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Building Social Networks with Computer Networks: A New Deal for Teaching and Learning*
Thomas Thurston
Columbia University
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WHAT CAN INTERNET-BASED history projects do to enable more personal encounters with their subjects of study? To ask that question reminds us that the opposite is more often the rule. Technology hooked up to education is usually thought to enable economies of scale, in which the personal is often sacrificed. Technology and education usually means broadcast education, whether for democratic ends--the greatest good for the greatest number; for budgetary expediency--the lowering of the unit cost of education; or for commercial considerations--the counting of "click-throughs," the contest for "eyeballs," in the jargon of the dot.com marketers. Enthusiasts herald the arrival of universal access to information. Skeptics warn of the commodification and privatization of that information. Will it be PBS or ABC? Either way, the debate is framed in the language of broadcasting. And in many respects, that language is a useful and familiar way in which to evaluate a website. |
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The New Deal Network (NDN), http://newdeal.feri.org, as not-for-profit history websites go, is a medium-sized broadcast network. Developed by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, IBM Corporation, and the Soros Foundation, NDN has been on-air for three-and-a-half years, and has attracted a growing audience. Site usage can be tracked with a fair degree of accuracy using logfile analysis programs. In November, 1999, for example, NDN received 230,000 "pageviews," as the folks over in marketing might say. (See NDN statistics for November, 1999 at http://newdeal.feri.org/stats/11_99.htm) These pageviews were requested by 28,115 distinct hosts, which can be understood as individual users, although multiple users may share the same host. The site contains 18,500 separate text and image files. 12,526 of these files were accessed that month, so site usage appears to be both deep and broad. |
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In addition to tracking usage, it is also possible to determine to a fair degree how many other sites link to NDN; how many other networks carry our program, so to speak. (This is sometimes referred to as "ego-surfing.") One can find linked sites on the Altavista search engine by carrying out a search using the expression "link:newdeal.feri.org." In December, 1999, Altavista reported over 1200 Websites linking to the New Deal Network. So far, then, the broadcast model, in which selected materials are prepared for and presented to apparently passive "end-users," seems a fairly effective way to describe the New Deal Network. However, although there were 28,115 distinct hosts who accessed the site, only 19,493 hits were registered to NDN's homepage. And those hits registered to the NDN homepage are not necessarily the page of entry. This leaves nearly 9,000 November visitors who entered the site without ever viewing the homepage; who came in through the bathroom window, so to speak. This, I think, suggests a pattern of use that the broadcast metaphor is ill-equipped to manage. |
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For example, in November 2,329 people
visited a single page within the NDN Photo Gallery, a simple index
page of images, scanned from the FDR Library, depicting the aftermath
of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (See http://newdeal.feri.org/library/d_4m.htm).
Despite Labor Secretary Frances Perkins' statement that March 25,
1911, was "the day the New Deal began, these photographs are not
highlighted on the New Deal Network. Having found them while scanning
images in the FDR Library, and thinking them of value to educators
and historians, I added them to the NDN photo gallery with nothing
but the barest of documentary information. How then, do people come
by this page? An Altavista search of sites linking to this specific
page on the New Deal Network reveals fourteen such websites. These
sites generated much of the traffic to that specific page within
NDN. A more modest example. In November there were 325 visits to
the content page to the Tennessee Federal Writers Project's Tennessee
Guide, http://newdeal.feri.org/guides/tnguide/index.htm. The
popularity of this URL would have eluded me had it not been for
a thank-you note I received via e-mail. Again, an Altavista search
found seven sites, none concerned with the New Deal era per se,
linking to this page. People find their own uses for online materials.
