Chapter Five
Wired Knowledge:
When They Let a
Murderer Loose
on the Internet
Paul Jernigan was a tattooed ex-mechanic just under six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds. He had been a drug addict and a chronic drunk, but nearly all his organs still looked in textbook shape by the standards of gross anatomy—a stroke of luck that would later help him win him a macabre competition. Jernigan had fatally stabbed and shot a seventy-five-year-old watchman after stealing a radio and a microwave oven. More than a decade had passed. So had his hopes for a successful appeal to the courts.
Lying on a gurney in a Texas deathhouse—his arms outstretched, as if in a crucifixion—Paul Jernigan just gawked upward as his brother watched. No last words came before the poison flowed into Jernigan’s veins.
Jernigan gave himself to science. A not-so-loquacious sister told me this was to spare the family the cost of burial. “It was like, matter of fact,” his last attorney said of the donation. “It was a gift. He wasn’t going to laud himself, pat himself on the back. We didn’t send an embossed announcement that ‘Paul Jernigan has donated his body to science and this is his ticket to redemption.’”[5.1] A former cellmate offered his own twist. Supposedly, Jernigan wanted his family to be able to sell his life story for a true-crime book. The donation just might make the planet care more about him in death than in life.
Within a year of the execution, in fact, I was reading clips about Paul Jernigan from the London Times, Jerusalem Post, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. My favorite lead came out in a British paper called The Independent: “A killer was yesterday let loose on the Internet computer network.” I wondered how he’d respond to flaming. The new Jernigan lived on as a digital atlas of the human body, a few steaklike cross sections of which I could dial up on the World Wide Web.
The Visible Human Project had come out of the National Library of Medicine in a Maryland suburb near Washington, D.C. It was one of the most spectacular examples of the Net’s potential for spreading knowledge, the topic of this chapter.
Researchers had cut Jernigan into four blocks, frozen him in a blue gel, ground him down millimeter by millimeter, digitally photographed the 1,878 cross sections that emerged, scanned these slices[5.2] into a computer, put them on magnetic tape, and then on the Internet. Now the cadaver would be grist for medical educators and cancer researchers and perhaps even the designers of a “Fantastic Voyage”-style game. Players might explore the human body from the inside, just as Isaac Asimov’s characters did in his novel. The government itself was spending $1.4 million on the project; expected commercial payoffs could reach the tens of millions and maybe more. Research and education, however, would be paramount here.
The Visible Human Project is but one of thousands of uses that academics and researchers have found for the Internet. The Net is why many scientific luminaries were quick to slap the “fraud” label on efforts to create energy through cold fusion. Skeptics throughout the world could compare notes. If Paris couldn’t replicate an experiment, then Boston would know within hours. Working in the other direction, fusion stalwarts have used the Internet to swap data and maintain the faith. Cyberspace is to knowledge what beehives are to honey.
Already the Net teems with thousands of mailing lists devoted to the most arcane disciplines, not just to the mainstream ones. Many scientists and other researchers envision the Net as a substitute for paper-style academic journals, subscriptions to some of which can cost as much as a Ford Escort. Stevan Harnad has caught the imaginations of many academics with “A Subversive Proposal” for scholars to publish their finished works formally on the Net without offering them to academic publishers. He puts out a vigilantly edited, psychology-related magazine with a circulation of tens of thousand on the Internet; he sees no reason for the Net just to be a repository for pre-publication papers. In his opinion, academics could use such opportunities to enjoy greater bargaining power with existing publishers.
Yet another glory of the Internet is that it serves as a bridge between experts and nonexperts, as well as one between authorities in many academic disciplines. A dean of a law school, for example, can sign up for mailing lists on electronic serials to learn more about the technology that is fueling the drive for copyright reform.
From Day One, the Internet was a creature of the elite research establishment, but knowledge-related uses have steadily grown more egalitarian—starting with the brightest students in elementary and high schools, then moving on to average children, and even to problem kids.
To dispose of a major issue, No, the Net shouldn’t replace teachers. I couldn’t agree more with Cliff Stoll when he rants against lax standards and mindless technocratic schemes. Well-trained teachers can provide inspiration and guidance to help children explore networks on their own. The last thing we need is to turn the educational reaches of the Net into one big flash card. What the Net can do is prepare children to deal with source material, with actual papers written by researchers, as opposed to pabulum in textbooks.
