from: exposure, the magazine of the Society for Photographic Education, March, 1995.
The time: March, 1990
The place: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The scene: The basement of the English building, a dingy old room filled with green-monitored UNIX machines.
The action: A young lab assistant hands a student a "username" and a "password," shows student to a machine, and walks away. The student calls him back, saying, "What do I do now?" Assistant returns, "signs-on" hapless new user, and with a few quick keystrokes, enters some deep dark UNIX hole. Assistant then exits, stage left, leaving student in cyberspace without oxygen....
Fast forward to 1994, same campus.
The scene: College of Agriculture Micro Computer facility, three large rooms chock full of Macintosh PowerPCs and 486's, bright color monitors, ethernet connections to the campus "backbone."
The same bewildered student enters, but this time the campus community is ready to open the door, to assist the new user as she/he assumes responsibility for participation in this strange new world. This article explains the difference between scenes one and two. It shows how responsible computing combined with Mosaic's graphical excitement produced the Discovery System, a tool freely available all over the world. You can examine our product on the Web at: w3.ag.uiuc.edu/WWW/AIM/Discovery/ds-center.html
First, in order to tackle an ambitious project such as training 500 incoming freshman students how to use the network, you need financial and technical support. Fortunately, the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois had the resources and foresight to tackle a formidable project. Had the College not taken this step, many students would "fall through the cracks" and soon be left behind as increasing numbers of classes begin to handle their classwork online. The College wanted to ensure that its entering students knew how to take advantage of their computer network privileges. Yet time was a factor. The first few weeks of the semester can be hectic, so training had to be quick and efficient.
The College already had outstanding computer facilities and expertise, and it assigned AIM lab to handle the task. AIM stands for Agriculture Instructional Media, and the staff, led by Visiting Professor John Schmitz, searched for the most helpful message, meaning, and means to deliver the project. We built ethics into our design from the earliest stages, wanting each student to understand the consequences of interactions in the cyberworld. Why did we spend so much effort in this direction? Dr. Schmitz is a philosopher and I am a director-at-large for CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Often amateur developers do not regard themselves as "computer professionals," but they are in powerful positions. With programs like Hypercard, ordinary teachers become programmers. The explosion of Web pages and html coding means more people are becoming developers all the time, particularly in education. CPSR asks creators to look at the deeper (often harder) questions, such as the effect on users and the community at large.
Because we are well aware of the problems, we realized that our students could be like unguided missiles on the net, inadvertently annoying others, misusing the software, clogging the wires with "spams," and possibly hurting others with thoughtless "flames." Not only that, we wanted to prepare them for hazards such as false information and neglecting studies to "chat." We didn't want them riding the information highway without knowing the rules. Last year one of the University's students was arrested for sending an e-mail death-treat to President Clinton, so a student's abuse of the Net can be extremely serious.
To give a brief overview of our message to the students, and the University community which will also share in our work, here is the wording from the opening Mosaic screen, a clear statement of the goals of our project:
In the Fall of 1993, we taught networking to a group of 18 students in a brand-new multimedia lab. We marveled at how far the computer services had grown from the humble machines of a few years past; the students said the gear was "awesome." However, fancy machines don't solve all the learning problems. We soon learned from working with our students just how little they knew about computers. We realized that any tutorial we devised would have be very basic, with simple language and modest goals.
We did not want to frighten students; rather, we hoped to build their confidence and curiosity and excitement. On the net there could be a wondrous bounty of information at their fingertips if only students could learn how harvest it. We planned the modules carefully, trying to make the links as logical and transparent as possible.
As we planned, we worried about our grave limitation for creating the Discovery tutorial for 500 students&emdash;a lack of work stations. The Micro Computer Center, even at full-strength, could not accommodate the numbers we were dealing with. Some of the machines are Macintosh, and some are PCs. We bought Authorware and SuperPaint, and readied ourselves to create a tutorial that we could move from one type of machine to another, and we explored the possibility of using CD's. Fortunately for us, Mosaic appeared, developed right here at the University of Illinois. Mosaic is a global hypermedia tool for accessing Network resources. Mosaic worked on all our machines, and allowed our tutorial to be reached from across the campus as well. Our students could use computers in their residence halls or labs, and link to the Web and Mosaic. Mosaic's ability to import text, sound, and graphics, gave us multimedia capacity. The "live" links would let us direct the students right to the resources they might need. Examples of resources which we can add to our module are glossaries, idea banks, scientific visualizations, resource lists, abstracts, short Quicktime movies, and so on. In short, Mosaic answered our prayers. And, best of all, we could tinker with the product and update it daily.
