Luby Liao and Jane Friedman

Department of Math/CS

University of San Diego

San Diego, CA 92110

As the chair of the Math/CS department, Luby Liao receives frequent calls for help with computer related problems. In September of 1998, Catherine Crutchfield of the Dean's office asked whether we can find a Computer Science (CS) student to help her set up a database application. A CS graduating senior Alphonse Esper took the challenge and worked on the project to her delight and satisfaction. We consider this the motivating event for the web group and fondly call Catherine the mother of the web group.

We formed the web group in the Spring semester of 1999 after being encouraged by the satisfaction of both the student helper Alphonse and his client Catherine. The goals of the web group were simply:

1. to provide a forum for the students to study web-related problems and their solutions, and
2. to help the USD community with their web-related problems.

Given the frenzied interest in everything related to the web, we quickly attracted eight students to the web group. Two joined for independent study credit. The others simply did it out of interest. A group member Tom Hua embarked on a semester-long project of helping Michele Magnin, a faculty member in the Foreign Language Department, with her web-related problems. The web group was less active in the summer of 1999. Yet, at that time, a student member Jaime Garcia started helping Gretchen Ponts of the Graduate Admissions office with their web site. This has been ongoing and will continue until Jaime graduates in May of 2000.

Just as web continues to grow, so does the web group. In the Fall of 1999, the web group became more visible. It now routinely received requests for help. Its 30 odd student members were busy helping many members of the campus.

The clients are happy because they now know that there is an organization they can turn to, to ask for free help. The student servers are happy because they enjoy the satisfaction of helping others and learning in the process. They are proud to be respected as experts.

Internally, the web group meets weekly to present problems and solutions, to give presentations, and to listen to lectures. Students learn to use databases in their web applications to enable dynamic contents. They learn how to use different technologies such as PHP, JDBC, Java applets, CGI and JavaScript. They learn how to choose the proper languages (Java, Perl, Python or others) for a given task. They learn how to set up Linux server machines.

The web group gave three workshops in the Spring of 1999 and one workshop in the Fall of 1999. These workshops are hands-on tutorials to teach web site construction. The attendees first run a script to create a rudimentary web site, this takes just one second. The rest of the time is spent on learning how to polish (edit-publish-edit-publish) web pages using Netscape Composer, a free web page editor.

The three Spring workshops attracted an average of about 5 attendees each. This was because the web group was young and unknown, and the workshops were not well publicized. In contrast, the Fall workshop drew an enthusiastic crowd of more than 50 people. We promised more workshops for those who were unable to attend. We attribute the success of this workshop to the fact that the web group has become more visible and to more aggressive advertising. The Fall workshop was followed by a reception, supported by the USD Enhanced Student/Faculty Interaction Funds, during which student web group members discussed new projects with faculty and staff.

The web group has become a web help center for many. The following letter is typical:

The following appreciative comment from Gretchen Ponts, Graduate Admissions Officer is equally typical:

As of December 1999, there were roughly ten web group students actively helping USD faculty/staff and offices.

In the Spring of 1999 when the web group got started, we recruited eight students by word of mouth. In the Fall of 1999, Luby Liao taught a Topics course in Web Programming which had an enrollment of 34 students. We decided to build a service learning component into the class, all the students are web group members by default. In order to have a group of comparable abilities, we also decided not to recruit new members. One highly motivated student, Johnny Bui, did join the group and made great contributions helping others, although he was not enrolled in the University for the semester.

In the Spring of 2000, we will be back to word of mouth recruitment. We already have a core of about ten students. We expect an active group of more than 20 students.

For now, the web group primarily serves the USD community. But we hope it can serve a larger community in the future, including K-12 school teachers. Two current web group members, Jeff Wagner and Susan Spencer, have begun a K-12 outreach effort. These students are working with Hidden Valley Elementary School in an effort to get all the teachers on-line. They plan to use Perl to create an object-oriented program which teachers at the school can use to create their own web sites. They also hope to develop a database which will contain student information and could be accessed by parents to keep track of their childrens’ progress.

Jane Friedman, one of the authors, has been brainstorming about helping local K-12 school teachers. One of the ideas is to collect phased out Pentiums, put the Linux operating system on them, and give them to K-12 school teachers on condition that they be trained to use them. To motivate the teachers to apply for these machines and mandatory training, the teachers should be compensated for their time and effort. We will apply for grant to make this possible.