[CPSR Home Page] | [CPSR Newsletter Index] | [Fall 1994 Issue--Table of Contents ]

Excerpts from
51 Reasons: How We Use the Internet and What It Says About the Information Superhighway
edited by Martha Stone-Martin and Laura Breeden, FARNET; Inc.

CPSR News Volume 12, Number 4: Fall 1994

Was this a space age fantasy? Or does this new way of communicating really have the potential to change the way we live, study, and work? We can begin to see the answers by looking at the Internet, where the beginnings of the information superhighway already exist. Through the Internet, a worldwide network of networks, millions of Americans exchange ideas, pictures, movies, articles, and other forms of data every day.

The Internet stories project was conceived at FARNET, the Federation of American Research Networks, in the fall of 1992. We felt that the increasing popularity of the Internet across many sectors, from education to libraries to health care, should be documented in a way that made it easy to understand who is using the network today, and how. We thought that this information would be especially useful during the discussions about information infrastructure that were beginning to take place. Having a more personal glimpse of the technology and the possibilities it creates is a helpful foundation for understanding its significance.

In February 1993, we issued an open "call for stories" over the Internet. The set of stories reprinted here is a small subset of those printed in the FARNET book, 51 Reasons: How We Use the Internet and What It Says About the Information Superhighway, which in turn is a small subset of the stories we received in response to our call.

Since 1982, Montana State University's Agriculture Extension Service has produced hundreds of printed guides for distribution to citizens around the state. These popular MontGuides cover a wide variety of topics, from watering yards to handling crop pests and pesticides to managing a ranch. Montana State University (MSU) also produces a series called the Beef Cattle Handbook, which focuses on topics such as nutrition, diseases, breeding, and cattle management.

In 1992, thousands of the MontGuides and Beef Cattle Handbooks were made available to MSU Libraries in machine-readable form, so they could be loaded on the Libraries' online system, CatLink. Catlink is now available on campus, but students and others can also access it through dial-up and the Internet.

Ann Harris is a composite portrait of the kind of person who has benefited from CatLink access. She is a rancher who lives miles from the nearest town, Twodot, Montana (population 95). Twodot itself is over a hundred miles from a population center with a library that might have current agricultural information. But because Ann has a modem and a computer for her ranch records, she is able to dial into the CatLink system and find information on a variety of topics. One day in late June, she locates several articles on alfalfa and several more on beef cattle. One article in particular seems useful to her, because it contains a nutrient table that she can manipulate to fit her ranching operation. She downloads the information into her personal computer and starts experimenting with the files.

Later, while scrolling through CatLink's MontGuides, she discovers an article "Growing Tomatoes in Montana" written by an MSU professor of horticulture science. Ann has never raised tomatoes because they have such a short growing season, but she has been interested in trying. On the screen she is able to browse the seventy-five pages of information. She finds practical information about the local growing season, the proven varieties for her area, and problems she might encounter.

There is currently a crisis in cosmology. This is because the apparent distribution of matter in the universe is a lot more "clumpy" or clustered than simple Big Bang models predict. For the last decade, Greg Bothun, an astronomer at the University of Oregon, has been involved with a large scale program to determine what the distribution of mass in the nearby universe actually is. Most of this work has been done in Chile, because the foothills of the Northern Chilean Andes are the best place on earth for making astronomical observations.

In the pre-Internet era, it took approximately thirty hours to travel from Oregon to the telescope in Chile. With a NASA maintained satellite up-link, however, the data from the telescope can now come directly to Eugene where it can be displayed and analyzed. In addition, hourly satellite photo retrieval can be used to assess the weather conditions within a hundred mile radius of the telescope. The end result makes for a much more efficient way to acquire relevant data.

As more and more telescopes get on the Internet, the opportunity for performing coordinated worldwide observations increases. Moreover, as telescopes move to a unified control environment, it will be possible to have a central Internet site control the movements of a vast array of telescopes.

For now though, Greg Bothun is happy he can operate and retrieve data from a telescope which is located ten thousand miles away. And he's happy that the Internet has been able to provide him with more than just image transfer. In 198X, Bothun was observing in Chile when his wife, back in Oregon, went into premature labor. With the Internet, Bothun could communicate with the hospital where his wife was staying. He could get reliable information and he wasn't, he says, as panicked as he might otherwise have been. So, for his professional and his personal life, the Internet has been an enormous asset.

