The spatial relations in a classroom are definitely different from those in a lab. RBS classroom students often sit in rows, with chair-desks all to themselves, facing a blackboard in front of which a teacher guides activity. This reflects the traditional culture of the school. Many teachers are exploring new methods and arrangements, but the norm for classroom space is reinforced by the kind of furniture, the layout of materials and tools, and the default organization necessary for "frontal teaching". In this environment, teachers have full sight of students, interaction is easily monitored and controlled, movement between desks is easy, and all eyes are up front. It is easy for the teacher establish rapport with the group as a single entity whenever that is called for.
Spatial relations in the lab are in stark contrast, reinforcing the difficulty of enculturation. Students work two- and three-to-a-computer, generally in physical contact with each other, competing for access to keyboard, mouse and monitor (or, having lost that competition, occasionally sulking behind or beside). Movement is very constrained - there is only one exit path, from any given seat, for wires block the central aisle of the two L-shaped arms of tables. The noises of the room, the blocking of eye contact by monitors, and the lack of uniform orientation of workspaces makes group address highly problematic, and group rapport impossible. Students, therefore, are free to work independently - and if they are quiet and manage to complete the day's assignment by the end of class, do pretty much whatever they wish online.
As Merleau-Ponty noted, we experience ourselves and our spaces largely through what we feel able to do with our bodies and senses - we are "empowered" by inhabiting space in which we can move. Rarely are we aware of ceilings and corners which we cannot reach, or the sides of objects we cannot see. Consequently our attention is drawn to spaces where we feel we can act. The many physical constraints of the computer lab were not experienced as barriers by students, because of their identification with the vast reaches of cyberspace accessible through their desktops. Email and the World Wide Web brought them into contact with a liberating, responsive, multifaceted world in which they were not only master of their own movement and activity (unlike the lining-up hall marching between classes) but producers of their own content (well informed by Reese of the number of visitors accessing and lauding their online work). Teachers not identifying with the potentials of cyberspace, in contrast, would clearly have little reason to feel comfortable in the lab.
It would have been provided interesting data for this study to have asked one class of fifth grade students while they are in the lab, and the other half of the grade while in their classroom, "What is School?" Whether consciously or not, students working in lab spaces might be relating to their work environment the way they learned to relate to sandboxes and playrooms--exploring the space, personalizing it, arranging objects, constructing things, evolving shared activities. Students in a modern classroom might have similar experiences, but still be more inclined to view School in the traditional way - as a teacher-controlled, externally structured institution where they are taught what they are "supposed to know".
The classroom and the computer lab are, therefore, very different environments, in terms of what kinds of class activity can go on, how people relate to each other, what sound and movement levels are like, and how they inform what School as a context represents. Students at RBS were able to acculturate to this new environment. RBS teachers were not; they appeared to regard the rows of machines as an environment alien to their daily workspaces and responsibilities. Although they were invited to lead computer-aided learning activities when visiting the lab, Paul Reese by default maintained sole responsibility for planning lessons that integrated computing into existing curricula. Without active teacher reflection on these strategies, such links were rarely strong.
Though he was willing to support and nurture opportunities, it had never been Paul's desire to force classroom infusion. For their part, RBS teachers were happy with the arrangement as it was. Frustration with computers that don't stay configured or functioning had never been an issue for them; nor had the distracting quality of the machines to classroom activity. It was certainly easier to have all computing within arm's reach of the long-armed Reese, should there be any glitches or mysteries that might otherwise interfere with planned lessons. But the arrangement was static. As Reese had predicted, the fifth-grade teacher had resisted the externally-foisted American History Archive project, and subsequently had two of four computers removed from her classroom. Two generations of computers had come and gone at RBS, and most teachers were yet to creatively integrate them into their teaching. The placement of high-end computers in this classroom turned out to be enough to break the stasis, however--a testament to the importance of space arrangements in supporting infusion.
To facilitate this expansion, the wiring of the RBS Computer Minischool was accomplished with ILT's help, and the four new machines supporting two new projects (Mundo Hispana and Teachers & Writers Digital Poetry) were welcome, unqualified successes. Was this the time for Reese and the faculty of RBS to form a technology planning committee and develop schoolwide staff development and classroom support plans for the classroom computers? Or should Reese have continued with his strategy of the gradual enfranchising of teachers as they became ready and interested, whenever that happened?
