Anatomy of a Senior Project

This part of the project will record my investigation much like a journal. Be sure to read the Preface to understand how this project got started.

Now, the way my mind works is that I kind of have ideas pop into my head, and the particular idea in this instance was for a website for kids. My children live with their mother in one of America's most comfortable counties. (Cobb county, Georgia. I call it "Newt's Country" after our former congressman Newt Gingrich.) A large swath of upscale middle-class Americana, conveniently turning Republican to safeguard their accumulating assets. Realizing that my three children, at the time in the 3rd, 6th, and what should have been 12th grades, were experiencing school very much like I had forty years ago, and knowing that microcomputers and the Internet were supposed to have revolutionized schools and the classroom (after all, I was in the information technology business a the very beginning of the personal computer era and have had computers as an intimate part of my life for the last twenty years,) I could not help but wonder, why have classrooms really not changed very much. Why are the schools of such a well-heeled community still technologically backward?

I had always thought my children's' schools and its denizens were very nice, and suppose I had just never stopped to think about it, but it certainly appears that little has changed in the classroom since my youth. Computers remain a novelty. The school projects they bring home are highly contrived and artificial, sometimes stupid, and certainly old-fashioned. So far, I've seen no focus on technology at all. Worse, I remember school, especially high school as boring and irrelevant. My children are even more "bored" and are less engaged than I was.

Yet, I am a turned-on learner now. I am convinced that much of this has to do with the technology. Yes, I have been known to go to the library for researching something, and it can be a pleasant experience. But it is also inconvenient and time consuming what with travel time and thumbing through books and scribbling notes then transcribing them into the computer. If all I had were the library and books, I know my ability and inclination to reach out and learn would be extremely abbreviated. The moral of the story is this: Technology unleashes knowledge. Period.

Technology can be used to engage children in lifelong learning. I firmly believe this. But what is the key? Perhaps I am not too bright, but I am smart enough to know that one's "impressions" of things are often severely disengaged from the facts. So, I created this project to investigate the status of computer technologies in the classroom, using the Internet as a focus.

Idea develops into SP, grows to involve UofA ......