Last year, children from Bonnie Blagojevic's family daycare home were "word travelers, going around the world" through picture books. As Blagojevic was reading books from Russia and Iceland, among other places, to the children in her care, she started to wonder about the authenticity of what she was reading. There was no shortage of multicultural books, but they were all written or illustrated from an American perspective. What, Blagojevic wondered, did picture books from around the world look like? What were the favorite books of youngsters in Italy, Norway, or Egypt?

With these questions in mind, she was able to get an Internet connection through the University of Maine. Then, with her daycare group, which included children ages three to nine, she used the computer to get to know children around the world. She says that the "richest online relationship" was with a five-year-old boy in Russia who lived outside Moscow. Blagojevic's group grew so attached to this friend that they decided to send him a book about Maine. They listed things they wanted him to know about Maine. Then, each child picked one item on the list and drew a picture to illustrate that aspect of Maine. These pictures, and photographs of the participating children, were collected and bound. The children named the result The Maine Tour, and they sent the book along with some of their favorite picture books to Russia. They also sent The Maine Tour and some of their favorite picture books to online friends in Iceland. The children in Iceland responded by sending back some of their favorites, half written in English and half in Icelandic. Luckily, a local man spoke Icelandic. When he came to daycare to read the books to the children, they insisted he read them ALL. Without the Internet, this project would not have had the sense of reality that it did for the children. It's not that the children needed the Internet to get the basic benefits of the book exchange; they found the books interesting, and they were exposed to diverse cultures. It wasn't, however, until the children "knew" youngsters around the globe that they had a genuine sense of real people living other lives. What's more, Blagojevic notes, the Internet quickly became something the children felt they could look to for answers. One afternoon, the group was making a Puerto Rican rice dish that called for pigeon peas. Nobody knew what pigeon peas were. Then one of the students suggested asking the computer. In the end, Blagojevic says, when one uses the Internet in early childhood education, one is using it for two reasons: to connect educators and help them to support one another, and to teach children from an early age that the Internet is a way of connecting to others. The goal at this stage in education, she says, is not ''academic knowledge but (to make children) aware that they are part of a global society."

"Out here in the Southwest corner of North Dakota," says Les Snavely, librarian at Bowman High School, "it's really no exaggeration to say that SENDIT is our link with the world." SENDIT, he explains, is his library's computer access to databases around the region, the nation, and the world. Through a modem, SENDIT connects to libraries, to NASA, to, in short, almost every public computer database. Such a wealth of information might seem unnecessary for a high school library, but in Snavely's remote community the public library is only open an hour a day, three days a week, and its collection of three thousand books contains mostly fiction. So, Bowman High School's libraryÑwith its 30,000 booksÑis the largest in the region. As a result, Snavely is responsible for serving the community as well as the five hundred students at Bowman.

It is in this latter capacity, as librarian for the region, that Snavely has made some of his most unusual finds. For a while, he says, he was getting constant requests from the paleontology department at the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum. They were requesting unusual and obscure titles dealing with their fossil specialties. The scientists were surprised by how quickly Snavely could find articles like "Molluscan Paleontology of the Pierre Shale Formations ...," a master's thesis in geology written in 1970, and "Foraminiferids of the Cannonball Formation ...," written in 1974. They sent requests for more articles, realizing that if they were going to "stump SENDIT," they'd have to request something old. Thus, they were stunned when Snavely produced the hard-to- find 1938 manuscript "Fossil Snakes of North America." And they were so amazed they had to stop their own workÑthe process of assembling a dinosaur fossilÑwhen Snavely produced an old hand-typed, 4x8 page volume of the 1908 "Fossil Turtles of North America."

Snavely himself is pleased by his ability to scan current data but most impressed by the fact that he can search through old, dust-laden archives to find the material his patrons need. Now, he wonders if he can find the original 1883 field notes of the Smithsonian Expeditions out in the untamed West. If they are available, he's confident SENDIT can locate them.

Maurizio Oliva taught a fourth-year course at the University of Utah called "Topics in Italian Culture: Contemporary Issues". It was the last in a series of three courses about the contemporary history, literature and society of Italy. The goals of the course were to increase students' knowledge of Italian society and to engage them in producing authentic text for the purpose of communicating with native speakers about contemporary issues. All aspects of the course were taught in Italian.