Correctly, Stoll criticizes some educators for teaching astronomy without children studying the actual sky; computer programs should only supplement such activities, not replace them. But shouldn’t he apply the same “real thing” logic to Web-distributed source material and applaud students’ easier access to it? Only the brightest children will benefit from a complicated mathematical treatise. But surely even an average student could take advantage of a historian’s paper on a nearby Civil War battle. If anything, teachers could use the Web and other areas of the Net to demand more research from students. Just why must Stoll compare the Net to a fun but dumb educational film? Is a Web version of the Odyssey to be confused with some educational Looney Tunes?
Intriguingly, Web technology makes it possible for students to produce information, not just soak it up. In Fairfax County, Virginia, students at Thomas Jefferson, a high school for the gifted, are posting their “pages” on the World Wide Web. I can remember when college applicants submitted tape recordings of their music. Now they can also give M.I.T. or Caltech the addresses of their Web pages and demonstrate, in the most direct way, their familiarity with networking. They can post their papers and point to other people’s pages that interest them.
Also, at Jefferson and countless other schools, students can electronically send their classmates to knowledge-rich sites on the Web. Clicking on “NASA” in blue letters within Bob’s area, Jill can see what the space program is doing. Then she can return, click on other blue letters, and check out his tip to visit a history-related site discussing the Sputnik and Vanguard days. Via a project called MendelWeb, Ellen can read the famous treatise of Gregor Mendel, the geneticist, and retrieve other scientists’ opinions; then she might write her own paper and post it on the Web for classmates and even for students elsewhere.
Clearly the value of the Net, for students and researchers alike, isn’t just in the information per se—it’s also in the ease of sharing it. Teachers can point to common Web resources (such as MendelWeb) from Web pages where they add their own comment, or even their own study guides. They can also link to other guides.
Some Web sites even offer electronic forms with questions to which students can respond—in either a multiple choice or an essay format. Andy Carvin, a specialist in educational technology with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, praises the World Wide Web as “an excellent tool in which to design online curricula.” Understandably, even elementary schools are getting on the Web with their own areas.
Other good things are happening. By way of a project called Big Sky Telegraph, Native Americans in Montana have been pen pals with children in the former Soviet Union. What better way to stir up an interest in writing, politics, and geography at the same time? Significantly, in Montana and other places, many schools are not on the Net directly. Instead, schools use affordable bulletin board systems—their own or perhaps those operated by hobbyists—which can relay Net-originated material. If need be, such systems can run on ancient computers of the kind found at garage sales; some messages may be delayed for days, but that’s better than no connection at all. Within the BBS world, moreover, nets even exist especially for education. Consider K12Net, which includes at least “three dozen conferences specifically related to K-12 curriculum” and reaches some sixty school-associated systems in New Zealand alone. More and more, however, lucky schools are hooking into the Internet directly or at least arranging for teachers and students to get accounts elsewhere.
As a ninth grader at Poolesville Middle Senior High School, in Poolesville, Maryland, Chris Gazunis used the Net to study catastrophes such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and oil spills. “We didn’t just look at a textbook diagram of what caused an earthquake and the casualty number associated with it,” he recalled. “We used the networks to learn what happened to the people’s lives and homes. Instead of just being given a set of directions and material that would result in an earthquake resistant building, we designed and tested them ourselves.”[5.3]
Randy Hammer, a high schooler at Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington, who is blind “with two glass eyes,” once had to have sighted people read the newspaper to him. No longer. Via network connections, he can enjoy the Washington Post, the Moscow News, and science-oriented publications—thanks to a gadget that reads aloud to him the words on his screen. “It’s hard now,” he wrote, “to remember how I lived without this wealth of materials and information at my fingertips.”[5.4] That’s what happens when the hardware is around.
Even in a wealthy place like the United States, however, society so far has been stingy toward high tech in public schools. The ratio between students and computers is something like 16 to 1. Some 75 percent of American schools have computers capable of getting on the Net, but the children can’t all use them at once. What’s more, just 35 percent of public schools have Internet hookups in classrooms, media centers, or computer labs. Only 3 percent of the classrooms themselves are wired in, according to a survey from the U.S. Department of Education.
