Work on a homework assignment
Shannon decides to work on a project for her Government class. The other day, she had a question about how the electoral college worked, and had posted on a message board hosted in the education platform to see if anyone could help. Now she’s checking to see if she’s received any responses.
Because the computer is used by all local students regardless of what school they go to, these message boards allow Shannon to talk to students from other schools, which is helpful if their teacher happened to explain something better than one of her recorded lectures did. One benefit of time sharing technology is that everyone who is able to connect to the local computer is from the local area, so the chat services hosted on the local computer are more closed off, and seen as safer. Although users can join the computer anonymously under any name, their terminal connection can be traced should they be disruptive or hateful in chat spaces, and they can face a ban from accessing public chat functions.
Shannon is lucky enough to have gotten 3 responses- 2 from students and one from a Subject Monitor. Subject Monitors are student volunteers, usually from the grade above, who monitor discussion posts centered around different school subjects to make sure that correct information is being shared and answer questions that other students haven’t been able to answer. They aren’t always available, as this is an unpaid position that students usually take on for service hours, meaning they tend to be online only after school lets out and not too late into the evening. Subject Monitors get special codes from teachers that give them slightly more power than the average user, with the ability to delete inappropriate comments from discussion boards. Moderation like this is done on a volunteer basis, though for the bigger public areas of the computer system moderators are hired and paid a low but livable wage. This is because moderating public boards can be more taxing, and occassionally involves legal issues.
Shannon types a quick "thank you" to everyone who responded. She has the information she needs to finish her homework, but before she does, she browses the other questions on the school message boards to see if she knows the answers to anyone's problem. Even though she doesn't have to, she always wants to try and return the favor whenever someone takes the time to try and help her. She finds a question on MLA citation that she knows the answer to and types a response, linking a previous similar question thread in case if the asker wants more information. Another handy thing about this question forum is that all the past questions remain and are searchable. So if you have a question, there's always a chance that someone else has asked a similar one previously and people have already posted answers. After finishing up on the message board, she gets to work on her homework.
What should Shannon do?