Team-Building through Technology: Using a Newsletter or a Web Site To Energize Your Department

One of the most difficult problems facing department chairs is inspiring a shared vision of the department, especially among part-time faculty. A departmental forum, or central means of communication that is regularly updated and widely accessible, can be useful in fostering teamwork and this shared vision, while two popular formats for forums are newsletters and World Wide Web pages. In developing a forum, it is essential that basic policy issues be resolved beforehand, including the forum's purpose and audience, what content will be appropriate, the format, methods for ensuring faculty participation, and goals with respect to how ambitious the project will be. In planning a text-based newsletter, key strategies include combining graphics with text to make the publication visually engaging; combining news with feature stories; designing catchy nameplates, mastheads, and headlines; and producing occasional special issues. The Web is a useful tool for providing graphics and text, as well as hypertext links to other resources. To create a Web-based forum, a Web browser, simple text editor, and knowledge of basic hypertext markup language codes are required. A good way to begin designing the site is to browse other Web sites and examine their source code to determine how certain effects are achieved. Care should be taken not to make the site too large to be handled by the department server or too rich in graphics to be downloaded rapidly. Contains 10 references. (BCY)