Bulletin Boards
As a student seeking to keep my finger on the pulse of college life, I often find myself stopping to look at the assorted bulletin boards dotted around the Stanford campus. These colourful, densely populated slabs of wood are communal—students are allowed to post any events or club meetings they see fit. As a grad student, I often looked at these boards to keep apprised of upcoming student events. During the first quarter, I joined the Muay Thai kickboxing club because their lime green coloured advertisements on the board had caught my eye. Thus, I do consider these boards to be learning spaces and important conduits of information.
In terms of the positives, the boards are well situated—I see them every morning on my way to class. They appear to be well dispersed making it easy for students all over campus to have some idea of upcoming events. In addition, the brightly coloured advertisements make it difficult to miss them.
Unfortunately, these positive attributes are offset by various negatives which detract from the learning potential of the space. For example, the posters are often pasted on top of each other, which eliminates the effectiveness of those not fortunate to be on the top. In addition, the advertisements are usually outdated, making it tedious to wade through the posters to differentiate between stale and fresh events. For these reasons, I usually find myself bypassing these boards rather than treating them as a useful source of information. Many of these negatives are obviously due to the student run nature of the boards.
There are several ways to improve the learning potential of these bulletin boards. My first suggestion would be to ensure the timeliness of the material. Either students or an employee should be responsible for monitoring the boards once a week and stripping the boards of old ads. As another suggestion, the boards could be organised in various quadrants to classify the information. One way to organise the quadrants could be by week. Another way to organise the quadrants could be by discipline area—i.e. academic, religious, athletics and arts.
One simple way of assessing the impact of these suggestions on raising awareness about campus wide events, is for student organisations to simply ask how many students found out about their event through the bulletin boards.
Deepak: I totally agree with you that bulletin boards are very useful learning spaces. As I was reading your reflections, I was simultaneously constructing solutions. One of the solutions was to divide the board in sections based on themes and timelines. I'm glad you thought of exactly the same solutions. Last Wednesday, three of LDT students, including myself, were giving a demonstration in an undergraduate residence on a research project called GraoupSpace. We knew that our flyer advertising the event would get lost on the bulletin board (it actually did), so we also pasted the flyers on the inside of the restroom doors so people couldn't miss them even if they wanted to.
One way to increase the effectiveness of bulletin boards is to have a separate section with attactive and eye-catching colors, which displays issues of social relevance or any other issue. A person in charge of the section would change the content every week to maintain the interest of people.
Bonnie: I agree with the bulletin board issue! What makes it difficult to flyer a campus such as Stanford is that it is simply HUGE. As an undergraduate, I found that we had to come up with create ways to flyer--for instnace, have triangle shaped flyers strung as banners, etc in order to catch people's attention. Flyering is also a highly ineffective way of getting students to respond.
Some alternatives to traditional paper flying include the "electronic" bulletin boards inside Tressider--two flatscreen monitors that stream a series of events. Another way to ensure better response is to combine the flyering with an in class annoucement.
Carline: Great suggestions guys. I like the alternatives to traditional flyering--i.e. class announcement, restroom doors and e-bulletin boards. They all represent creative ways to raise student awareness of campus-wide events. Currently, the bulletin boards are simply one way to raise awareneness--however, they are definitely being underutilised in terms of effectiveness (given their great locations in particular).