Students can cheer, jeer University on campus Web site

 by Karen Michelle Sarver
 published on Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Potholes, parking and pepperocinis are just some of the topics Polytechnic Campus students have ranted or raved about on Cheers & Jeers — an online forum featured in the campus's electronic publication, The Insider.

Information Technology Project Manager Jeni Li said the publication was launched in the summer of 2005 "to replace a manual process that was time-consuming, inefficient and, frankly, dull."

Brian Schilt, a former ASU IT student who now works for the CIA, maintained a Web page that featured campus events, a movie schedule and classified ads.

Li said that every week, Brian had to hunt people down to gather campus news.

"Geeks don't like to do stuff by hand, " Li said. "We like to write programs that will help people do things for themselves."

Li and fellow self-proclaimed geeks Schilt and former IT graduate student Mohammad Armia streamlined the reporting process by piloting a database-driven Web site.

Cheers & Jeers, one of The Insider's original features, was inspired by a feedback system used at ASU West's Fletcher Library in the 1990s, Li said. Students submitted comments on index cards and library staff wrote responses on the cards and taped them to the elevator.

"That personal, conversational approach to problem-solving was what we were going for," Li said.

Cheers & Jeers is online and easily accessible. Students can post their comments or concerns on the site, and then, Mike Mader, assistant dean of student affairs, will direct them to the person best qualified to help.

Li said comments tend to come in waves.

"We may go a month or longer with no cheers or jeers, then suddenly receive five or six in the span of a week," she said.

She added that sometimes a post will "spur a flurry of comments on the same topic," noting that housing and parking issues are common complaints.

Erin L. Meehan, an applied biological sciences senior, has posted her concerns about knee-high grass and weeds in the housing area.

Meehan said she thinks Cheers & Jeers enables collaboration among students, "engaging them to be proactive in the development of their university community."

Students are required to submit their name and a valid e-mail address, Mader said. "If it is totally anonymous, people seem to say things that are not appropriate," he added.

Li said that while posted comments are not edited, "some comments aren't suitable for publication, including hate speech, violations of privacy and personal accusations of a defamatory nature."

"Once or twice, at the request of the student who commented, I have modified a cheer or jeer to remove personally identifying details," Li said. But, she added, the staff believes "very strongly" that student comments "should be reproduced exactly as submitted."

That hands-off policy can make for entertaining reading.

Li said one student recently admitted that Cheers & Jeers posts are his substitute for soap operas. That's probably because there are a lot more jeers than cheers.

"People are more inclined to complain than they are to give a cheer," Mader said.

Li said that is why managing Cheers & Jeers isn't always fun, though, she added, when she can help fix a student's problem and make his or her "life a little easier, there's no better feeling than that."

And that's something to cheer about.

To read Cheers & Jeers, visit insider.poly.asu.edu/cheersjeers/index.asp.

Reach the reporter at: ksarver@asu.edu.