Press attention to the information superhighway increasingly centers on the World Wide Web, the graphically driven and linked universe of computer servers and home pages on the Internet. Even the Times is doing its own version of "cool" Web sites, offering three or four "must-visit" home pages each week. The Web and the Internet, and the so-called "cyberculture" that spawned them, are increasingly perceived by politicians and others as offering solutions to a range of endemic social and political problems. Ross Perot's campaign proposal for an "electronic" Town Hall or Newt Gingrich's plan to give every citizen a laptop computer are based on notions of the information superhighway as a kind of technological panacea for the decline in political participation by ordinary citizens. What is lost in all of the hype about digital interconnectedness is that the rapid expansion of the Web in the past year has resulted more from its potential as a new venue to advertise products and services than from the possibilities it offers for social improvement.

The grandiose claims for the centrality of networked computers in our individual and collective futures have spawned an interesting and understandable counter reaction. A small but discernible number of critics and commentators pride themselves on their personal immunity to technology hype. They stand by the side of the road offering resounding Bronx cheers to the accelerating technology caravan rolling down the infobahn. Capitalizing on people's understandable fears of being marginalized by technological change, these critics have tapped into a very real undercurrent of popular opposition to the digital future. Critics like Neal Postman have raised difficult and important questions about who will have access to new forms of technology, who will control the content of what is produced, and whether we can afford to implement technology in our schools when other, more important educational priorities go unattended.

These difficult issues demand careful consideration and reflection. To be sure, those who profit materially and culturally from any form of technological change can be counted on to sing its praises uncritically, bolstering their personal investment in the new with general assertions of the economic, cultural and even moral advantages that all will enjoy. Chris Whittle tricked up his sales pitch to schools to sound as if his mission was simply to bring scarce technological resources to those previously denied such access. Actually his desire was to sell television advertising to captive audiences of school children whose attention he managed to hijack by getting schools to accept "free" televisions and satellite dishes. But to reveal Whittle's shabby hucksterism does not mean that we must reject technology outright simply because there are businessmen who hope to profit from its deployment.

I would argue, instead, that the antipodean views (technology as panacea vs. technology as bête noire) expressed in the current debate between computer technology enthusiasts (like Whittle) and critics (like Postman) effectively miss the point, much as did prior claims about the positive or negative effects of other forms of educational technology (such as television) on educational practice. The challenge for educators and administrator is to determine how to critically assess the potential of educational technology to improve teaching and learning while acknowledging the very real equity and access issues raised by the uneven dissemination of that technology. A healthy skepticism about technology's purposes should not preclude our willingness to search for educationally appropriate ways to design, produce, and implement new forms of educational technology that can help students become active and critical learners. Rather than naysay on the sidelines, educators should rise to the challenge posed by the possibilities that educational technology holds for ourselves and our students.

The Who Built America? Curriculum

That challenge is precisely what motivated me and my colleagues at the American Social History Project (ASHP)/Center for Media and Learning--a group of a dozen historians, artists, teachers, video makers and writers--when we began our work 15 years ago at the City University of New York (CUNY). We decided to become educational technology designers and producers as part of our overall commitment to use the new social history scholarship, which had transformed the history profession in the 1970s, to revitalize students' interest in studying the past. Focusing on "ordinary" Americans whose actions and beliefs shaped the nation's development, ASHP's Who Built America? multimedia curriculum &endash; which includes a two-volume textbook (published by Pantheon Books), videos, viewer and teacher guides, and, since 1993, CD-ROMs--has been designed to reach broad classroom and public audiences and to enable learners to better understand the value of studying history.

When we began our work, the prevailing forms of educational technology in high school and even college classrooms remained the slide projector and the tape recorder. And that's where my colleagues and I started as educational technologists: producing half-hour slide/tape presentations that used historical imagery and dramatized performances by actors to bring to life nineteenth-century American history and make the historical experience of ordinary Americans more immediate and tangible to students. Our Who Built America? productions cover events and developments in U.S. history from the American Revolution through the aftermath of World War I. Our initial six slide/tape shows have now metamorphosed into ten documentary videos and accompanying printed viewer guides, our response to changes in the prevailing form of educational technology during the mid 1980s. Our videos are not designed simply to be used to fill an open half-hour slot in a lesson plan. Nor are they meant as informational supplements to the printed text, like so many educational productions currently on the market. Each video and supplementary viewer guide requires, instead, the active and ongoing engagement of teachers and students in a collaborative learning process that involves reading, writing, critical viewing, and discussion. The Who Built America? videos and text are designed to challenge teachers and students, to make them work together to understand what happened in the past and why.

We realized early on that if the visual media we produced were truly going to improve history instruction in the classroom, we would have to go beyond our role as media producers to work directly with teachers. The ASHP High School Collaboration, led by ASHP Education Director Bret Eynon, has, since 1989, worked directly with New York City high school and CUNY faculty to use the ASHP multimedia curriculum to change educational practice in eleventh-grade social studies and English classrooms. The careful use of ASHP multimedia materials within the context of an active learning pedagogy, according to outside evaluations conducted over the past several years, has yielded important educational gains for students enrolled in the ASHP High School Collaboration (the majority of whom are African-Americans and Latinos), including improved writing, speaking, and critical viewing skills; elevated standardized test scores; and enhanced self-esteem and confidence.

