Date: Wed, 9 Jun 93 13:59:21 -0400 From: sasha@cs.colgate.edu I've just put the hard copy in the mail, and I'm appending a better file for KIDLINK: it still has some LaTeX commands, but at least the beginning is not so forbidding. You certainly have my permission to post it, --< cut here ----------------- NETWORKS IN EDUCATION: FOUR PROJECTS Presented at the International Conference on Information Technology and People, Moscow, 1993\footnote{ This work was partially supported by a grant to Colgate from the Howard Hughes Institute of Health. Travel to the conference was supported by Colgate's Research Council and Faculty Development Council.} Alexander Nakhimovsky Computer Science Department Colgate University Hamilton NY 13346 USA\footnote{Internet: sasha@cs.colgate.edu, tel. 315-824-7586 fax 315-824-7831} This paper tells the story of four projects that use computer networks in education. Two of those projects are for students in an introductory computer science course; another one is for students in a humanities course, and the fourth is for science classes in secondary school. \paragraph {\bf The Setting: Colgate and Hamilton} Colgate is a small private liberal arts college located in the village of Hamilton in upstate New York. (There was an article about Colgate and Hamilton in {\em Vokrug Sveta} 1, 1993.) The population of Hamilton is about 2,500. There are farms and smaller villages around it. Hamilton has a school with classes K (for kindergarten) through 12, ages 5 through 18. Because of the college, Hamilton is a relatively rich community. It has a hospital and many doctors. Colgate has 2,600 students, all of them undergraduates. Since it is a private college, it receives little money from the state and federal government. Its income mostly comes from tuition, donations by wealthy graduates, and the income from its capital (called endowment). Tuition and other fees add up to more than \$20,000 a year, but Colgate provides financial aid to some students. As a liberal arts college, Colgate tries to give all its students broad humanistic education. In practical terms, this means that students spend a significant part of their time taking courses outside their area of concentration. A student usually takes four courses a semester or thirty- two courses during his/her four years at Colgate. Out of those thirty-two courses, at least eight, and usually more, come from outside the concentration. In particular, every student must take four courses in the General Education program: Roots of Western Civilization, Roots of Modernity, a course in a non-Western country and society, and an interdisciplinary course on a contemporary problem. Although the material of those courses mostly comes from the humanities and social sciences, all Colgate professors teach in them, including computer scientists. One of my experiments with using computer networks for education was in the Roots of Western Civilization course, where students read Gilgamesh, the Bible, Homer, and Plato. \paragraph {\bf Project 1: An Electronic Discussion Group} Colgate has a campus-wide computer network, with clusters of computers in every academic building. Every Colgate student can get a free account on the central computer which serves the campus network and is also connected to the Internet. It can thus be used for email, both inside and outside the campus. General Education classes are taught in small groups, no more than 25 students, and much of class time is taken by discussion. Given the nature of the course, there is never enough time to finish the discussion in class. This was one of the motivations for creating an electronic discussion group for students in my class. An electronic discussion group is simply an arrangement that makes it easy for the participants to send mail to the entire group; it also provides for automatic archiving of all correspondence. Electronic mail (email) is rapidly becoming as common as telephones. There are several advantages to using it for discussion, described in great detail in Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, {\em Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization}, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991. People can contribute at a time that is convenient for them; shy people feel less shy; women do much better in electronic discussions than in face-to-face discussions; people who need more time to think have that time; and people with more status (like professors) do not dominate the discussion so much. Although participation is optional, dozens of messages have accumulated on subjects that range from religion and philosophy to social justice and women's rights. Here is a fairly typical message: \begin{quotation} I've noticed that the recent discussion has been centering around the idea of equality, and are all humans created equal? I understand Alex's point about the lack of opportunity for a baby born addicted to crack as opposed to a healthy child. However, I think we must rely on the principle that everyone is created with just as much right to live as the next person. Now whether or not the circumstances one is born into are favorable or not is another issue, and this of course determines the course of one's life. Before exhausting this topic completely I would like to add a comment concerning equality in the life of Solon. As the Athenians began to look towards Solon to be a leader, people began to formulate opinions of this man one of them being, Phanias of Lesbos. This individual states that in trying to please all the classes, Solon "went behind the backs of both parties in order to save the city..."