Ebenezer Computer Conferencing project

Reflection: Having previously used computer conferencing to organise collaboration for the Educational Developers Software Forum, it broadened my horizons to see the technique used to enhance collaboration between schools in a local area. I was very impressed with the interpersonal and social value that online communication could offer and how it could break down barriers between pupils from different schools.

Contribution: I had very little to offer beyond moral support and a critical view of online software, having experienced it for myself and applying what I had learnt about software design.

This project used the 'bulletin board' software called Caucus. The project was named Ebenezer after Ebenezer Howard, the architect of Letchworth Garden City and the garden city movement. The project was sponsored by the charity Education 2000.

Terms of Reference

This is an item copied from the sub-conference devoted to the steering committee's business, posted by Hilary Sepahy the project coordinator:

Item 5    25-MAY-90    12:38    Hilary Sepahy

Terms of Reference

At the Panel meeting on 23rd May we discussed the proposed terms of reference. A number of suggestions were made and it was proposed that we continue our debate here.  In the light of the discussion I have modified the original ToR as follows:

1. To advise on strategies for the implmentaton of conferencing in

curriculum delivery.

2. To advise on monitoring and evaluation of computer conferencing in schools and colleges.

3. To support in monitoring technical developments which may broaden access to the system and which will enhance performance

4. To consider and advise on how best to manage growth in the user

community.

5. To advise on publicity and support the dissemination of information

about the project.

In the discussion on ToR we included;

Need to expand horizons To help choose the best direction for future

developments

To influence curriculum and seek to develop and implement new

curriculum opportunities  ("extend boundaries of curriculum innovation")

Need for monitoring, how this may be achieved (action research,

headteachers to collect feedback, etc).

Please feel free to discuss, add to, refine or reword ToR  in responses to

this item.

Memory of Ebenezer

I have also copied the following account to give an idea of what Ebenezer meant to the students involved.

It is a posting at http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=4475317

The author, clearly a student at the time remembers 'Ebby', as it was informally called:

Monument (marnanel) wrote, @ 2001-05-28 11:58:00

ARRAY(0x2b4bf8ac0670)

Mood:

awed

in memoriam Ebby
This is EBENEZER in Letchworth

During the time of my GCSEs and A-levels (this would be 1989 to 1992-ish, I suppose) there was a charity called Education 2000 whose purpose was to increase the usage of computers in schools; they'd picked on North Hertfordshire as the area they were going to experiment in. To begin with, the practical upshot of this was buying each school a hundred or so RM Nimbuses. But then, suddenly... oh glory... then, there was Ebby.

Ebby. Two VAXen in Letchworth Town Hall, named EBENEZER and HOWARD after the founder of the town, a high-capacity network between there and all the secondary schools in Letchworth, Baldock and (for a while) Hitchin and Royston too... four or five terminals for each school (two for the library, one in the staffroom, one in the sixth-form area as a special privilege, one in a quiet room somewhere else)... a conferencing system running on them called Caucus... two dialup lines for students who were lucky enough to have machines with 2400 or even 9600 baud modems at home... all these were the Ebby.

Yet Ebby was more. It was the people who used it... the bizarre screen names, eventually clamped down on by admin, who gave a few weeks' grace period until they barred the change-name command, the announcements of this in school assemblies (who needs MOTDs?), the people, such as the ever-vivacious Helen Priestley, who never got around to changing and so were stuck with names like "THE HASH SMASH POT!!!!!" all the rest of their Ebby lives... it was a few thousand teachers and students learning how to exist in cyberspace for the first time, the Ebbyverse as we called it, the disembodiment of minds... it was the culture of emailing your friends who you'd see next period anyway... it was remembering people by their Ebby logins... it was the conferences, discussion boards with grand purposes and strong names... SCHOLAR2 the quiet hive of no activity... CHRISTIAN the atheist-versus-Christian flamewar where both sides were as indignant and insensitive as sixth-formers can get... PRATCHETT (was it?) where we discussed the writings of the great one, and someone worked out an address, fertile with percentage signs, which would send email out of Ebby onto another network that would forward to some sort of Internet gateway that would somehow get mail to Terry Pratchett's Demon account... it was the PHONE command, like talk on Unix, which let you talk in real time, which was banned and unbanned as regularly as clockwork... it was INTRO files, descriptions of a user, which usually ran to several tens of kilobytes and had pictures and pages of blank lines, every so often dropping in another random nugget of information... it was meeting up with people you knew from the same area and talking about Ebby even when you were offline... it was APHYSHELP, AMATHSHELP, ACHEMHELP, the forums where staff and students were supposed to discuss A-level difficulties and find solutions, and which were supposed to justify Ebby's existence, but in practice were so empty that your nervous exploring footsteps echoed around you when you ventured in from the bustling world outside... it was meeting people who wanted to know how to hack around with the registers of an EGA card to get the colour addressing properly which led to the assembler animation routines in Avalot working at all-- specifically, meeting one Cameron Grant from another school in the computer forums, who was a mentor to me in writing games, and collaborated with me on mailshotting US bulletin boards and magazines with the programs we'd written... it was sharing poetry, discussing The Mary Whitehouse Experience, it was being part of it all.

I'm blessed to have been a part of Ebby. May its memory be ever cherished.

THURMANTS3