The idea of a Driver's License Test for the Internet did not originate with our lab. The Network community has tossed the concept around for years. What we were able to do, however, is incorporate the metaphor into our tutorial and make it a mandatory assignment for the freshman students. In order to pass the basic Agriculture introductory course, AG/HRFS 100, they had to do two assignments from the Discovery tutorial. This "test" gave them more incentive to work their way through the netiquette sections. Here is an excerpt from one of our screens:
Ethics on the Internet can involve:
Unwanted romantic e-mail Business uses Chain letters Flaming Threats
We tried to cover all these and more. For the first assignment, the students had to send a properly formatted e-mail message. We stressed the basic rules of sending e-mail, such as what to put in the subject line and how to identify themselves clearly. The last point becomes of paramount importance when you consider that almost 500 students would be sending in e-mail messages.
For help with the Driver's License, we turned to the Internet community and our own campus computer gurus and asked their advice for basic and helpful knowledge which the students should have. They suggested many topics:
As has been our experience, the "netters: quickly contributed valuable ideas which we attempted to incorporate. We kept in mind that some of our 18-year-old students came from communities and schools that gave them no background in Network communication, and the highly technical items would possibly overwhelm them. One thing the students did know extremely well, naturally, was the concept of earning a Driver's License.
Hyperlinks pointed the students to the sections on ethics at every opportunity. Sources for the Netiquette materials included: "When you're in someone else's house..." by the Computer Ethics Institute; "Zen and the Art of the Internet'" by Brendan P. Kehoe; "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet," by Ed Krol; and "Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet," by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Moreover, we included an entire "page" on "Riding on the Information Highway&emdash;Tips for the Critical Traveler" We urged the students to be suspicious of material found on the information highway:
This is no different than being a critical reader of text or a critical viewer of all graphics in
Ask yourself: What is the credibility of the information I find?
Remember: Anybody can put Anything on the Net!
Here is an early version of the test we planned to use:
The test: AG/HRFS 100 Fall, 1994
Answer the following ten questions. You will get X pts. for each satisfactory answer.
1. What is "flaming?"
2. How do you log-off your e-mail account? How do you quit an application?
3. What and where is Prairienet? [our local Freenet] How do you sign onto it?
4. What does each part of this address stand for? ux4.cso.uiuc.edu
5. What are three rights and responsibilities of your sign-on?
6. List three ways that e-mail is different from a letter and three ways it is the same.
7. What is a network interest group? Give an example.
8. List three common mistakes made by a novice sending e-mail.
9. List seven CCSO sites and three others that are open to the whole campus community.
10. Define "computer network" and "on-line."
Mary Connors, an experienced teacher and artist, joined the team in its early stages. She began with black and white sketches which we scanned in and colorized. Once she saw how much fun she could have in Photoshop, she began to color her own drawings. Mary's work gave the Discovery System much more pizzazz. Each icon had to relate to the overall design. Team members, Aaron Buckley and Chip Aubry quickly mastered html coding and Photoshop special effects. They also showed a knack for eye-catching design.
Now that the Freshman Discovery Tutorial is completed, the AIM staff is gathering information about its effectiveness. The flexibility of Mosaic will allow easy modification. You can cruise the newer modules to see how systems thinking and cognitive learning are incorporated into every section. We both strongly believe that no instruction about computing software should be given without an ethical component. Nowhere is this more important than in the use of the Network. Ethics should be integral to all curriculum planning, of course, but particularly when you are launching thousands of new students into cyberspace. We attempted to use the excitement of Mosaic, of color and linking, of instantly connecting half-way around the world, to hold the students' interest while we presented the "rules of the road." We created a program we see as a first draft, needing polishing and editing and pilot testing. In six months we will be able to assess its effectiveness.
1995
Email Marsha Woodbury with your questions or comments.