young academicians should be encouraged to acquire this. Key words: academic personal website, personal website, ISP, server

What are the medium characteristics of the personal website?

• Multimedianess: The personal website can display text, graphic, sound, and moving-image.

• Asynchronicity: Generally, exchanges between authors and browsers of personal

websites (usually by emails or guestbook messages) are non-instantaneous and significantly delayed.

• Revisability: Before or after posting a personal website on the Web, website

authors can extend, modify, delete, or reorganize the website contents whenever they like

• Hypertextuality: A personal website can contain ‘hyperlinks’, which enable

browsers to roam from one webpage to other webpages within or external to the website site.

• Global Reachability: Once a personal homepage is posted on the Web, normally

every net user around the world can access it. (Cheung: 2003)

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IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn Let me tell you a secret: in 1995, two years after the Mosaic browser had grabbed the

attention of the world and made the Web an interesting place to hang out; I was still illiterate

about the Net. First, because I hadn’t got a PC and second, the access to the Internet at the

time was still limited to a number of people since the cost was still quite expensive, at least to

me. Even in 1997, when I finally could get my first own access to the Internet, I saw that it

had not been very popular amongst the society, particularly in the midst of academicians. But,

just within three years it became impossible to think about life without the Web.

To academicians, the presence of the World Wide Web should be welcomed

enthusiastically. Moreover, with the vast opportunity to build our own website on the Internet,

posting information, pictures or articles/ essay became very easy. Why let an article go out of

date by two years waiting for a journal to publish it? Put it on the Web today and you can

appeal hundreds of audience. Why fly thousands of miles only to hang around with lots of

middle-aged, unhappy academicians? Instead, chat with them within the welcome confines of

e-mail, and then do the international travel to explore other cultures.

Research evidence shows that people from all walks of life have started to use personal

website for strategic and elaborate self-presentation. One of the prominent uses of personal

website is to promote one’s professional achievement in ways which may not otherwise be

possible in everyday life. People seeking jobs, for example, use personal website to highlight

and embellish aspects of their professional achievements, so as to reach potential employers

or to create more lasting impressions than brief phone or face-to-face job interviews

(Rosenstein, 2000). Likewise, artists use their websites to promote their artistic persona

(Pariser, 2000), and young academics use faculty homepages to gain wider exposure (Miller

and Arnold, 2001).

The emergence of the World Wide Web should have challenged academicians who

particularly accustomed to using the Internet as one of their media of communications to

maximize its functions. Besides its ease of use as the medium of communication, the World

Wide Web which overlaps with the Internet also serves as the great source of information. For

teachers/ lecturers, the Internet can become the always-ready assistant whenever they need

teaching/ lecture materials or just supplementary materials since it is accessible for twenty-

four hours a day. To confront the challenge, the academicians should not only make use of the

Internet for sending e-mails and browsing information, but also make use of it as the medium

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of teaching. Indeed, the lecturer or the teacher must build her own personal (academic)

website.

You might have been familiar with personal website, but not with academic personal

website. I use this term to refer to a personal website that mostly contains academic things

such as courses or subjects, syllabus, assessment to the subject taught by the lecturer,

announcement board for the result of a test or an exam, feedback of assignment and links to

other useful websites that relate to the teaching/ lecture materials. Most of all, what the

lecturer must provide on her personal academic website is related to what she teaches in her

college or university.

‘It is me!’: the Personal Website as a Stage for Strategic and Elaborate Self-Presentation

The first emancipatory use of the personal website is strategic and elaborate self-

presentation. In everyday life we usually try hard to tell other people who we “really” are.

Though we can one-sidedly complain that other people misunderstand us, sociologist suggests

that self-presentational failure in everyday life actually involves other factors such as social

interactional contexts and our presentation skills.

Goffman (1959) argues, in everyday encounters, the social settings and audiences we

face always define the kinds of ‘acceptable’ selves we should present –a worker will perform

as a hard-working employee in front of his boss. However, we may want to present certain

identities but may not be able to find the ‘right’ social settings and audiences, and if we insist

on presenting our identities in inappropriate social settings, we will experience

embarrassment, rejection or harassment (Cheung, 2003). For instance, a student who is fond

of singing in class will not only fail to get praise from his teacher but also annoy his friends.

