Projects Seeking Funding

Archival

Computing Educators Oral History Project, Phase II

Description: Currently, there is no oral history collection that focuses on either the history of computing educators or on under-represented groups within that population. The Computing Educators Oral History Project (CEOHP) is filling this niche and has already made a solid start during the NSF-funded Phase I project. Among the audiences for this project are prospective computing students (who can be encouraged by stories from role models), historians studying pathways of early pioneers in computing education, and those interested in studies of under-represented groups. These materials will serve as sources of new knowledge about the past and for providing interpretive perspectives within the relatively young and quickly changing field of computing. Projects such as this one will also help increase the population of people entering and staying in computing careers, especially careers in computing education. In addition to recording the perspectives of those who helped form computing curricula and build the field (and thus provided the foundational knowledge of individuals who are now leaders in industry and research), these materials will help reveal the influences and motives underlying the current state of the field, explanations that are generally unavailable otherwise. The overall purposes of this Phase II project are as follows: 1. Based on interviews with computing educators, develop these personal stories into examples to support mentoring and recruiting. These stories will provide inspiration throughout the various stages of the computing education pipeline. 2. Create an historical record of pioneers in the field of computing education and use this as a foundation for contrasting with the stories of younger practitioners. 3. Develop curricular materials that can be used in pre-college and undergraduate programs to aid in retention and recruitment. 4. Grow this model into a framework for sibling projects in other areas of computing, providing the potential for a much larger and richer collection of interviews. We anticipate that over time historians, social scientists, and computing educators will find other uses for the artifacts that result from this project.

Methodology: This project began from a Working Group during the ITiCSE conference in Lisbon, Portugal in June, 2005. In addition to seven computing educators, the Working Group included an historian and a social scientist who guided the development of a methodology for collecting and analyzing interviews from primary sources. The Working Group report included aids for conducting interviews, including an opening script, an outline of topics to be covered, guidelines for conducting interviews, and a set of probing questions to ensure consistency across interviews. The report included issues such as copyright and archival that confront the large-scale implementation of such a project. Using those procedures, several individuals were trained in how to conduct interviews. The project has a solid foundation of 14 published interviews and 4 yet-to-be-approved unpublished interviews. During Phase II we will further develop these interviews to include indexing, features to improve usability, and mechanisms for tracking use and receiving feedback. We will expand the list of potential interviewees, with special attention to balancing factors such as gender, ethnicity, career phase, institution size, and geographic location. Trained interviewers will conduct new interviews and oversee processing of all interviews. We will emphasize criteria for detailed evaluation of the project and mechanisms for its on-going sustainability. In addition, we propose to help individuals in other computing areas introduce separate but parallel oral history projects with their own Pis, for example, an on-going project in the area of networking. We will work with PIs as they amend the interview protocols to accommodate the issues inherent in these new areas. This project builds on work previously funded by the Sam Taylor Fund, currently funded by a planning grant from the National Science Foundation, and represented by the pilot website at ceoph.org.

Deliverables: The project will produce the following deliverables: * Digital recordings, audio transcripts, pullquote snippets, brief video snippets, and other artifacts that expand upon what is already in place for the existing set of interviews (14 published, 4 that must still be approved, and 3 that are in progress as we develop this proposal); * At least 20 new interviews added to the collection; * A set of curricular materials based on the collection that have been pilot tested in at least 3 pre-college and 4 undergraduate settings. * An expanded version of the prototype website that includes the interviews and materials listed above, as well as mechanisms for evaluating the usability and quality of the collection and the extent of its use; * Documented standards for audio and video recording and transcriptions; * Evidence that at least two additional oral history projects in areas related to computing have been able to make use of the procedures developed as part of CEOHP.

Project timeline: On-going

More information: http://ceohp.org

Amount sought: $15000

Contact:
Barbara Boucher Owens
Southwestern University
owensb@southwestern.edu

Archival

The NABU Network Reconstruction Project

Description: The NABU Network was designed and implemented by a Canadian company NABU Manufacturing between 1981 and 1983. The underlying idea behind the network was to link home personal computers to cable television networks which would supply a continuous, high speed stream of computer programs and information to almost an unlimited number of users. Cable television was a uniquely ideal technology for NABU to deliver software and data to home computers because of its high bandwidth and networking capabilities. After its official launch on Ottawa Cablevision in October of 1983, the NABU Network was introduced by Ottawa's Skyline Cablevision in 1984 and a year later in Sowa, Japan, via a collaboration between NABU and ASCII Corp. Described as "the most innovative, daring, and least appreciated venture in the Canadian computer and communications industries" and even as "the `Internet' -- ten years ahead of its time," the NABU Network was an innovative attempt to radically reshape the principles of personal computer-based public access to information and entertainment. In 2005, recognizing the significance of the NABU Network, the York University Computer Museum began a reconstruction project to recreate the network (software and hardware) in a form as complete and historically accurate as possible. As much of the original technical literature describing the NABU Network cannot be easily located, the second objective of the project is to create an on-line NABU repository that will include, among other document categories: NABU corporate, technical, and promotional documentation, user manuals and guides, technical database of NABU products, technical documentation created during the network's reconstruction. More information: http://www.cse.yorku.ca/museum/research/NABU.htm

Methodology: Since technical documentation concerning the NABU Network is scarce, the project relies on extensive interviews with former NABU software and hardware engineers. It also uses software and hardware archaeology techniques to extract information about the NABU Network components', architecture, and interfacing. The project uses the original as well as emulated NABU hardware and software.

Deliverables: The reconstructed network will reside on the Internet. A user will be able to access it via a standard PC or via the original (and now rare) NABU PC. The NABU Network repository will be available on-line as one of the York University Computer Museum's collections. A number of technical reports and research papers is scheduled at the end of the project.

Project timeline: September 2005 -- September 20

Contact:
Zbigniew Stachniak
York University
zbigniew@cse.yorku.ca