The following post is an extension of an article I wrote during my Master’s of Education final project titled Enriching adolescent self-study by increasing help-seeking pathways through the employment of online social learning networks (2025). The full paper can be found using the link below.
For those of you who would like to explore the help forum, you can access it here with the password SMS2025.
What I’ve Learned
The most important lesson I’ve learned as I design my online help forum is how frustrating web design can be. While I don’t have much knowledge when it comes to designing websites, I do have substantial experience in coding and designing simulations. For this project, I decided to use wordpress.com which was probably an error. While this site is attractive for an amatuer like myself because of the ease of use, it ultimately failed to provide me the freedom I needed to achieve my vision. For those unaware, wordpress.com allows you to build websites using pre-defined blocks that can include paragraphs, videos, forms, and other types of media. The interface is simple to use and allows for efficient website building.
The difficulty with this block oriented editor is that it does not allow you to use custom code. As I learned more and more about web design, I wanted to implement custom code so that I could define new functions and features. Unfortunately, this is impossible using wordpress.com without a monthly subscription that starts at around $10 and only goes up from there. Ultimately, what I’ve learned is that if I want to achieve my vision for this help forum, I need to use a design tool that affords me the freedom to customize the environment using html code.
Next Steps For The Help Center
Presently, there are two future steps for my help center: (1) real user engagement and (2) migration to wordpress.org. First, the website needs real human users so that I can study how they interact within the space. The help center is currently built upon theoretical frameworks and generalizations spawned from literature. A true test of the space would be to see how students actually use it. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this post, my students are on summer break and the only help they’re looking for is a ride to the beach and some cash for ice cream. However, if you’re reading this and are looking to be a guinea pig, you can access the general help forum and request assistance yourself! I’ll try to be timely with my help.
Second, the limitations of wordpress.com make customizing the website difficult; especially if I want to implement a feature that doesn’t currently exists as one of their blocks. One such example is the ‘thread count’ feature that is supposed to count how many comments there are in a help topic. WordPress.com does not have a block for counting comments on a specific post and it also does not allow you to import custom code to do so. This is because wordpress.com is a for-profit website that requires you to pay a subscription fee to use their premium plugins (one of which allows you to custom code). WordPress.org on the other hand is open source and allows for the custom creation of user-defined elements. While it may be trickier to use as a beginner, the benefits greatly outweigh the negatives once you become competent with html coding and web design.
Next Steps For Research
As I look to warp this project up and move on to testing, one area of research that interests me is how children interact anonymously with each other online. A key design feature of my site is the ability to interact with others as an anonymous user. Much of the literature I have read about help seeking is that anonymous interaction alleviates social pressure and allows for greater levels of vulnerability. But how exactly do children behave when they are unknown to their community? If it is anything like how adults interact with each other online, additional steps will need to be taken to ensure their safety as well as the safety of the community. Future research would focus on the factors that moderate anonymous interactions amongst adolescents and the impacts of it on a community like a help forum.
Share Your Thoughts!
If you have an ideas for how to improve my online help forum, please leave a comment below and I’ll try my best to implement it.