In face-to-face interaction, we present our selves through the use of ‘sign vehicles’ like

clothing, posture, mimics, speech pattern and bodily gesture. But most face-to-face

interactions proceed in a spontaneous manner and do not include an assigned block of time in

which we can present ourselves in an orderly and systematic fashion. Frequently, our

presentation of self in everyday life is a delicate enterprise (Goffman, 1959, Cheung, 2003),

subject to moment-to-moment mishaps and unintentional misrepresentations. What follow

these mishaps are again the experience of embarrassment, rejection or harassment, and

consequently the failure of self-presentation.

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The personal website gives more opportunities for having more strategic self-

presentation than everyday interaction. It is a self-defined ‘stage’ that we can decide what

aspects of our selves we would like to present on it. To academics, the personal website could

be a strategic place to elaborate their self-presentation than that of in everyday presentation.

Academicians who might get less public acknowledgement can still appeal mass audience by

setting new personalities and reputation through their academic personal websites. For

instance, if they have unpublished writings, instead of queuing for years just to publish one of

their articles on a journal or a newspaper, they can put them on their personal websites. It

would give them more self-confidence as academicians since their writings will have been

read by hundreds or maybe thousands of people, not only by their students but also by other

lecturers from other university. As one young academician confessed: ‘For the person

visiting the Web page of my own department, I am more visible than the professors (who

don’t have pages)’(Miller and Arnold, 2001:105).

The Advantages of Having Academic Personal Website There are many things you can do of having academic personal website. Both the

owner and the students can benefit from such website.

For the lecturer, academic personal website can become a good medium to teach. I’m

not saying that lectures should be conducted through website, but in certain occasions

the lecturer has to leave her class free because of sudden business, attending seminar

for a few days for instance. If the lecturer could not compensate the free class in other

occasion, the students will lose their chance to learn from her. More often than not, to

compensate the free class in other occasion is very difficult because the limited time

owned by the lecturer. Such situation can make the students disappointed if it happens

frequently and lower her professionalism. With academic personal website the lecturer

does not necessarily have to leave her students free from the lecture, instead she can

still give her students lecture materials and the instruction from her personal website.

All in all, the lecturer must tell her students from the beginning of her lecture that she

has an academic personal website available on the Internet that can be accessed by the

students. Moreover, she must also strongly recommend her students to frequently visit

her website and ask her all students to have e-mail addresses that she can contact to

give them information. In consequence, the students must also check their e-mail

folders regularly in case of the incoming sudden important announcement or

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information from their lecturer. This seems difficult to do, but after a few weeks

running the students will get used to it. The lecturer can upload the file of the materials

from everywhere while she is away from campus. She can always do it at ease even

though the time is very limited. As long as there is the Internet access and computer,

then definitely uploading files becomes feasible.

Academic personal website also serves as the source of information for the students.

The lecturer who teaches a certain subject definitely can post supplementary materials

and other sources of lecture materials on her personal website, such as links to other

websites which provide fruitful information. Besides additional materials, the lecturer

also can display the general and specific purposes of the subject and the syllabus, so

the students can find out about them since early of the semester. To make students

know that the lecturer has a personal website, she must announce the website address

at the announcement board or on the department’s website. If you attach your personal

website on to the department’s website, the students will easily find it.

The lecturer who has personal website can easily share, and exchange ideas with other

lecturers from other universities or colleges. The alike-minded lecturers can arrange a

meeting, a conference or a research that is definitely beneficial for them. For instance,

a lecturer who has great research interest in new media studies will always keep

himself up-to-date with any development of theories in new media studies by any

means, e.g.: subscribing to weekly-news, participating in on-line discussions, and

expressing his thoughts about the development of new media studies theories on his

personal website. He simply writes on his e-mail to his counterpart, who might be in

different hemisphere, the URL of his personal website and ask the receivers to check

out his personal website.

A lecturer who is keen on conducting researches or writing books, he can also make

use of his personal website as a means of attracting other researchers who have the same

interest to participate in or support his research, or might be other writers who are interested

in contributing articles for the book.

The book entitles Web.Studies, which was edited by David Gauntlett, (former lecturer

at the Institute of Communications Studies of the University of Leeds), is contributed by

distinguished writers from various countries. Uniquely, the editor has never talked to all of the

writers face to face; he invited them to contribute essays for his book because he had seen and

read some of their articles in several books. He showed his websites: www.theory.org.uk and

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www.newmediastudies.com to these people to let them know who he is, and then the book

writing started. All the discussions were made by e-mails. Gauntlett (2000) says:

This book, for example, came together entirely on the Internet. I have never spoken to most of the contributors, nor written to them by conventional mail. But we’ve exchanged a lot of e-mails. ….. I received 140 proposals for chapters –mostly from academics and postgraduate students—within a month. Obviously, I had to reject most of them. Once commissioned, the chapters were sent and discussed by e-mail. I checked facts and gave away bits of the forthcoming book at newmediastudies.com in a bid to raise interest.