(p.55). He says that both the rich and the poor were willing to accept him because he promised different legislations to both parties. It is also said that the phrase "equality breeds no strife" was used a great deal before Solon's election, yet this meant different things to different groups of people. The rich thought he based equality on "merit and achievement"(p.55) while the poor assumed he was talking about equality simply "based on the counting of heads"(p.55). These are two opposing views of equality that different people adopted according to their situations. I wonder if some engage in this line of thinking still today? Is the idea of equality an objective one, or is it subjective? \end{quotation} \paragraph {\bf Project 2: Obtaining Data from the Network} Project 1 used the network locally, and only for email. The remaining projects all use the resources of the Internet. In Project 2, these resources are combined with the capabilities of the spreadsheet to develop what may be called "a structured approach to challenging conventional wisdom." Mass media daily confront us with assertions presumably based on statistical analysis of data. Issued authoritatively by a respectable source, they tend to become conventional wisdom. Two recent developments, both the result of the computer-driven technological revolution, have made it possible for an ordinary citizen to subject conventional wisdom to greater scrutiny. The first and older development is the availability of computer programs that make it possible to use sophisticated analytical tools after relatively little training. The second and very recent development is the availability of large banks of data in public access areas on computer networks. Putting the two together gives a structure to an introductory computer applications course. We can choose one or two issues of current interest (the AIDS epidemic, drug and alcohol abuse, the environment, changing employment patterns, etc.) and try to ascertain what the current conventional wisdom is. In the meantime, we would be learning how to use spreadsheets for modeling and analysis of data, and how to navigate the networks. After we have developed all the necessary technical skills we will test the conventional wisdom against the real-world data from the net. In the course I taught in the spring, the problem we chose was the AIDS epidemic. A preliminary lab dealt with mathematical models for epidemic diseases and their spreadsheet implementation. For the main lab of the unit, students were given real-world data on the spread of AIDS in the United States. (Every three months, fresh data sets, in the ASCII format, are uploaded by the Centers for Disease Control to the Public Health Network.) The students had to download the data to their computer, convert it from the ASCII to the spreadsheet format, and perform several analytical operations on it. The results surprised most everybody, as the subsequent electronic discussion demonstrated. \paragraph {\bf Project 3: From Text to Database} This project was also done by students in the introductory computer science course, and it also involved converting ASCII to spreadsheet data format. Otherwise, the projects are quite different. The raw data of Project 3 came in sentences, from which structured data had to be extracted. The resulting data formed a database. and the statistical analysis was purely descriptive (while the statistical tools used in Project 2 included regression analysis). Perhaps the most important contrast is that Project 2 was about disease and death, while Project 3 was about children and their plans for the future. The data for the project came from KIDLINK, a global network of children and educators created by a Norwegian, Odd de Presho and run by an international group of volunteers. Every year in early May, KIDLINK starts its annual cycle of activity which culminates in a celebration on May 8. Three such cycles, KIDS-91, KIDS-92, and KIDS-93 have been completed. The following message, abbreviated here, is sent to every new subscriber to KIDLINK: \begin{quotation} Dear networker, KIDS-93 is a grassroot project aiming at getting as many children in the age group 10-15 as possible involved in a GLOBAL dialog continuing until May 1993. KIDLINK is the name of the organization of volunteers who run the KIDS-xx yearly projects. Please note that the KIDLINK list is only one part of our activity. We also have the following discussion lists under our "umbrella": RESPONSE is where the children send their responses to the four introductory questions: 1) Who am I? 2) What do I want to be when I grow up? 3) How do I want the world to be better when I grow up? 4) What can I do now to make this happen? This is the *only* purpose of this list. When this is done, we invite the children to start writing messages in KIDCAFE and KIDS-ACT. KIDCAFE is for kids aged 10 - 15. Here, they can talk about whatever they like, establish relationships with new friends in other countries, discuss the future, school, hobbies, environment, or whatever. Subscription: Open for everybody, but read only for those not in this age group. And, read only for kids who have not yet introduced themselves publicly by responding to the four basic questions. KIDS-ACT is for kids aged 10 - 15. Here, they can talk about what THEY can do NOW to achieve their future visions. Regard it as an extension of the KIDS-93 question 4. Open for everybody, but read only for those not in this age group. And, read only for kids who have not yet introduced themselves publicly by responding to the four basic questions. KIDLEADR is for teachers, coordinators, parents, social workers, and others interested in KIDS-93. This is an informal meeting place for those involved in KIDLINK: exchange of curriculum ideas, networking on a personal level, ask for help, requests for hello messages, teacher introductions, invitations to joint class projects, and much more. Subscription: Open to everybody. Remember to check out the archives of KIDLEADER for interesting background information. KIDPROJ has been created to enable teachers/youth group leaders to provide projects for children through the KIDLINK network. For additional information, send a message to LISTSERV@vm1.nodak.edu . In the TEXT of your message, write the command GET KIDLINK PROJINFO KIDPLAN this is for those who want to participate in the detail planning of the project. We have among other things been discussing whether to