Case Summaries

The Ralph Bunche Computer Minischool (RBS)

The conceptual core of RBS's Computer Minischool was "Earth Lab," network nursery to a rich LAN with full Internet access, designed and administered by District Five Computer Coordinator Paul Reese. Until recently, all RBS instructional computing took place in "the computer room", two adjacent lab arrangements. Now, thanks in part to support from the Living Schoolbook project among other sources, all RBS classrooms are wired and contain at least one up-to-date Macintosh. At this stage, it is hard to imagine RBS students still associating computers with a lab space, the way many students do in other schools. The Macintosh Finder is their desktop workspace, wherever they find one.

All RBS students have two scheduled hours of computer room time each week, but the room stays open afterschool for unstructured activity until 6pm daily. During the first year of Living Schoolbook, RBS was an easy tool-up for project PR demonstrations showcasing these net-savvy students who considered videoconferencing, web-surfing and email third-nature, if not yet second, and looked digital cameras straight in the eye. Paul Reese was an expert fundraiser for the lab, which was a testbed for many educational projects (The Shadows Project, The Great Penny Toss, the Pineapple Project, the Halloween and Valentines Day Art Pages). All these projects gained recognition prior to Living Schoolbook, and were publicized in the school's gopher site, website and newspaper. Yet the computer-based components of all these projects were initiated either by Reese or his external partners - not by RBS teachers.

By and large, RBS Computer Minischool teachers had yet to catch on to the potentials of the computers they visited twice a week, perhaps because of the contrast between the computer room and their own classrooms as learning spaces and cultures of activity. Through Living Schoolbook ILT, waving its constructivist classroom banner, funded the purchase of four new machines targeted for a pilot fifth-grade classroom project called the American History Archive Inquirer www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/aha/rbs/rbspage.html. Though he welcomed the new machines, Reese viewed the move by ILT as hurried. He was proven right when the participating teacher, who had never been quite sanguine about the effort, afterward demanded that two of four seeded computers be removed from her classroom.

The desire for a successful demonstration constructivist classroom by the end of the first year was properly ILT's agenda, seeking as it did the proof of its concept and the shepherding of Living Schoolbook deliverables (particularly given that an additional year of funding was by no means certain). This urgency was not shared by the partner teacher, and from the standpoint of widening her own practice, the effort failed. However, the mere presence of computers in a classroom had powerful effects. While there had been a Mac Plus in the corner of a number of classrooms previously, the presence of a number of up-to-date, Web-friendly machines made much more possible, which students recognized immediately.

There were two fifth grade teachers at RBS, with abutting rooms. The other half of the fifth grade, seeing their neighbors' good fortune, at once demanded computers for their own classroom, a call taken up by the rest of the students of the Computer Minischool. Thus, the pilot of a "classroom cluster" opening the breach that resulted the following year in all RBS classrooms being wired and equipped with up-to-date Macs. The American History Archive was succeeded by two better-received LSB classroom collaborations, Mundo Hispana and the Teachers & Writers Collaborative Digital Poetry Projects. Although these efforts were more popular with their host teachers, both were initiated and largely executed by ILT, an external partner.

The School for the Physical City (SPC)

Because the school's largest classroom had been wired (electrically) to support a local nurses union's computer literacy program, SPC had access a lab of 20 networked 286 PCs. However, because the packed schedule did not afford teachers much access to the room, it did not play a significant role in the life of the school. Through various sources, SPC had also accumulated 17 Macs, many of which were still unpacked. A few were hidden in closets (for rooms were not secure and vandalism common), reserved for teacher use as word processors. An exception was the classroom of a Humanities teacher, who had worked previously at The School Of the Future. She had managed to collect seven machines for the use of her students as word processors, and was interested in making use of the lab.

With the considerable assistance of ILT, all SPC Macs were unpacked and consolidated in the lab, which became the new classroom of this teacher and also repurposed as a supported environment where teachers and students could develop skills afterschool. But with 2 exceptions teachers did not use this opportunity, for various expressed reasons - they not have the time, they needed to be available in their own classrooms to their students, and they did not consider the machines reliable, given the constant crashing of various systems as kinks were worked out by part-time visitors. Because of these many birth pains, in the first year of Living Schoolbook technology initiatives were low on the agenda of most faculty. Students, however, succeeded in producing "Phat News," a LAN-based online newspaper, and developed a faculty-consterning infatuation with "Sim City". It was telling that neither students nor faculty viewed this urban planning simulation game as particularly relevant to the curriculum of this school dedicated to urban planning and engineering - actually, no one asked such questions of it.

SPC moved in 1995 to a renovated building designed especially for it, with state of the art facilities. Technological resources included a new Mac lab, one networked computer in every classroom, a First Class bulletin board system, and a few classroom computer clusters to be redeployed as needed for specific projects. Unfortunately, NYNEX never completed SPC's link to the NYNET (the broadband ATM testbed that hosts Living Schoolbook), a connection that had been expected and planned for. The poor substitute of a few dialout lines slowed the integration of Internet access into the curriculum, though it did permit collaboration with RBS in the Mundo Hispana and Digital Poetry projects mentioned above.

Perhaps the most significant factor in the reorientation to technology in SPC's second year was the hiring of Phil Davies, who had been at ILT, as full-time computer coordinator. Phil maintained the systems, educated faculty about their use, and worked hard to maintain the dialout lines. Despite a lack of reliable Internet Access (a technology upon which much of the project development of Living Schoolbook relied) the school community made substantial use of its bulletin board system, which Phil supported. As they colonized their new building, students and faculty also colonized their own locally-administered "SPCnet", which had previously been part of the BBS shared by SPC's sister Expeditionary Learning-Outward Bound schools. SPCnet became a forum for the intense and occasionally outrageous throes of the school's cybercultural initiation.

These summaries give a quick flavor of activity in the two Downstate school partners of Living Schoolbook. We will now enter into their trajectories in greater depth, searching for patterns and implications in these case studies of technology infusion.

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