We’re talking almost Third World here. “It’s amazing to me how people outside of education have no idea how teachers still have to line up outside the teachers’ lounge to use the telephone,” says a senior analyst at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.[5.5]
In the end, as I see it, the real solution is a TeleRead-style program of the kind described in the previous chapter. It would connect the students to the nets from home, reduce the future communications costs of the schools somewhat, and allow students to explore computer networks at leisure rather than just during the school day. A few small steps are already being taken in this general direction. The state of Maryland has granted limited—but free—Internet privileges to school children and other residents. Without leaving home, they can dial up material ranging from weather reports, to academic papers, to Shakespearean poetry. Joseph Peightel, a cable splicer with Bell Atlantic, says that the Sailor program is just the ticket for his ten-year-old daughter, whose hunger for books outstrips the family budget. While the Peightels can’t retrieve the latest best-sellers, they at least can enjoy Project Gutenberg-style material in the public domain. The Maryland program helping the Peightels is not TeleRead, and it comes with problems and inefficiencies, but it may be as close as any state effort to the nirvana envisioned by Al Gore, in which all children could dial up the Library of Congress.
Needless to say, I bristle when Cliff Stoll glosses over the reasons why the Net can’t provide easy answers to questions such as “What political compromises caused Bismarck to become the capital of North Dakota?” or “Why isn’t Kyoto the capital of today’s Japan?” or “What’s the history of the Ruhr Valley, and what are the implications of its new Eastern European competition?” Of course. Worried about piracy, publishers have understandably kept their textbooks off the Net. The last laugh, however, just may be on the more zealous of the copyright interests. Right now Stoll couldn’t be more correct about the need for more and better books on the Net; but as shown by, say, MendelWeb, the academic community is doing plenty on its own. And if this keeps up, the demand for copyrighted, commercial books, the kind that feed me, my editors, and yes, my publishers, too, could suffer. Far better to have a national digital library with privately originated books available from the very start.
Ahead I’ll examine more closely some scientific and educational uses of the Net. Selections—yes, the print kind, not the Jernigan variety—will appear on:
• The “hows,” the positives, and the negatives of the Visible Human Project—it stands out for reasons beyond the drama. The Clinton administration has encouraged high-bandwidth, scientific users of the Net. The original Visible Man requires sixteen gigabytes of storage—enough space to hold fifty Encyclopaedia Britannicas. Some say this isn’t the best use of Net resources. I disagree, however, and I’ll tell why. Along the way I’ll pass on information about the Internet’s Visible Man before he became so visible.
• High school use of the Internet. The United States is hardly the only nation with thousands of children in cyberspace—countries ranging from Canada to Singapore are putting students online, directly or indirectly. Significantly, computers and networks can help students outside the elite. Some proof of this comes from Nova Scotia, where, for several years, a high school has been using the Internet to benefit some “at-risk” students. I’ll tell you about the Internet success that a Canadian teacher named Jeff Doran has enjoyed with leather-jacketed teenagers. Many are racing into the computer lab and, let’s hope, away from fates such as Paul Jernigan’s. The Internet project at Park View Education Centre is far from an unqualified triumph—many Park View teachers still fear the technology—but patterns there suggest a vast potential for educational uses of the Net if schools will modernize their curricula.
The Visible Man
The doctor, a Scottish-accented man in his fifties or sixties, had collected a wall full of diplomas and plaques. Perhaps that’s why he felt entitled to give only the sketchiest of explanations when he told a Midwestern friend of mine that she might need heart surgery to avoid a possible stroke. Karen* would be in the hospital just a day or so. But during this time a surgeon would insert a catheter up her groin and go on to kill off selected heart cells. With luck, the operation would end her atrial fibrillation. It had made her heart throb as quickly as 200 beats a minute on occasion and had sent her to the emergency room.
Karen pressed for details about the recommended operation. “Ma’am,” Dr. S. said in a peremptory burr, “this is too technical.”
It was Valentine’s Day and Karen and her husband would rather have been thinking about hearts in that way alone. But she wanted to know all. “Ma’am, I’ll draw you a picture,” Dr. S. said a bit grudgingly. The doctor sketched a crude heart that might as well have been on a greeting card. Hastily drawn lines showed how electric impulses were traveling through Karen’s heart with an extra path. The operation would cut off the surplus wiring, so to speak.
Well, this was a start. But Karen still felt ignorant, and it was her body into which the catheter would go. And so it is with many patients, not all, but many. Even good doctors don’t always tell enough.