split up KIDCAFE into pieces, a generic name for our projects, and much more. Subscription: open for everybody. You may want to seek more information from the archive before involving yourself in the discussion. We suggest that you first retrieve the "Letter to teachers" and various newsletters. Contribution to this list is automatically archived. You can obtain a list of archived notes and other available files by sending an "INDEX KIDLINK" command in an ordinary email message to LISTSERV@VM1.NODAK.EDU. Virtually, The LISTSERV and KIDLINK management \end{quotation} On April 16, Odd de Presno posted a message to KIDLINK from which I quote below: \begin{quotation} Hello KIDLINKers, Here is a challenge to all participating teachers, that may also be of interest to teachers of older students \ldots KIDLINK needs data that can tell us and others what is happening to our grassroots movement. Among the things we want to know are the following: * How many children did answer (all) the four KIDLINK introductory questions during KIDS-93 (May 20, 1992 until May 8, 1993). * Where do they live (city/place and country)? * How old are they? In addition, we would be very happy to learn the following about KIDS-93 (second priority, though, if you feel that the items above are enough): * Who are they? (breakdown by hobbies, interests, etc.) * What do they want to be when they grow up? (breakdown by profession, etc.) * How do they want the world to be better when they grow up? (breakdown by kind of wish, etc.) * How do they want the world to be better when they grow up? (breakdown by proposal, etc.) Given the amount of children involved in KIDLINK, knowing the answers to these questions will be extremely interesting: to KIDLINK, to KIDLINKers, to the press, to educators, to politicians, parents, you name it. You may want to use either a spreadsheet program or a data base management system, into which you register the data. If you do, then you should be able to do powerful analysis of the data, once the data is in place. \end{quotation} Odd's challenge matched the contents of our introductory course very closely, and we decided to take it up in our last lab. Using FTP (File Transfer Protocol), LOG files were retrieved from the RESPONSE archive on the VM1.nodak.edu, and moved to the PCs in the lab. Using various techniques, text file information was converted to records in a QuattroPro spreadsheet. Once this was done, a variety of statistical data could be produced from the resulting database of records. Both students and lab instructors worked on the lab with great enthusiasm, motivated by the knowledge that they were doing something useful. Besides, it was simply interesting to read those responses. I suspect that some of the students in the class started a correspondence with several KIDLINK participants from Brazil. \paragraph {\bf Project 4: Meteorology for School Children} There is a growing concern in the U.S. about the low level of science and math education in secondary schools. A big part of the problem is poor teaching: science is taught as something abstract and boring. Many attempts are now being made to correct the situation by inventing specific projects that would connect science to students' interests and curiosities. People are naturally interested in weather, especially violent weather and weather forecasting. Weather forecast ultimately boils down to questions of physics and chemistry: Is there moisture in the air? Is there a lifting mechanism to lift the moisture into colder regions where it will condense into precipitation? Are there pressure differentials that will move the precipitation from one area to another? A great deal of science can thus be taught through exercises in weather forecasting. It so happens that a great deal of meteorological information is freely available on the Internet. Satellite pictures of North America, both in the visible and infrared spectrum, are uploaded every hour in the GIF format to a computer at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. Similar (but better) pictures for Europe and the North Atlantic are regularly deposited at a computer in Finland. A computer at the University of Michigan posts regular weather forecasts for big city areas of the U.S. and Canada. All these data are freely accessible by the Telnet and anonymous FTP facilities of the Internet. As part of the same effort to improve science education in secondary school, money is made available through various granting agencies to pay for Internet connections for secondary schools, especially in the context of a college-school collaboration. Last fall, Hamilton Central School (HCS) and Colgate wrote a join grant proposal to NYSERNet, a nonprofit organization that helps develop networking in the state of New York. Most of the projects proposed in the grant had to do with KIDLINK, but we have since begun to develop some science projects, including the meteorological one. We hope to see it in the classroom in the fall of this year, if we manage to overcome the initial problems. The biggest initial problem proved to be, unsurprisingly, teacher motivation and training. Secondary school teachers in the U.S. are, by U.S. standards, poorly paid and often poorly trained. They have heavy schedules and little incentive to move into new areas like the Internet. Many suffer from computer phobia; many lack computers and network connections. Our first steps, therefore, are directed at teacher training. Together with a meteorologist from Colgate, I conducted an initial training session with four school teachers at HCS. We connected to the Illinois computer, downloaded two fresh satellite pictures, analyzed the most important weather features, and tried to develop a forecast for the area where it was fairly obvious. We then connected to the Michigan computer and compared our forecast to the one from the U.S. Weather Service. (We didn't do too badly.) This is the kind of exercise we hope to see in the classrooms in the fall, after a week-long teacher training workshop in August.