Since students were to be communicating with native speakers, they needed background knowledge about their topics and basic information about the political and social structures of modern Italy. To this end, the teacher assigned readings about Italy's constitution, political parties, government institutions, and demographics. Students also read newspaper and journal articles relevant to their individual topics of study.

During the first two weeks, Oliva discussed the assigned readings and helped students learn to use the computers. They began by obtaining accounts on the Novell network from the University of Utah Computer Center, which enabled them to link up with worldwide news networks. Oliva then reviewed basic word processing skills and taught students how to use the Program Editor (PE) and how to access and use the news reader and email.

Beginning in the third week, students were required to send three postings per week to a network news group, soc.culture.italian. These messages were written at home so that class time could be spent sending text to the network, checking mail and discussing other students' postings. (Students read each other's work either before or after it was sent to the network.) Those who wished to receive comments from the teacher prior to posting their texts were able to do so. The teacher checked the news group to make sure students were completing the required amount of writing as well as to monitor the overall quality of the texts. Oliva could review students' work at home by connecting to the campus network by modem.

Students received an average of three responses for each article they posted and were required to reply to each posting with a follow-up comment. Students also received responses to their news texts through email and were encouraged to reply to those as well. Since email accounts are private, however, Oliva was only able to monitor the frequency with which the students replied to these responses.

At the end of the course, students submitted a summary and analysis of the materials they had posted and of the reactions they had received, and participated in a course evaluation session. All the students believed their writing had improved as a result of having communicated through the network. One student felt she had overcome grammar problems, while the others reported feeling more at ease with writing in Italian.

"One of the great times as a librarian," says an employee at Daniel Boone Regional Library in Missouri, "is when you give a student exactly what she wants." Librarians at Daniel Boone Regional Library are able to do this because they are part of the Colombia Online Information Network (COIN). COIN is a community computer service that provides open access to online information for Columbia and the surrounding area. It started as a collaboration among the City of Columbia, the Columbia Public Schools, the Daniel Boone Regional Library, and the University of Missouri-Columbia. COIN's goals are twofold: to prepare the public and private sectors for an information age by providing tree and open access to online information, and to develop a prototype for implementation in other Missouri communities.

Through a development grant from the Higher Education program of the Eisenhower Science and Mathematics Act, work began on the system in September of 1992. The initial focus was the development of an online curriculum library for K-12 science education. The library currently contains over two hundred lesson plans. Many other types of information are also available, including 1990 census data, horticulture guides, constitutional documents, and a directory of social service agencies. Other features of the system include email, bulletin boards, discussion lists, and full Internet access.

COIN opened for public access in May, 1992. At present, the system averages over eight hundred sessions a day. These might be from the schools or from any one of the 2200 users in the community. One user is a senior citizen with Parkinson's disease. This retired gentleman has an ancient computer and was not, prior to becoming a user of COIN, particularly computer literate. He uses his computer daily now, to communicate with people in the community and around the world.

COIN has provided other communities as well as state government with a concrete example of a minimally expensive, largely volunteer effort that makes use of public domain software. Four communities around Columbia are interested in joining COIN as soon as possible, and two other communities in rural Missouri are using COIN as a model for the implementation of their own systems. Staff from the University of Missouri and the Columbia Public Schools have demonstrated the system at conferences and community meetings around the state and have been met with great enthusiasm.

A community information system has the potential for creating a partnership with organizations, universities, public libraries, K-12 schools and local government, that historically do not cooperate, at least with respect to technology. The global economy has created an urgent need to create the global classroom. Project COIN has allowed the rural Missouri classroom to be an active participant in the worldwide information revolution. Without this access, we would be have-nots in a society of information haves and have-nots.

Family daycare is the most popular form of childcare in the United States; four times as many children are cared for in family daycare homes as in childcare centers. Yet, until recently, neither the public nor the private sector had done much to improve the educational component of family daycare.

In 1991, Dr. Carole Greenes, Associate Dean of the Boston University School of Education, and Kathleen Kilgore, a writer and former childcare administrator, started the Home Learning Centers Project (with funds and equipment from IBM) to expand the Chelsea Early Learning Program and to keep good providers working in childcare. The Home Learning Program had three components:

1. A computer network linking twelve family childcare providers to all childcare organizations in Chelsea;
2. Early childhood education training for academic credit (open to all childcare workers and parents in Chelsea);
3. Computer training and home visits by Director Laura DiChiappari to the twelve family childcare providers in the Project.