ASHP's program of educational reform and renewal is now up and running in fully one-third of all New York City public high schools, supported by major funding from CUNY, the New York City Board of Education and the Aaron Diamond Foundation. The success of the New York City program allowed us to secure significant funding from the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund last year to expand our professional development program. It now encompasses a dozen urban high school systems across the country, including schools and colleges in Boston; Chicago; Flint, Michigan; Nashville; and Northern California.

The Digital Future

Our transition in the mid-1980s from slide-tape presentations to videotape productions and our redesign of those materials for effective use in the classroom, has been followed by our leap into the digital present. Beginning in 1991, we entered into partnership with Voyager--one of the leading producers and publishers of new digital media--to convert the Who Built America? textbook into a CD-ROM that would serve as the prototype for a multidisk, interactive multimedia series on U.S. history. The co-creators and co-authors of the CD-ROM--Roy Rosenzweig, Joshua Brown, and myself --faced a very real challenge at the outset in conceiving and creating this prototype: What was the most appropriate structure and metaphor for adapting the traditional, two-media textbook (text and pictures) that we had written and illustrated to take best advantage of the multimedia (text, still images, sound, and moving images) capabilities of the CD-ROM format? After much reflection on the meaning and purpose of our original text, we decided that the prototype CD-ROM, which covered the years between 1876 and 1914, would be built on the "spine" of our original written analysis, linking a vast array of additional primary and secondary historical resources directly to the original prose that formed the core of our historical interpretation.

The metaphor we used to organize this supplementary source material is the "excursion," literally a "side trip" off the prose page, allowing computer users to go well beyond the 200 printed textbook pages, 100 graphic images, and 40 primary source documents included in the original text chapters . The Who Built America? CD-ROM includes nearly 200 such excursions, which give the user access to over five-thousand additional pages of text documents; 700 photographs, cartoons, and other graphic illustrations; 20 documentary and dramatic film clips totaling 45 minutes; over four hours of archival speeches, songs, vaudeville routines, and oral history interviews with historical participants; and 75 graphs, maps, and charts.

Sheer quantity of resources is but one advantage of a multimedia exploration of the past. The vast array of data contained on the CD-ROM can be searched and indexed with great speed and relative ease, using a sophisticated search engine to do fine-grain searching not only for individuals and places (a particular political, military, or business figure or cities and towns, large and small) but for general concepts and ideas (existing index categories such as immigrants, popular culture and leisure, and sexuality; or a more general concept reflecting one's own interests, e.g., "women and work"). In this sense, the CD-ROM is not only a library-like repository of sources, it also offers a card catalog-like ability to search at the same time for very specific things and very general concepts. A related advantage of the computer's ability to access and keep track of information is what we might call "simultaneity"--the ability to move very quickly from one body of information to another and to link disparate sources together. For example, a user can shift from reading the African-American Congressman Robert Smalls's speech denouncing the disfranchisement of black voters, to studying statistics on the effects of the secret ballot on voting, to examining the text of Louisiana's "grandfather" clause, to considering the debate between historians C. Vann Woodward and Howard Rabinowitz on the historical origins of Jim Crow, to listening to a re-recording of Booker T. Washington delivering his famous 1895 "Atlanta Compromise" address. Imagine how much fuller and more complete is the CD-ROM user's understanding of the important historical and political questions raised by studying the history of segregation and Jim Crow at the turn of the century if he or she can read, view, and hear this array of traditional and non-traditional historical sources and easily compare them.

A more nuanced and heightened understanding of history and the historical process has emerged among college students who have had sustained exposure to the Who Built America? CD-ROM. The City College of New York's History Department agreed to incorporate the CD-ROM into its basic undergraduate U.S. history survey, integrating the disk into three sections of the required course during the Fall 1994 term. Faculty used the disk for presentation of video, audio and visual resources to large lecture classes (a "Resource Collector" feature on the disk allows faculty to easily access diverse multimedia resources and, assuming an appropriate classroom setup, to project moving and still images and play sound resources to a lecture-size classroom). Working in small teams at computer workstations, CCNY students also used the disk to engage in weekly research and writing assignments and prepare for classroom discussions. Participating CCNY faculty report that the CD-ROM encouraged students to examine more closely and completely the interplay of interpretation and evidence in historical presentation. More anecdotal reports from history faculty and students around the country who also had access to the Who Built America? CD-ROM over the past two years have indicated that student use of the disk led to an increased understanding of and interest in historical study.

I am not arguing that multimedia presentations like the Who Built America? CD-ROM offer some kind of educational panacea for all that ails teachers, students, and schools around the country. The problems that plague our classrooms are simply too large, too complex, and too expensive to yield to simple, one-shot solutions, technological or otherwise. But our experience at the American Social History Project over the past 15 years tells us that solutions to educational problems must combine both the human and the technological, and must empower teachers and students with new ideas and new tools to allow them to transcend the shortcomings of the traditional pedagogy of passivity that continues to dominate many classrooms. We need to take advantage of educational media to make learning more immediate, more alive, and, God forbid, more fun. And media producers need to listen to and learn from teachers and students as we design, develop, evaluate, and revise new educational media. If that happens, educational technology will end up being neither panacea nor bete noire but something better: a powerful and effective tool that can help us improve the quality of how we teach and what we learn.

Originally appeared in The College Board Review, Nos. 176 & 177, Special Issue, 1995.Stephen Brier is Executive Director, American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, City University of New York. He served as co-author and supervising editor of the ASHP's Who Built America? textbook, (Pantheon, 1990, 1992), executive producer of the video series, and co-creator and co-author of the CD-ROM (Voyager, 1993). He can be reached by email at: sbrier@gc.cuny.edu