The following is a "documentary" of Peter's experiences with computers and education. It is presented in his own words, and is, as he says,
"to be continued . . . "

The first time I ever used a computer was in 1984, when I was enrolled in a novel-writing class at the University of Washington. I knew that I'd be doing a lot of revisions, and the promise of something they were calling "word processing" lured me down to a little second-floor shop on the main shopping avenue in the university district. I took a free tutorial to learn how to use their rental machines and the program WordStar. I was so impressed with the possibilities that I paid for my first 10 hours of rental and received my first of many punch cards.

Though it was the word processor's power of revision that led me to computers in the first place, I found that power held a dark underside to it when I faced the daunting task of turning in a number of polished chapters for the novel-writing class final. The shop I'd been using for all my word processing closed at 10 p.m., and I knew I was looking at substantially more time than that early closing allowed. I visited another, newer shop down the avenue, and made arrangements to rent a "portable" for a 24-hour period the following Friday.

I picked up the self-contained unit that must have weighed in around 30 pounds, a Compaq with a detachable lid/keyboard, and headed to my rental home. My roommates were duly impressed with the novelty I'd lugged through the door, but all of us were dismayed to find we could not make it work. Our older home had no grounded outlets, and it seemed too much to risk the fate of this incredibly expensive machine on a 99¢ adapter. So I packed the thing back up and drove to my parents' house, half an hour away, to stay up as long as necessary to finish my chapters. By the time dawn broke, my eyes were weary of the glowing green screen, but the chapters were done. All that was left was to return to the store for a printer.

I had seen the future, and was determined to become a part of it. The university offered a computer-purchase program for students, and, on the advice of a neighbor who wrote computer programs for a living (I hadn't known such a thing was possible!), I steered clear of the Apple computers offered in favor of a low-priced DOS system: an amber-screened, 256K, dual 5 1/4" floppy Zenith model. (Hey, they made good televisions, didn't they?) I ordered a copy of a word processing program called, simply enough, Word, from a little software outfit across the lake called Microsoft, and I was on my way. My little Zenith didn't have a hard drive, couldn't do graphics or colors or sounds, but it offered me an entry into word processing, spreadsheets and databases, and I was soon finding excuses to do everything on it.

I kept working on that amber-screened wonder until I could no longer buy software that would run on it. My 256K, dual-drive setup was soon left in the dust by new applications that required more and more memory as well as installation on a hard drive, which I was without. By the time it finally came time to part company with my Zenith, however, I was ready. I had begun my teaching career with my first job at a middle school with the latest in classroom technology: a smattering of computers called Classics.

When my neighbor had advised me against purchasing an Apple computer, he no doubt did me a favor. At that time what I needed was a word processor, and any old DOS machine would do at a much lower cost than the Apple models available. But as I began to see what these self-contained little gray boxes called Classics could do, I began to see what I'd been missing. They came with something called a mouse, which allowed me to move about the screen in new ways, and to add graphics to my work, and when I was done, what I printed out actually looked something like what I saw on the screen. They ran a package called Works (from that not-so-little-anymore software outfit called Microsoft) that combined word processing, spreadsheets, and databases, so information in the form of text, numbers, charts, and graphs could all be integrated into a single project document. They also ran a little graphics program called Superpaint, which was murder to draw with (as I'd just been introduced to the mouse) but which allowed me to bring in all sorts of clip art. Suddenly, my work could look professional, was easy to create, and could be revised multiple times with ease . . . so I was never quite finished.

For me, moving from my Zenith to the Macintosh Classics was like moving from the Dark Ages directly into the 21st century. Like Rip van Winkle, or, perhaps more accurately, Woody Allen's character in Sleeper, I found myself in a world of new possibilities that I could not quite understand, but whose potentials I could clearly appreciate. So far, however, the technology had all been for my benefit. It helped me do my work, and made my life easier. But I was a teacher now, and if I was to make this technology truly useful in my work, I needed to let the students in on the secret, and turn the power over to them.

Two computer programs got me started down that road to integrating technology into my teaching, and I still rely on them (or their descendants) heavily. The first, Pagemaker, allowed me to watch what happens when students see a professional-looking product emerge from their hard work. The second, HyperCard, allowed me to see the possibility of turning an open-ended authoring program over to students to see what they could create.

My first year of teaching brought an integrated Language Arts/Geography project to my 7th grade students, where they created newspapers in small groups reflecting the information they were learning in the unit. The finished papers would be photocopied and distributed to their classmates, and would form part of the unit's content for discussion, review, and testing. What I noticed as students worked on the project was that for many, their enthusiasm for the finished paper was transitory. Students would get excited about an idea, then when their visions failed to turn out exactly as expected they would get frustrated and lose interest. Some used the Classics for word processing their stories, some wrote longhand, but all of them struggled with cutting and pasting their final writing into the narrow column format of our newspapers.

We did our layout by hand on 11 x 17-inch paper, pasting things down with rubber cement. Stories were too long or short, too wide or narrow, or didn't line up, or, after being pasted down, were discovered to contain errors, requiring whiteout corrections or a new version pasted on top. In the midst of this project, which was quickly developing a life of its own, I realized that a computer program that would help with the layout functions would eradicate many of these student frustrations. I found Pagemaker (version 4.0, I believe) and the following year we banished the white out, rubber cement, and 11 x 17-inch paper from the classroom. The newsmagazines the students created ended up looking more like real newspapers than the year before, and it wasn't nearly as difficult for students to return to their work to make corrections and revisions if necessary. There were still frustrations, but many could easily (and rightly) be blamed on the computers themselves, and students could direct more of their attention to the content they were working with. (To be continued . . .)