Web.Studies is just one of the evidence that personal website can become the effective

means to promote our interest or achievement. Many other academicians turned into

successful and famous people. The key factor is just how you can promote the existence of

your website to other people that are millions out there, and we do not know who interested

are in the content of your website. But, it is at least beneficial to the lecturer’s own students.

How Should the Academic Personal Website be? Although the academic personal websites are not like common personal or commercial

websites, they necessarily adopt the checklists that are generally followed by other common

websites.

• Page Title

Does your title explain what the page is? Is your page title descriptive? This is what

will show up if someone bookmarks your page, and at the top of the page. The academic

personal website should have representative title. This is important especially if you target

your personal website for outer visitors –not your students. Visitors will usually see title of

the web page before they read the content and scroll it down.

• Appearance and Content Have you thought about how your page will look on different browsers? If it is too

long, people won’t want to scroll to read it, but if it’s too short, it won’t have enough

information to keep people on the page.

Under no circumstances have text that goes from the left hand edge of the screen

across to the right hand edge of the screen. That is the classic sign of a horrible webpage. The

human eye hates running along those long lines. That’s why newspapers come in columns. In

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order to have shorter text lines and a nice layout, put all (or most) of your webpage within a

table. Obviously having everything in a grid on the screen would be horrible. If you are not

happy with the layout, you can make the table invisible.

Many people might think that the face of an academic website should look

sophisticated and brilliant. An academician with good capability in web building and design

may be able to create a good-looking personal academic website. In fact, the website should

not be like that, but it must give more emphasis on the quality of its contents. The academic

website should reflect the academic things, so the things like the description of the module/

subject taught by the owner, the way of assessing it, or essays written by the owner should

appear on the website.

Some academicians might like using animated graphics, such as animated cursor,

animated text, bouncing image and ever-changing background colour to decorate their

personal websites. Obviously these are very nice in personal websites, because the visitors

will probably be impressed by the sophistication of the animated graphics. But, I would like

to suggest that these are not always impressive for the website visitors. Instead, these graphics

will be very annoying for them since these are actually just the side-effect. These are probably

not what they are searching for. In the academic website, the contents are far more important

than the side-effects. What’s more, the capability of some Internet providers that have limited

bandwidth makes the download process of a web page slower if it contains many animated

graphics. Conversely, if it just contains text, the download progress will be faster. The effect

will be great to the website visitors; they could browse the website more quickly.

Daniel Chandler’s personal websites (below) illustrates the simplicity of how the

personal website should be. It is not decorated with animated graphics, but just simple

background design. Compared with my personal website, though it is not coloured with

animated graphics, its links are made with graphics, not text. This will also differ in time of

downloading the web page. In addition to Chandler’s personal website, the author seem to be

more attentive at the contents rather than at the appearance. Many personal website authors

like using animated graphics to beautify their websites. Nonetheless, they also pay attention to

the content, in terms of its good quality.

Another example is the personal website belongs to David Gauntlett,

newmediastudies.com. He doesn’t employ complicated design to his website, especially on its

front page. However, undeniably its contents are far more important than its humble-looking

front page. Newmediastudies.com is full of fruitful information regarding the new mode of

media studies as well as the study of new media. In short, personal academic website doesn’t

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necessarily show its prominence on its appearance, but it should emphasize more on the

qualified contents, not only “junks”. More often than not, a personal website comprises only a

very few things, a picture of the author and some links to not-really useful sites.

The other thing is, don’t go mad with colours. That sounds a bit boring… but a mass of

colours just looks horrible. What you really need is to choose a small number of

complimentary colours and use those.

In short, the content must be compelling, interesting and informative. You should

know the target audience. Academic personal website has its own audience, i.e.: students and

academicians. Having known your website rich of useful contents, this kind of audience will

come back to it since they come to website for information.

Picture 1: Daniel Chandler’s academic personal websites

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Picture 2: The very simple front page of www.newmediastudies.com

• Ease of navigation The personal website must have this characteristic, i.e.: easy to navigate by the visitors.

