TCETP Bulletin #3: BBN Project Heats Up!

by Dave Spreen, TCETP Volunteer Coordinator and SMUG Member

A press conference was held August 17, 1994, at the Humboldt County Office of Education (HCOE) at which the following announcement was made:

"User Group Connection Awards Program '94 recipients Sequoia Macintosh Users Group in partnership with the Humboldt County Office of Education and facilitated by the Tri-County Educational Telecommunications Project Association has been awarded 8 Macintosh Performa 450 computers and 8 modems to be distributed to eight K-12 schools as follows (key participants in parentheses):

The winning entry, the Blackberry Bramble Network Project, will help facilitate these schools, educators and their students to implement technology in their classrooms in a cross-curriculum method to create a local historical database that will be available to the community at large. It is envisioned that the project will spread, like the blackberry brambles of Northern California, to network many of the schools of Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity and Mendocino counties."

Ray Kaupp, president of User Group Connection, was on hand to present a plaque to SMUG (equipment will arrive at HCOE about Sept. 1st). He indicated that of more than 50 entries nationwide, ours was clearly the winner, stating, "the BBN project doesn't use computers as a 'glorified, electronic flashcard.' Rather, the project's coordinators plan to use computers to let students explore and get involved in the process of creating the material. They have a million ideas, if you put technology in the hands of creative people, all kinds of things can happen." A few days later on Sunday 8/21/94, Mary Lane of the Times-Standard reported on page 3 of section A, "Eight Humboldt schools get computers in grant program" which describes the UGCAP '94 winning entry, the Blackberry Bramble Network. Also included in the article are comments by participants Emily Gibson, Roger Elliott, and Elaine Gray.

Following are the BBN Project objectives as outlined in the UGCAP official entry:

     
  1. To build an online communications network to link schools in a three county area of rural northern California. This will be accomplished by insuring that participating schools have the necessary equipment and that teachers have the training to make use of it. Children will learn to access information from remote sources and communicate with children in other schools locally and around the world. There are already school networks established and TCETP has arranged for local schools to be able to use them for free and volunteers from the users group are available to provide the training.
  2. To make the network a useful tool for students and teachers. The Blackberry Bramble Network Project accomplishes a practical goal (the creation of a data base of local history) while children and teachers learn to communicate and share ideas through an electronic network.
  3. To give children a sense of the history of where they live and involve the community as active participants. The project will give children a chance to help preserve the colorful, multi ethnic and exciting history of our local area in a format that can be used by the community for many years. Members of the community will become involved by telling their stories to the students and the students will learn some things about research and history in addition to developing skills related to electronic communications.
  4. To develop a model for the integration of teaching electronic communication through practical applications that can be transferred to other areas. An electronic network which links schools can be useful, particularly in an isolated rural area, to implement cross age tutoring between high school and elementary students, to teach students to research any topic, for developing other data bases (science, environmental education) and to allow teachers to communicate with each other. It is hoped that this project will become a model that will facilitate this learning.
  5. To develop partnerships between schools, community organizations and business . Each of these groups has expertise and resources. Sharing them will benefit all of us who live in work in small rural communities. Working together to preserve our local history and develop an electronic communications network is the best way to effectively use our limited resources and develop a sense of community.
  6. To document and preserve our local history in a format that can be shared with the community. This can include the development of a CD-ROM format data base or the publication of a book available for sale to the community, the proceeds of which could be used to update and maintain the hardware for the network.

Planning for the project has been going on continually in the Current Projects conference which is a branch of the Tele-Schools conference online Smuggler's BBS which is gatewayed with The Hallway, Northcoast Electronic Town and NerveNet BBSes. NET has offered to carry parts of the project on the Internet at no charge. Mary Ann Mather of Apple's eWorld would like to feature the BBN progress as well. I will be giving a brief presentation at MacWorld in SF next January. Anyway, we currently envision students creating an online database with Steve Kayner's implementation of the Butler Database software and individual multimedia creations which will be edited into a suitable format at the end of the school year.

Meanwhile, interest in the project continues to grow not only among educators and students, but parents, businesses, associations and the media too. We believe this project will be a catalyst for leveraging more funds to realize not only the objectives of the BBN Project, but for facilitating the overall goals of the Tri-County Educational Telecommunications Project and creating a model for others to follow...virtual pioneers!

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