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October 15, 2004
EdWeb and My Blog Turn 10 This Week!
Hi everyone,
This week marks the 10-year anniversary of my educational website, EdWeb: Exploring Technology and School Reform, and my personal website/blog, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth.
For those of you who weren't online then, in the summer of '94 I was on Northwestern's Annenberg-Washington fellowship at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), where I was encouraged to find a research project and self-publish. I decided to look at the confluence of education technology, school reform, attempts to overhaul telecom policy and the birth of the "information highway."
Over the course of that summer, I spent a lot of time emailing people on various listservs and researching gopher servers to collect my data. A handful of very kind people -- Bonnie Bracey of the NII Advisory Council, Patsy Wang-Iverson of Research for Better Schools, Larry Irving at NTIA, Jamie Wilkerson at Kidlink, Larry Anderson at Mississippi State -- all took the time to reply to my questions and help me think through these issues, which as a lowly grad student were still quite new to me.
Based on all the information I collected, I wrote a series of essays about education, telecom reform, this new "World Wide Web" and what it would mean for schools, etc, then broke them down into small blocks of information that would be hyperlinked together, modeling them on "Engines for Education," a hypertext book written by a former Northwestern professor of mine, Roger Schank.
Since CPB didn't have a web server at the time, I learned HTML and converted my rickety old Mac into a server. Along with the collection of essays, I created Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidh, a personal web page to update friends and family about what I was doing at any given time. Every now and then I'd update it with a new blurb: a link to an essay I'd written, a travelogue, conference updates, etc. (After many years I got sick of hand-coding the page, so I converted it to a blog so posting would be more automated.)
Both EdWeb and Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth went online the week of October 12, 1994. I announced it on several education listservs, including edtech and lm_net. A copy of my original announcement can be found in my October 1994 blog archive.
Little did I know it at the time, but EdWeb set me off on a new career path. The response to the site was overwhelming. It was the first website reviewed by Harvard Education Review, and was plugged by Esther Dyson in her writings about the Internet. I began to get so many emails from people wanting to talk about the role of the Web in education, I created an email discussion list, WWWEDU, which will celebrate its 10th anniversry this December 1st.
Soon my fellowship at CPB turned into a full-time job as a program officer developing grant programs to promote constructivist edtech initiatives and community networking grants to fund the development of locally relevant content. That work later led to my five years at the Benton Foundation, before moving up to Boston with Benton's Digital Divide Network to launch the EDC Center for Media & Community last February. Who knew that a crudely designed website would lead me this way... :-)
Over the years, EdWeb and my Waste of Bandwidth moved from a server at CPB, to CNIDR in North Carolina, to Global Schoolhouse in southern California, and finally back to North Carolina as part of the UNC Sunsite/Ibiblio.org project. Ibiblio still hosts all of my content for free, as did the others, and I'm grateful for their assistance over the years.
With all the other projects I do now, EdWeb is largely a snapshot in time, a look at the issue of education technology as it was being examined during the early years of the Internet. Meanwhile, I still use my EdWeb domain to host my blog and a collection of other websites, including travelogues and my history of the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, From Sideshow to Genocide. I've recently set up andycarvin.com as a shortcut to my blog, but it's still hosted at EdWeb as well.
So if you haven't visited in a while, please come to http://www.edwebproject.org and take a walk through my small contribution to edtech. And if you get a chance, post a comment on my blog and say hello when you get a chance... -andy
Posted by acarvin at October 15, 2004 9:46 AM
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