And as these examples illustrate, the way in which material from
the New Deal Network is put to use need not involve the active participation
of NDN. The challenge on the part of educational web developers
is to respond to those uses in a meaningful way. |
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Portals, Vortals and Aortals
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Commentators have taken to referring to broad sites as portals, gateway sites that direct traffic to online resources. Yahoo, of course is an exemplary portal. Portals continue to be the most highly visited sites on the Internet, although, like airports, they are not places one would chose to linger. Portals, with their undifferentiated mass of links, have their drawbacks, to which my daughter Chloe, the owner of a pet chinchilla, can attest. Apparently the online world of chinchillas is rather evenly divided into two camps, depending on one's interest in the animals as Pets or Pelts. After a quick tour through the Yahoo chinchilla listings, occasioned by sporadic shrieks of horror, Chloe rather quickly bookmarked the sites that suited her interests--One-Stop Chinchilla Pet Care Centers catering to all your chinchilla needs. Deep, informational sites such as these have been called "vertical portals," or vortals. If portals are the point of departure, vortals are the destination. I'd like to suggest a third category of websites, "associative portals," or aortals. An aortal is a site that enables the creation of social networks. H-Net, the online Humanities and Social Sciences Network, http://www.h-net.msu.edu/, is an aortal. It's structure is designed to foster the creation of distributed networks of academic communities. If a website aims to be more than an archive, an online exhibit, a virtual textbook, it must consider how it can nurture similar dynamic relationships. |
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The Julia Lathrop Housing Project
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In practice, the engagement between NDN site development and users has resulted in a host of specific personal encounters. As project director, I'd like to consider some of the ways the materials on the site have been refashioned to meet the particular needs of individual teachers and students by considering e-mail exchanges between site visitors and historians and by discussing some of the classroom and community activities that have emerged since the creation of the website. E-mail is the most effective way in which the web is transformed from a broadcast into a two-way communications model. E-mail, for my purposes in this discussion, includes both the private messages received from correspondents and the group messages that are disseminated through the New Deal discussion list. One way in which history becomes personal and, as a consequence, scholarship becomes public, is the integration of a very public website, private point-to-point e-mail, and a moderated online discussion list. Some time ago, for example, a correspondent wrote to me after finding photographs of the Julia Lathrop Housing project on NDN, http://newdeal.feri.org/library/c_1w_7z.htm. "During my childhood, my family lived in the Julia C. Lathrop Housing Project in Chicago. In fact, we lived there from about 1935 through 1952. I would like to write some information about the 'Projects' in a paper I am writing for my children. Do you have any material on file at the New Deal Network other then the photos that you list?" I didn't, in fact, have much more information on the Lathrop Housing Project beyond that which was currently online, but I suggested that, with his permission, members of the New Deal discussion list might be able to provide information. He wrote me a longer letter, describing his experiences growing up in the "projects," and his deeply felt wonder and concern over what had gone wrong with public housing in America, which I posted to the list. His post prompted a very interesting exchange of views, including an eloquent summary of the shift in public housing policy by Professor Gail Radford, author of Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. |
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Privately, Professor Radford and this correspondent continued, in a couple of exchanges, to share information on the Julia Lathrop housing project. And this was truly a sharing of information, not simply a brain-picking session. He was quite excited to find a scholar interested in hearing of his experiences and answering some of his questions. Professor Radford, in turn, had a rare opportunity to discuss this subject with a resident of the housing projects she had described in her work. In this way the original correspondent was transformed from information seeker to informant, while the professor turned public historian. |
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Now Professor Radford is a public historian by inclination, I suspect. It didn't take a communications revolution to push her into the public sphere. She has gone on to make herself available for consultation to a high school teacher in Brooklyn whose students are developing a website on the Williamsburg Housing Project. She has offered very constructive suggestions towards improving the New Deal Network. She's posted her class syllabus on NDN and, in turn has made extensive use of NDN materials in her classroom. Although we have never met, Gail and I are colleagues. There is nothing new or unusual about this. This is networking in the old-fashioned sense: the development of a web of personal and professional relationships that, while enhanced by new technologies, looks very much like those relationships we have always had. This is not new wine in old bottles, but old wine in new bottles, although the dimensions of these new bottles are still unexplored. Consider, for example, the way in which the following NDN-based project shifted from activism to education and back again. |