For the Ralph Bunche School Computer Minischool, the lab-to-classroom strategy developed by Paul Reese has been effective in developing a networked computing culture among students. The flagship projects that have been piloted at RBS have attracted recognition and funding. Despite the incredibly long hours (regular 11-hour days) devoted to maintaining the network singlehandedly, Reese still loves his work, indicating both his dedication and the incredible amount he has been able to achieve. The strengths of his strategy include the centralization of computer supervision, maintenance and repair needs, and the provision of equal access to all students. Certainly, with computer labs far more prevalent than classroom clusters, this strategy is the most likely one for schools.
On the other hand, the pace of creative engagement with network technology has been slow among the faculty, considering the number of years the school has been wired. After eight years, technology projects are still initiated by Paul Reese or external partners. Many RBS teachers don't "own" their school computing infrastructure or accept their role as media literacy ombudsmen - yet.
Lab and office computer support was shared between an afterschool adult educator and the author; but neither could be present enough to protect pioneer teachers from a host of frustrations, from print failures and server crashes to dead mice and diskjams. The lab was not a strategic spot for teachers to place themselves compared to their classrooms, where materials were available, where students and teachers might drop by, and which was theirs to control. Some occasionally ventured into the lab, a few scheduled writing classes, and the rest avoided the place, save for a bold Humanities teacher who moved her students there to access the Macs for word processing (many of which had been in her old room previously). In contrast, the computers in the busy SPC office were well used by students and teachers alike - as administrative and production tools, not for teaching.
However, in the following year, the school moved to it's own building, designed for its purposes and its culture. Thus ensconced, teachers began to explore machines deployed in classrooms as part of the schoolwide network. SPCnet was overhauled and extended by ILT's Phil Davies, who had transferred from ILT to become SPC's first computer coordinator. Phil began offering a series of afterschool teacher workshops (with few takers, to his ire), and grooming a cadre of "student sys-ops" (as he had done the year before at RBS). He also supported SPC's participation in the Mundo Hispana and Digital Poetry Projects of Living Schoolbook, and a third Native American History project that didn't get off the ground. But his greatest impact came from administrating SPCnet, which offered an opportunity for many netiquette object lessons.
The decision to adopt a school bulletin board system by a majority of faculty and the principal for discussion of substantial issues can have significant impacts on the evolution of school culture. A BBS makes discussions (and the roles taken in them by participants) public and "freezes" them as references and pointers for all who come after. Because so many share in the same process over extended periods of time, a BBS can potentially accelerate changes both in the culture of communication and in the shared sense of what the community is. It is democratic, in that all comers are invited to participate, and develop their own public voices to contribute. This will bring many undercurrents and issues to the fore that might otherwise be suppressed, unnoticed, or isolated.
Edward T. Hall uses the terms "formal, informal and technical" to describe the layers of cultural adaptation. In Hall's model, the formal level consists in those attitudes and behaviors which are fixed by tradition and shared by the group (in the RBS case, that computers belong in the lab); the informal level are those made by individuals exploring the boundaries of the formal as they adapting to new circumstances (the placement of computers in a classroom to enable a particular project). As these adaptations are recognized by the group, they become part of a toolbox of new techniques. Then, full circle, the choice to employ the techniques is no longer made - they are simply done because "that's how we do it," and have become part of a new formal order (the expectation that computers belong in classrooms).
It is easy to see how, within the fertile and transformative environment of public BBS discourse, this reculturation process could be accelerated, and SPC provides a cogent example, described below. In that example, the positive role of an online environment to meet the goals of the school community was soundly demonstrated, and SPC use of the BBS moved from the informal (a few teachers and students trying it) to the technical (its use for discussions about its own protocols and conventions) to the formal (its integration into the communicative life of the school). It has been the thesis of Dr. Robbie McClintock, director of ILT, that networked technologies, if deployed, would be their own advocates and change agents; This proved to be the case in both schools, but the particular consonance at SPC between these change agents and a general desire for change must also be emphasized.
