Setting and Participants

The school. The research took place at Flowing Wells Junior High School (FWJHS) in Tucson, Arizona, USA. This school enrolls approximately 1000 students in grades 7 and 8 and is the only junior high in a small district with one high school, one alternative school, and six elementary schools. It is located in a middle- to lower-income neighborhood; according to one source, the school is located in the area of Tucson that has the highest percentage of welfare recipients in the city. The student population is predominantly Caucasian and Hispanic, but small numbers of Native American, African American, Asian Pacific, and ESL students also attend.

In addition to a gym and cafeteria, the FWJHS campus consists of nine "pods" -- octagonal buildings with wedge-shaped classrooms. At the center of each is a large common area with eight teachers' desks. Because of this structure and the leadership of Karen Blair, the 24-year veteran school principal, FWJHS has a very close-knit staff.

The school follows a modified block schedule in which students enroll in eight courses and attend four each day, with each class meeting for 90 minutes every other day ("blue days" and "gold days").

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The media arts class. At the time of this study, the traditional "newspaper" elective had recently been renamed "media arts," split into two sections (blue and gold), and taken over by Marc Hamilton, an innovative teacher with six years of middle school experience in English literature, American studies, geography, and study skills. Marc also holds an administrative certificate and is considered a school leader in technology and curriculum design. He is a strong believer in inquiry-based education and allows his students a great deal of autonomy in designing their own project-oriented curricula.

Marc's emphasis on all of the media arts enabled his students to explore desktop publishing, video production, digital photography, and webpage design with the ultimate goals of creating a school website, publishing the school newspaper online, and linking members of the student council electronically with student leaders around the United States. Marc allowed me to participate in establishing these goals and in working with students toward them. At the outset of this study, I attended both media arts classes as the primary web design instructor three to four afternoons per week, on equal numbers of blue and gold days.

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The students. In the fall of 1997, I solicited student volunteers from the two media arts classes for the "web crawlers" team. All potential volunteers completed an interest survey, and based on the results, six students were selected -- three from the blue group (April, Jason, and Skye) and three from the gold (Danielle, Maria, and Brian). (All names are pseudonyms.) Because the students came from different classes, they worked on the project in two teams of three, meeting together as a whole on only one occasion.

The phrases I have associated with each student describe her or his self-designated primary role.

April, the "Technical Expert," is a self-described "computer nerd" and was one of the most productive members of the team. Prior to the study she had taught herself to do word-processing but she had never been on the Internet. In an initial interview, April stated, "Well, actually, I really haven't been using [computers] that long, but my cousin is a computer whiz and I went and stayed with him for probably a week and he taught me everything, pretty much everything he knew. And, plus, I just got on the computer and I messed around in the summertime and it was so boring, so I just sat on the computer, like 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I just, when I woke up I was on the computer and I learned a lot about it that way."

April's technical ability was considered a valuable commodity by her classmates; in fact, her web design work was often interrupted by other members of the media arts class who needed technical assistance with other computer projects. April also has a creative sense of color and design (see Figure 1).

Jason was the "Writer." He sports baggy pants, buzz-cut hair, and a "cool" persona. He impressed us with his dedication to the web project and his interest in learning more about computers for his own future benefit. Jason's family doesn't own a computer so he had the least computer experience in the group, had never been on the Internet, and was somewhat intimidated by technical problems; however, of all the web crawlers, he and April are the two who plan to register for a new web design elective when they enter high school. In response to some peer ridicule at his plan to take computer classes in high school, Jason said, "It won't kill me to spend one period a day with nerds. Hey, nerds are the ones with good-paying jobs."

Although Jason does not view himself as a good speaker or grammarian, his writing on the website was extremely creative and engaging. An example of Jason's humorous slogans appears in the sports section of the site (Figure 2).

Jason's biographies of FWJHS staff members are also amusing, as exemplified by the headline on the staff webpage (Figure 3).

Skye, the "Surfer," spent more time online browsing for free graphics, buttons, and backgrounds for the website than did the other crawlers; she even took floppy disks home to save graphics she found while surfing on her mother's computer. Skye's disks became the primary source of graphics for the group. She was very concerned with the appearance of the site and spent countless hours sampling color schemes.

Although Skye is a bright student and possesses a great deal of knowledge and technical expertise, she also tends to daydream and needed supervision to remain focused on the task. She spent some of her time surfing entertainment websites, saying she was "looking for ideas." However, when encouraged, she produced some impressive sections for the school website (see Figure 4).

Danielle was the "Artist." One of those well-rounded, excels-at-everything-she-tries students, Danielle is an exceptionally talented artist and writer. She is also a top athlete. Prior to the project Danielle had some experience with word-processing in school but had never been online. Her significant contribution to the website was to draw the background image and the navigation buttons offline and, with help, to scan and digitize them (see Figure 5). Beyond that, she never really "took" to the computer and spent more time handling her student council responsibilities than she did on the web project.

Like Danielle, Maria, our "Community Link," was a student council member. Because of her knowledge of the school's infrastructure, Maria could be relied on to find information that the crawlers needed for the website. She spent a lot of time out of the classroom locating yearbook photos and lists of students of the month, soliciting student artwork and writing, and interviewing faculty members.

Although Maria is computer literate and has Internet access at home, she has so many other interests and social activities that she wasn't satisfied sitting in front of the computer for long stretches. She contribute very little actual programming on the site aside from some very well-organized tables (see Figure 6), preferring to serve as an information gatherer for the more technically inclined web crawlers.

Brian, the "Photographer," was the only seventh grader to volunteer for the project. He is registered for media arts again for grade 8 and will have an important role in training the next group of web crawlers. Prior to this study, Brian had surfed the Internet from home on a few occasions and had gained a moderate amount of experience working with computers. His major contribution to the project was using the digital camera to photograph staff members, downloading the images, converting them to the proper format, reducing the file size, saving them, and inserting them onto the webpages. This required a significant amount of patience and technical expertise, and Brian did this task without complaint.

Brian also has a good sense of color and design (see Figure 7). He was one of the few crawlers who consistently maintained the school colors (blue and gold) and mascot (mustang) throughout his pages.

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Equipment

Hardware. The media arts classes are housed in a five-year-old networked PC lab that contains one file server, one teacher's computer, one printer, and thirty 486 student computers. Each student computer runs Windows 95 with a 66 MHz processor, a 500 MB hard drive, and 8 MB of RAM. The computers are used by more than 150 students and adults per day. Because of this, and because the school district is small and lacks adequate technical support, the printer and most of the computers are temperamental and challenging to use. The lab also has a telephone with an outside line, a modem, two video cameras, an analog video editing deck, a digital camera, an LCD projector, and a flatbed scanner.

Software. The school is not yet wired for the Internet, so I installed file-sharing software on the teacher's computer and four of the student computers so that all five could share one modem connection. This meant that the student (client) computers depended on the teacher's (server) computer for their outside line. The dial-up service was initially my own personal account, but later in the study the school principal chose to fund a permanent school account that now hosts the website (which can be viewed at http://earthvision.asu.edu/~maya/fwjhs).

The teacher's computer is equipped with dial-up software, and digital camera and scanner software; in addition, each of the five computers used in this study was outfitted with Netscape Navigator Gold (for browsing and composing); Paint Shop Pro (for digitizing and converting graphics) and Microsoft Word (for word-processing). Due to time and equipment limitations, the students did not explore audio or video production for the website.

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