The Visible Human Project, however, would make it easier for Karen to learn more. Dr. S. could have shown Karen a computer image of an actual human heart and have pointed to the exact areas that the surgeon would kill off. Karen would have picked up a better appreciation of the complexities of the proposed operation. At the same time, Dr. S. could also have juggled around computer images to show the increased risk of clotting that would result if she failed to have the operation. Karen would have emerged better informed and more confident—or less, whatever the facts justified. Someday she might even be able to dial up on the Internet an animated, perfectly detailed series of pictures of the operation.
That was what the Visible Human Project would mean. What’s more, patient education was just one of many uses; the right technology could revolutionize the training of doctors and advance medical research.
As far back as the 1980s, such ideas intrigued Michael Ackerman, a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering who worked for the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health. He heard of a project at the University of Washington that was digitizing the human brain, although not the entire body. Researchers at other schools hoped to do the same with other organs. But they were less keen on collecting images and other data than on using them, so why duplicate each other? Like the Internet itself, then, just one digitized corpse could help many researchers at once.
In North Carolina a marketing executive with a drug company was dreaming of a human atlas on a computer screen. Why should medical students have to make do with fold-out drawings in anatomy guides? Michael Du Toit, Vice President of marketing for Glaxo Inc., passed the idea on to a small company called Butler Communications, which checked out the technology. Glaxo had three goals. First, it wanted to create the basic images. Second, it wanted viewers to be able to wander through the body; ideally they could move the body for the best view, spin it, travel through it. And third, it wanted researchers to be able to give the lungs cancer, clog the arteries to the heart, and demonstrate the effects of drugs. But computers weren’t ready. “The hype versus the deliverable,” Robert Butler told me, “was miles and miles apart.” To meet Glaxo’s specs—to show the body by way of artistic recreations and virtual reality—might cost as much as $100 million.
Imagine the excitement that Du Toit and Butler must have felt on learning that academic and government researchers were finally coming up with the means for this to happen at a fraction of the expense. The Feds put out a request for proposals for the dissection job, and the crew at the University of Colorado made the final cut. Still unanswered was the question of whose corpse would end up on the Internet. The contest judges allowed a bit more leeway than did the people choosing Miss America and Mr. Universe.
The ideal candidate for Visibility could be anywhere from maybe thirty to sixty years of age and be a bit thin or pudgy, albeit not exceedingly so. Height mustn’t go too far beyond the norms for male and female. Above all, the innards of the body had to be photogenic from an anatomical perspective. That weeded out anyone worn down by cancer or similar disease, not to mention any victims of automobile accidents or knifings.
A little unfairly, this contest had geographical limits. Texas, Maryland, and Colorado were the states with subcontracts to provide the body. I could understand Maryland and Colorado, but Texas? I wondered if the reason would be the fondness of the people down there for capital punishment. No longer did bodies have to roast in electric chairs. Texas helpfully killed its murderers with lethal injections. So, in this competition, Paul Jernigan was a strong contender from the beginning.
Murder is an act of the will no matter how poor or Hitlerian our parents are, or what genes shape us and our brains. But if Fate sent anyone to the deathhouse gurney and to Visible Manhood, it was Paul Jernigan. He lived out an updated Dreiser novel.
His full legal name was Joseph Paul Jernigan, and he was born in Geneva, Illinois, on January 31, 1954, the youngest of Earl Jernigan’s six children. The boy suffered from asthma and almost died of it. He and his brothers and sisters typically owned just one pair of jeans each. Their mother eked it out in a chicken-processing plant, as a clerk at Montgomery Wards, and at other low-paying jobs, and they lived in public housing. She married a truck driver who, like Earl, was a strict disciplinarian toward the children. Later she suffered a stroke. Afflicted with a learning disorder, Paul flunked a grade at school and dropped out two years before graduating. He was a drunk and eventually was doing a pharmacy’s worth of drugs, from Quaaludes to horse tranquilizers.
The Army trained Paul Jernigan as a mechanic, sent him to Germany, then tossed him out as unsalvageable. Perhaps recognizing the cruel matrix that shaped Jernigan, it gave him a general discharge (a “no comment” in effect) rather than a dishonorable one. A shrink later found Jernigan to be a passive-aggressive man who was sometimes TNT-volatile. In the years after the military Jernigan kept a cooler of ice and beer in his automobile; a typical paycheck went for pot, cheeseburgers, and enough octane for himself and the car.
Paradoxically, though, friends trusted Paul Jernigan with their children. Jernigan was the perfect baby-sitter who enjoyed romping around with his charges. He married for a stretch and loved his stepchildren.
But he failed at marriage just as he had failed in school and in the Army.