Lacking of this will probably cause negative influence to the visitors. A personal website

which is designed without paying attention to its layout, whether or not it is easy to navigate

by the visitors, can cause the visitors desperate. The desperate visitors will not be willing to

come back to your personal website. Even though the lecturer can require his every student to

visit his personal website regularly, but it will be somewhat bothering. Make sure that the

visitors can easily “go home” to the front page whenever they are “lost” to restart their

navigation. My personal website (picture 3 and 4) probably can illustrate this. The left

navigation bar enables visitors to always restart their navigation whenever they want.

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Picture 3: One of the site maps on my personal website is about the subject I teach.

It covers Introduction, Objectives, Syllabus, Assessment, References, Sources and Links to other websites

• Don’t be too Big or too Small

In determining the text size, don’t do very big. Generally, if things are smallish they

look more stylish, whereas huge things have a tendency to look dumb. If the text you use in

your web pages is too big, it is sometimes associated with children’s books. Anyway, there’s

been a trend recently to make everything look more compact. It is of course dependent upon

your own style in designing your page.

Conversely, avoid using lots of tiny text that is too small to read. Visitors are not keen

on reading too small text.

• Keep up-to-date In order not to disappoint the visitors, the personal website should be regularly

updated. The academic personal website ideally should be updated at least once a week.

When a lecturer wants to announce important information regarding his sudden plan to be

absent from the class, he could immediately post it on his personal website. His students

should have been told in advance to check his website at least twice a week.

In modern universities who have used computers and the Internet as the means of

communication among administrators, students and lecturers, such kind of case can be solved

easily because the lecturer can immediately tell the students by e-mails through the university

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e-mail network about certain information. When the students are accidentally accessing the

university computer, they will be notified by popping-up message from the network

administrator that they get new e-mails from their lecturer. Accordingly, the students can

check them immediately.

• Provide a guestbook for feedback Feedback from the visitors is very important for the sake of the improvement of your

website. Therefore, you should provide a guestbook that enable the visitors to write their

comments and recommendations to your website. These can become the inputs to improve

your website. Even, you should “listen” to what the visitors say about your site, whether the

content has been good, rich or poor. In addition, they may also criticize the design of your

website. If you think they give constructive ideas to improve the website, you’d better follow

them.

Picture 4: The front page of my personal website.

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Picture 5: The face of www.theory.org.uk

• Use a counter It is also important to know how many people accessing your personal website

everyday, every week and every month. Therefore, you should install a counter on your

website. It will enable you to know the number of visitors. Even though you have provided a

guestbook, not all visitors will leave a message in it. Every month you can compile the

statistical data obtained from the counter, and you can compare between months about which

is the most. Having done this, you can evaluate them to increase the effectiveness, the

attractiveness and the quality of the content to suck more visitors.

• Check spellings and grammars

Web pages with no spelling and grammatical mistakes will be far more convenient to

read than web pages which have many mistakes on grammar and spelling. Therefore, it is

important to check them before uploading them to the website. If you write on your web

pages with too many mistakes on spelling and grammars, it will describe that you are a

careless person, or it will show that you don’t administer your website seriously. If you can

write well then the visitors may have good judgment to you. Conversely, they may show less

appreciation to you if you can not comply with the well-written and free-spelling and

grammatical-errors web pages.

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• Improve its visibility Having been successfully targeted your academic personal website to your students

you should also think of letting other people know its existence by improving its visibility. If

your website is attached to the department’s, the faculty’s or and the university’s official

website, it would not be too hard for visitors who are predominantly your own students to find

it, what’s more if your institution is the famous one. But, if your website is independent --not

attached to the faculty’s website—you should make efforts to tell people with different ways

instead of just telling them from class to class. When you have expanded your target audience

to people outside your university, you need to improve the visibility of your personal website.

TIPS TO IMPROVE WEB SITE VISIBILITY

Use an “obvious” URL

Install plenty of links

Register all possible variations in spelling

Register keywords that are likely to be used by web users, not your own promotional positioning phrases

How to build a website? There are many ways to build a website, namely using HTML/DHTML, XML, PHP etc. But

that would probably be too difficult and time-consuming if we just want to set up a simple

personal website. Building a website requires at least a little skill mastery in HTML or other

website-building software such as Microsoft Front Page or Macromedia. It probably

takes quite a long time to learn HTML since it is quite complicated, especially for the

beginners. Young prospective academicians may have high idealism about making their web

pages. However, to learn HTML may just spoil their time, unless they have already got

preliminary skill in it.