Candy Systra, SPC Curriculum Coordinator
In SPC's old digs in Chelsea, NYC, many of those standalone computers that had found their way into classrooms had been either closely guarded by faculty as their own property, or not well supervised, prey for vandalism. This year, by contrast, computers represent common property and shared values. Having computers in one's classroom means each teacher (and student, of course) takes responsibility for how they are treated, structured, and maintained. This was generally experienced as a mixed blessing:
Candy Systra
Although each teacher's classroom is a separate environment, the school's physical and virtual shared spaces are a commons to reflect the developing values of its small, democratic community. The first schoolwide issue addressed on SPCnet dealt with inappropriate email postings by students, both within the school and to teachers in sister Expeditionary Learning-Outward Bound schools accessible over the gateway. Outraged by the deliberate acts, some called for canceling of accounts, while others for a radical "hands-off" that forbade Phil's monitoring of external communications. In response, student privileges to email outside the school were revoked, until the online culture matured to reflect values the school would be proud to share.
It is important to underscore that the issues of what the school as a community stood for and would tolerate, and how student stress levels were impacting upon it, were latent and "in the air" at SPC. Individual access to online expression and instant response, like a canary in a coal mine, increased the sensitivity and impact of those undercurrents. As one teacher put it, "Our whole email/privacy/civility issue has been somewhat frustrating, especially in getting people to try to hear one another. That's not a function of the technology, however."
After days and days of fiery student protest at the punishment of the many for the transgressions of a few, and a host of proposed technical solutions to the problem (as if it were merely a matter of network administration), Phil posted the following manifesto to SPCnet, which earned a slew of "ditto" postings from many faculty:
Phil Davies, SPC Computer Coordinator
Phil Davies
The conversations on SPCnet have not all been as contentious as the censorship thread. The other issue to draw comment from nearly everyone was the fervent debate on what names to give two virtual dogs which had been adopted as school online mascots. The network was also used for sharing projects and news, exchanging pretty pictures, and (in the teachers-only section) the filing and review of student evaluations (a vast improvement over earlier methods). Importantly, the network made it easy for teachers to help each other with technical and pedagogic problems, making classroom computing projects less daunting.
The most significant effect of SPCnet, however, was its support of the development of a community-centered school culture. Beyond these anecdotal comments by teachers, it's difficult to trace direct links between the online dialog and the daily morning community meetings, or the impact of cyberspatial enculturation on reframiing the school's sense of itself through it's move to the new building on 25th Street. But it seems clear, given teacher comments quoted above, that a school bulletin board, and the degree of computer access it demands, makes a collaborative school community that much more viable. For the "small democratic schools" movement sweeping across New York City, this is a powerful argument for school networking.
=>Proceed to General Conclusions
The Ralph Bunche Computer Minischool: Analysis
Why were RBS teachers resistant to working with computers, given the purpose of their Computer Minischool and the substantial support available to them? For three years RBS teachers had dutifully brought their classes to the lab two periods a week, but with two exceptions refused to participate in the development of computer-based curricula that went on there, deferring to resident expert Paul Reese. Perhaps the densely-packed lab setting was not conducive to the kinds of activity that took place in the warmer and fuzzier surrounding classrooms, which the elementary-school teachers were accustomed to. Classroom Clusters and the End of Lab-Centrism
When fifth graders from the neighboring classroom saw their first computer cluster in Room 412, equitable classroom deployment, which had been one of Paul's long range goals, had to be stepped up apace. Teachers demanded each room be wired and equipped - on behalf of their students' use , not their own. The sudden sight of computers in the classroom had caused a paradigm shift for the students - their tacit sense of what classrooms were and what activity took place within them had shifted radically. The connection between classroom learning and access to computers as learning tools was now made in their minds - and they demanded access to these tools, realizing how useful and appropriate they were to tasks given to them. The School for the Physical City: Analysis
During the School for the Physical City's first years in it's temporary space, a lab maintained for computer literacy instruction by a local nurses' union provided an opportunity for students to word process and get addicted to Tetris and Sim City, but little else. The first year of Living Schoolbook nursed this aging network into supporting limited desktop and electronic publishing, and a few techie students began to learn the rudiments of network administration. In addition, the 17 Macs which had been hoarded or boxed around the school in various states of assembly and repair were networked and deployed in the lab and office, supporting file sharing, a number of applications, and the first incarnation of the school's own BBS, SPCnet.SPC Cultural Evolution on the BBS
In the course of a year, SPCnet grew from a few echoing voices across an empty hall to a thriving schoolwide initiative, a virtual commons for all manner of activity. Much of SPC's administrative and curricular communication now occurs on-line, and teachers approve:
"[On-line communication] permits me to be more efficient in responding to a larger number of people in a smaller amount of time. It also allows me to respond when it is convenient for me, say at 7 AM, whether or not the people are in the school building. Further, the fact that it is not a chat permits me to be concise and be done -- I am not engaging in conversation. I love the informality and the privacy of the conversations. Sometimes it feels like we're whispering to each other during the Star Spangled Banner. Sometimes the honesty of the communication is increased by the mediating capacity of the technology."