Before the Home Learning Centers Project established a computer network, many family daycare providers left the profession due to isolation and lack of support. At the start of the Project, experts warned that the family daycare providers would ignore the computers placed in their homes, that they would be "frightened" of them. But this didn't turn out to be true. Instead, the providers loved them. They used them to "talk," share childcare information, arrange field trips and get updates from the health center and the School of Education. They used the network to plan formal outings, to pick apples, to go to the beach. They extended informal invitations, to gather with the children at the park, to meet for a cup of coffee, over the network. The Home Learning Center Project also used the network to sponsor its own activities: children's art exhibits, park clean- ups, English language classes and other community activities.

An added benefit of the network in Chelsea has been the effect the network has had on the self-esteem of childcare workers. People who previously thought of themselves as "mere" baby-sitters now think of themselves as professionals. What's more, the network has had an equalizing effect on participants. On the network, everyone talks: professors, doctors, childcare workers, administrators.

Education and class don't matter. This has been particularly apparent in Chelsea, a small place where residents are nonetheless isolated within ethnic communities. The network allows friendships, friendships that otherwise might not have happenedÑto form across ethnic, class and educational lines.

It was an ordinary Saturday morning in March, and I had tickets to see Kathleen Turner in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that night in Philadelphia. But, by noon, it would turn out to be a most unordinary day. My mother had called to tell me that her doctor thought she had lung cancer. Stunned, I booked a flight to New Orleans, wound up a few projects at the office, and packed, not knowing how long I would be gone or what to expect when I got there. As it turned out, I stayed for seventeen months, and the Internet allowed me to keep my job in Pennsylvania while caring for my mother in New Orleans.

I am the Assistant Director of Academic Computing at Bryn Mawr College, a Seven Sisters college of about two thousand undergraduate and graduate students located on the Main Line in suburban Philadelphia. In the winter of 1989-90, Bryn Mawr joined PREPnet, the Pennsylvania regional network.

After I had been in New Orleans for a week, one of my co-workers mailed me a computer and a modem so that I could set up an office on the kitchen table. I sought (he assistance of a colleague at the University of New Orleans, who gave me an account on a university computer.

At the time, Bryn Mawr did not have a formal family leave policy, so I used up all of my vacation time, and then negotiated a part-time arrangement. I would work twenty hours per week, and the balance of my salary would be used to employ additional student labor at Bryn Mawr. The reduced time would allow me to spend time with my mother: running errands, cooking, taking her places, visiting her when she was hospitalized. Retaining my job helped me "get away" from the responsibilities of my caregiving role, and the income helped me pay my six- month-old mortgage.

Everyone was surprised by how much I could do long distance. From my kitchen "office" in New Orleans, I used troubleshooting software to diagnose hardware failures on the mainframe. I performed everyday maintenance tasks like adding accounts, changing passwords, evaluating system performance, and programming. I consulted with the library staff by electronic mail about the local area network which was being installed. I wrote training materials for the Computing Center's student staff and articles for the newsletter. I advised the biology department in the selection of equipment and software for a new computer lab. I evaluated new software for faculty. Each afternoon while Mom was napping, I answered questions by electronic mail. I had, in effect, "office hours" during which people could find me online for an interactive chat. And finally, I gave students specific instructions for a variety of tasks that needed to be done on site.

The loyalty of the student staff and the close relationships that I had developed with faculty over the years first as a student, and later as a staff member were important to the success of this arrangement. The personnel department's willingness to try a flexible, unorthodox arrangement was important too, as was the support of my supervisor. The Internet provided a reliable, cost-effective means for cross-country communication. I was able to keep my job while caring for my mother, and my employer was able to retain me while I was 1500 miles away. The bottom line is that networking technology made it all possible.

All of the stories FARNET received are available on the Internet for online retrieval using the BPS/SEARCH retrieval tool managed by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). To use the tool, telnet to a.cni.org, and login as brsuser. For additional access methods, please contact Craig Summerhil1 at CNI craig@cni.org. To contact FARNET, either call (617) 860-9445 or send email to stonem@farnet.org.

[Previous Article] | [Table of Contents] | [Next Article]

© Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
P.O. Box 717 Palo Alto, CA 94302-0717
Tel. (415) 322-3778 Fax (415) 322-3798 webmaster@cpsr.org