History of the Internet

For today's middle schoolers, there has always been an Internet and World Wide Web, Macintosh computers and Windows software, Google and Wikipedia.  But most of us teachers can remember when that wasn't so...

The following is a video from 1969, which was the last year of the original TV series, Star Trek, envisioned the connected computer network of the future (albeit in gratingly sexist ways):


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Almost 25 years later, Star Trek was still on...except by now, it was Star Trek:  Deep Space Nine.  The Internet was a reality by this point, but was so primitive compared to what our children can even imagine, as shown by this 1993 video:




I think it is great for our kids to see how far computer networking has come in a relatively short time... or, if nothing else, to recognize that distinctive connection noise that those of us using the Internet in the 1990's will never forget...

Why Don't Women Contribute to Wikipedia?

I've had a terrible muscle cramp or something in my right shoulder blade today, so I'm not really up to much blogging tonight.  So I thought I would just post an article that I found intriguing, even though it doesn't really deal directly with middle schoolers, although it does have some impact at all ages....

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that is responsible for Wikipedia, did a study that showed that only 13% of people who write Wikipedia entries are women.  The question, of course, is why such a collaborative, community-driven, and open-access project as Wikipedia is so male dominated.  There have been a rash of articles written investigating this subject, but my favorite is this one by the New York Times.

Does it matter?  Well, I think it probably does (which is how I connect it to middle schoolers).  Wikipedia is just such an important resource in our digital age.  A recent Pew survey reported that over half of the adults who regularly use the Internet rely on Wikipedia for information (with usage skewed towards the younger adult population).  I use it with my middle schooler at least several times a week.  It is one of the resources that I've taught him is relatively reliable as an information source.  But while I trusted the community vetting of information, I had never imagined that there would be such a gender difference among the writers.

With such an overwhelming percentage of male contributors, however, I now have to assume an underlying male bias.  The New York Times article reports several instances of topics of interest to women that contain only a few paragraphs, whereas topics of interest of men have much more extensive entries.

Is this really a problem?  I'm not sure, but intuitively, I don't like it.  What should we do about it?  I don't know.  But I'm just glad to be aware of the issue, and to perhaps be a bit more careful about recommending it to my middle schooler as an exclusive or definitive information source.