By using ready-used software for end-users can enhance your time-speed of learning

how to build a website. Using Microsoft Front Page or Macromedia Dreamweaver can

be very convenient and enjoyable, because they use what you see is what you get principle.

Microsoft Front Page is more appropriate for beginners. You can follow the instruction

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from the Help section in the software step by step, from planning the layout of your website

until publishing it on the Web.

Nevertheless, if you are still not familiar with using the programs above, you can try

the easiest one, namely using the website-building tools available for free on the Internet such

as Geocities and Tripod. Anyone can make her personal website directly on the Internet, then

upload the file to the server as they also provide you free domain up to 80MB. Even, you will

have been provided with templates that can guide you to set up your website. It is probably

the simplest and the quickest way to build a personal website. Having finished uploading all

the web pages you make, you can test your website URL from any browsers, the Internet

Explorer or Netscape Navigator. There are also some commercial websites which offer you to

shorten/ redirect your website URL to make it easy to remember, e.g.:

www.smartredirect.com.

Reality Constraints in the Making of Personal Website So far, the making of personal website is still hindered by some factors. One key factor

that influences people’s chances of reaping the emancipatory benefits of the personal website

is their internet access rate. One factor which influences one’s opportunities to access the

Internet is country of residence. Take some countries as examples: the Internet access rate of

people living in China is 3.6%; France, 28.4%; Germany, 38.9%; Greece, 13.2%; Iceland,

69.8%; Malaysia, 25.2%; Russia, 12.4%; Singapore, 51.8%; Sweden, 67.8%; Spain, 19.7%;

Thailand, 2%; United Arab Emirates, 36.8%; United Kingdom, 57.2%; United States, 59,1%

(the above are 2001 and 2002 statistics, see Nua.com, 2002). Since internet access varies

widely from country to country, the availability of the emancipatory potentials of the personal

website varies substantially between people living in different countries. In fact, besides

country of residence, internet statistics also show that, in many countries, some factors such

as ethnicity, gender, age, educational attainment and income level may also affect internet

access rate, although the influential power of individual factors varies greatly from country to

country (Cheung, 2003).

But will equal internet access bring about equal opportunities in making personal

websites? Not necessarily. In a study of the student websites of four USA universities and

four Germany universities, Döring (2002) finds that females only make up 27% and 13% of

the student website authors in the USA universities and Germany universities respectively,

despite the fact that all of these universities the gender of students are balanced. One possible

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explanation is that females tend to feel alienated from the male dominated computer culture

(Morbey, 2000; Turkle, 1988), making them less easily and motivated to learn website-

building skills. In other words, even if females and males have similar opportunities to ‘log

on’ to the Internet (it has already been the case in certain countries like the US and Canada),

females may not have the same degree of technique and motivation as males to create and

maintain personal websites. In short, equal internet access does not necessarily means equal

opportunities in making personal website.

It is also illustrated by Dominick’s (1999) study of how the factors of gender, age, and

occupation may influence people’s chances of making website. From 317 English personal

websites randomly sampled from the Yahoo! website directory, Dominick finds that those

who mention an ‘occupation’ are students and around 90% of the remaining occupations are

white collar workers. These data suggest that, at least for the making of ‘English’ websites,

the young, females, the unemployed and blue collar workers may have less chances of

building websites than other people (Cheung, 2003).

Conclusions My analysis so far clearly demonstrates that, although the personal website is an

emancipatory media genre for some people, its emancipatory potentials have not yet benefited

all. The reality constraints though in some cases do matter can still be resolved. Looking at

the importance of the personal website and its advantages produced, the young academicians

should start thinking of to have a personal website which is used to teach the subject he

teaches.

The problem of the Internet access might be less bothering if there is an Internet

Services Provider in the university. Some universities have already got their own ISP that

operates to serve their internal users. This can solve the problem of lecturers who don’t have

the Internet access at home. They don’t necessarily go to the Internet café to update their

personal websites, so they can maintain their websites from the ease of their office chair.

Moreover, it is important to implant the new habit to students to check their e-mail

folders and faculty websites or their lecturer’s personal website regularly. If they have

accustomed to doing it, the learning process through personal website will be optimum.

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