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The Hugo Gellert Murals
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In February 1998, a short article appeared in the City Section of the New York Times, reporting the impending destruction of the four Hugo Gellert frescoes that grace the lobbies of the Seward Park Coop Apartments. Despite the protests of Coop residents, who had voted to preserve these important frescoes, the Board of Directors of the Seward Park Housing Cooperative marked them for destruction as part of a lobby redecoration project. A group of artists, art historians, coop and community members formed the Friends of Gellert Committee. As project director of the New Deal Network, I offered Web support for the campaign to save the Seward Park murals. Like any group of activists, we turned to established networks of political, labor, and art preservation organizations. The Gellert Web site, http://newdeal.feri.org/gellert, came to serve as a virtual Post Office box, information kiosk, and learning center for this campaign. It linked together participants in this struggle to the extent that at mural preservation events, Co-op members would approach me to inform me that "we have website, you know." |
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The New Deal Network seemed a natural home for the Gellert Website. Hugo Gellert played an important role in the 1930s in organizing the Artist's Committee for Action and the Artists' Union, two pivotal institutions which greatly contributed to the instigation and perpetuation of the federally funded WPA art programs. He served on the editorial committee of Art Front, the Artists' Union's official publication. Gellert helped organize the American Artists' Congress and he became involved with the Artists' Coordination Committee for the National Exhibition of Contemporary American Art at the 1939 New York World's Fair. |
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However, Gellert's Seward Park murals, created in 1959, came out of a different historical moment. The four murals, which depict Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Albert Einstein, were commissioned by the United Housing Foundation, the organization which funded and developed the Seward Park Coop. The UHF, established in 1951, grew out of the New York City labor movement and its expansive vision of trade unionism--a vision that saw the fight against shop conditions as continuous with the struggle to improve the living conditions of working people in New York City. Ultimately, UHF projects would create some 30,000 units of moderately priced housing units dedicated to cooperative principles. Clearly, the significance of these murals extended beyond their artistic value to include the history of labor, housing and working people in NYC. As teachers, historians and artists, we thought it important to attempt to reintegrate the Gellert murals into the daily life of the Lower East Side by educating students and community members in the value of our public art. A brief lesson plan was developed for the Web site. Students from The Lower East Side School invited us to speak about the murals in their classroom. They later visited the murals, created classroom art projects, and mailed artwork and letters of support to the Coop Board. In addition, a Hugo Gellert Symposium, sponsored by the New York Metro American Studies Association and the New Deal Network, was held at NYU's Tamiment Library. Half the members of the audience were coop members. |
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We garnered support from other quarters, as well. The New York Municipal Art Society voted to urge the preservation of the murals. Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the New York State Assembly, and Jay Mazur of UNITE, wrote to protest the destruction of the Gellert murals. Letters and e-mail reached me from across the country and as far away as Italy, turning what might have remained a local Lower East Side controversy into a matter of general interest. Finally, the Mary Ryan Gallery appraised the murals at $600,000, a figure which must have given the Seward Park Board of Directors pause. |
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We soon found ourselves communicating with representatives of the Seward Park Board. On May 4, 1998, the Seward Park Housing Corporation's Board of Directors met and rescinded their previous approval of lobby redecoration plans which would have resulted in the destruction of the murals. This successful campaign relied upon a complex network of coop members, artists, scholars, community organizations, local teachers and their students, and labor and political leaders. While the Gellert Website played a critical role in focusing our efforts and disseminating our message, in many ways it was but the merest representation of this complex social network. |
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Conclusion
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Web sites are often described in the language of older media forms: as archives, directories, exhibits, or essays. While there is a certain functional equivalency to these categories, they fail to note the social potential of networked media. Computer networks used to create and enhance social networks can lead to innovative educational partnerships and can help to transform the teaching of history. In the final analysis, web development is always a form of social practice. It's networking in the old-fangled sense of the term. Not servers and routers and TCP/IP, but the building of those distributed social networks that we scholars more often refer to as a communities. |
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* An online version of this paper, which was presented at the American Historical Association's 2000 conference, is available at http://newdeal.feri.org/aha/. Statistics presented are based on 1999 tabulations.
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