The "break the mold" culture of SPC is radically different from that of Ralph Bunche, which follows a more traditional schedule and ethos. SPC students and faculty meet as a full community every morning, and faculty meetings are common afterschool occurrences. Under the genial facilitation of principal Mark Weiss, the school exists and grows as a collaborative effort, dedicated to communication process evolution. After a half-year's percolation of various teachers trying email, a general consensus was reached, marked by Weiss, that this local area network was a good thing, and to be entered and mastered by all. The consensual culture of the school carried over, and the virtual commons became an extension of the real one, although amplifying some trends and loosing the influence of others.
"We have only one machine in my classroom; it's more of a pain in the neck than a help, due to students vying for the scarce resource. ... Also, as I'm just learning this stuff, I cannot be as helpful as I'd like when the need for trouble-shooting arises. (Luckily there are usually one or two students around who really know their way around the computers.)"
Computing is not centralized at SPC. The occasional class period held in the lab for supervised student computing time with Phil does not define how computers will be experienced and interacted with back home. Every teacher makes a separate peace with computers in their classroom. As Candy Systra put it, "When we all go to the computer room the whole scene shifts, so it's not like dealing with the same management issues [as the classroom]."
"I believe [email] has the power to transform our roles in school/culture etc., as we can participate in many discussions with a panoply of people inside/outside school without prejudices of age, race, sex or creed that necessarily inhibit our face to face communication. But what good is it if we use it brazenly? Why would we want to reinforce negative stereotypes? It can give a positive and powerful voice to those that might not have that opportunity otherwise."
The open nature of the school's culture permitted very heated discussions to develop in the conference folders of SPCnet (rather than be censored), prompting broader and deeper participation from teachers and students alike in helping define the parameters of the BBS. When cruel or disrespectful messages showed up, they were responded to with appropriate outrage - but were not removed. This strategy forced students and faculty to experience the impact of the communication, building a sense of the need for greater awareness of what is written and, by extension, what is said. Again, Phil summed up the lesson:
"It is very important to understand that email is NOT conversation where words just vaporize as they are said. Email is more permanent, so what you "say" has a distinct impact from that of face to face conversation. The person reading the message does so with uncertainty in perceiving what others think about the message. In a room full of people you can tell when someone is kidding, or angry or silly and everyone understands it through gesture and so on. When you aren't necessarily in the same room with someone "saying" these words using email, you can't gauge the tone of the message, so one has to be very clear about the choice of words. That is why we must develop clear and distinct guidelines for email usage, the written word has a different impact than a spoken word."
Technology deployment was successful in supporting the existing initiative of developing community reflection and process-rich communication at SPC because the conventions of online discourse were tailor-made for the existing and developing communicative culture at the school. Marianne Melendez, a Humanities Teacher, had four computers temporarily placed in her classroom to support the Teachers and Writers Collaborative Digital Poetry Project. With the partnership of a poet-in-residence, Marianne employed SPCnet as a digital poetry library and a workspace for collaborative poems. Reflecting on the intensity of student voices on the BBS, she wrote: "SPCnet has made us consider what we as a community put out to the world and how it makes us look. Inside the school it's opened up many dialogues that would not have taken place otherwise."