Foot - An Oral History of the Internet

I was not too interested in reading this article from Vanity Fair, but after I got into it I was completely hooked. I think my favorite part about the entire article was that is was an oral history; directly from the mouths of those who created the internet all the way to people who created blogs and lots in between.

The internet was originally created for military communication purposes and as a tool in the Cold War, but Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at U.C.L.A, and an instrumental creator of the earliest computer network, saw the internet as not just a military or university tool, but something for all people, "he also foresaw a great change in the way activity would take place: education, creativity, commerce, just general information access. He foresaw a connected world of information."

I just finished reading and blogging about Dr. Kist's book The Socially Networked Classroom and after reviewing all of the exciting ways teachers can use the internet and technology it is really cool to read how the internet got started. It is also amazing that Leonard Kleinrock's vision of a "connected world of information" has come true and we can use it in our classrooms!

I can't count the number of times I have been told by professors that Wikipedia is NOT a reliable source. I adhere to my professor's warnings when it comes to academic papers, but I often find useful and accurate information on Wikipedia when I am looking at things for personal inquiries. And so, I found this section about the founding of Wikipedia to be very interesting. The article explains that Wikipedia is run by volunteers and so the problems of "...maintaining accuracy...and of combating bias and even outright malice" is very prevalent; which would explain my professor's extreme hatred of Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales, a 2001 former options trader for Wikipedia, puts it this way, "How do you innovate a social community—social rules and norms that allow for good-quality work to take place? What you have to balance there are, on the one hand, if a Web site is essentially a brutal police state where every action could easily result in random blocking or banning from the site and nobody can trust anything—that doesn’t work. Complete and total anarchy, where anyone can do anything, also doesn’t work. It’s actually the same problem we face off-line. It’s the problem of living together. It’s the problem of a good city government." It's an interesting way to look at Wikipedia, one I've never even thought of. Will Wikipedia ever become a relabel source? Should I warn my students against it as my professor's do; or should I tell them to use it as a tool but use it with discretion?

An interesting fact to be noted in this article is that all of the original founders of the internet were male as Stewart Brand states, "Anyway, we were all engineers of both ilks, the narrow-tie, nine-to-five serious engineers and the stay-up-all-night long-haired hackers who had earned their way into the respect of the engineers. And pretty much everybody was male." In the article it is not until 1996 that a female name is even mentioned and then it is Cindy Margolis, a model who became known as "the world's most downloaded woman". Why is it that there are so few women included in the history of the internet? And when one finally does appear, it is for physical appearance; what does that say about our society?

I found a story by a coffee house owner and computer-graphics co-owner, Sky Dalton, to be humorous but also revealing of how far we've come in technology in the past 20 years: "I heard about this thing called the Internet. I thought, That sounds kind of interesting. The first thing I did is I actually picked up the phone and dialed 411, and I said, I’d like the number for the Internet, please. And the operator is like, What? I said, Just search any company with the word Internet in the name. Blank. Nothing. I thought, Wow, this is interesting. What is this thing anyway?" This quote is from 1994; less then 20 years ago people didn't know what the internet was!

At the beginning of the article it was revealed to me that the internet was originally created for military use and at the end of the article it is again mentioned how the military is currently using the vast resources of the internet to combat vitrual-terroists.

It is truly amazing and exciting how advanced the internet and the technology surrounding it has become. It is also exciting to be a teacher during this time; we have so many resources available to us which will enhance the learning process for our students.