Jernigan bungled at burglary, too. He was already a two-time loser in 1981 when he and a pal named Roy Lamb were driving down the road in Corsicana, Texas, a small, howdy-neighbor kind of town south of Dallas on Interstate 45. Emboldened by a night of booze and pot, the two decided to rob Edward Hale’s house. They began stuffing their loot into a pillow case when Hale surprised them. Lamb ran out. Jernigan beat Hale over the head with an ashtray, hoping to kill off the witness. Hale stubbornly survived. Then Jernigan stabbed him with a rusty, dull-bladed meat knife, which just bent on Hale’s chest. And so he took a shotgun and fired until the watchman was dead. Edward Hale did not die painlessly.
After the murder, Jernigan went to Houston to try to straighten out his life. He was in a halfway house when arrested.
Some would say Jernigan needn’t have wound up on the gurney; the law prevented the courts from accepting an accomplice’s testimony. Mark Ticer, his last attorney, believes that Jernigan may have felt so contrite that he wanted to die. Ticer grew truly fond of his client. In character, Jernigan would constantly inquire about the lawyer’s two-year-old and remember birthdays.
Jernigan gave Ticer’s wife, Cecily, some earrings made from gold bought with his military pension, and he crafted a wishing-well bucket for Ticer. Ticer was as trusting of the murderer as Jernigan’s friends had been; he would have trusted him with his own young daughter. Even on death row Jernigan would write to the stepchildren from his failed marriage.
Smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and sipping a Pepsi, he would discuss legal strategy with Ticer until finally there wasn’t quite so much to be strategic about.
“Paul,” Ticer more or less said, “things are not going well. I guess I have to talk about your burial arrangements if they’re going to execute you. I know your family doesn’t have a lot of money.” And it was there in the Ellis prison in Huntsville that Ticer learned of The Gift. Neither knew Jernigan would eventually become the Visible Man.
Mark Ticer tried for a stay of execution up to the last minute. Aware of Ticer’s devotion to him, Jernigan asked his lawyer not to witness his last minutes. Death was almost instant. Paul Jernigan died much more smoothly than he had lived.
The state anatomical board, a subcontractor of the University of Colorado, took it from there. Jernigan got one and a half gallons of 1 percent formalin. That was a light touch. Often cadavers are embalmed with ten gallons of a stronger preservative, and they sit and pickle for a year, so that when medical students cut them up all the tissues are gray. But the idea here, in case Jernigan won the Visible Man honors, was to keep his tissue looking nice and bright like prime meat; the students would be able to enjoy a better, more realistic view.
Writing this chapter, I pondered the use of the state anatomical board as a cadaver procurer. Thank God the board was separate from the court system. Given the rage for businesslike government, I could just imagine some of the wilder politicians setting up an execution quota to work toward a balanced state budget. But the real reason for the use of Jernigan’s corpse was more prosaic. Texas had one of the best cadaver-donation programs in the country, and of some 2,000 bodies that year, his just happened to show up at the right time and in the right condition.
A Learjet flew Jernigan from Texas to Colorado. Awaiting him were the masterminds of the dissection effort at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. Victor Spitzer specialized in radiology and cellular and structural biology; David Whitlock was a professor of cellular and structural biology. The people working most on Jernigan would be the research assistants in the dissection room, which, day to day, was overseen by Tim Butzer, thirty, and his wife, Martha Pelster, a bright, curly-haired woman of twenty-five who would later apply for medical school. Helen Pelster, another assistant, was the sister of Martha Pelster.[5.6] The whole scenario—the family connection—begged for embellishment from Stephen King or Robin Cook.
I asked Martha Pelster if her work haunted her at night. “I kind of keep it on a pretty even level,” she said. “I don’t have too much trouble with it.”[5.7] She said Butzer felt the same.
Had Jernigan inspired much after-hours talk with her husband?
“If there was a problem that needed to be worked out.”
But did Pelster and Butzer reflect on the Visible Man’s past in relation to what was happening now?
“Not too much. Getting emotionally involved with something like that—you don’t want to discuss it. It isn’t relevant to what we’re doing.”
Inquiring about the university’s most famous cadaver, I learned that Jernigan had come with at least two tattoos on his chest area; they looked vaguely like dragons. His build and muscles were impressive. The lab had to modify some of the machinery to handle Jernigan. He showed up with just one testicle, which, I learned elsewhere, was the aftermath of painful surgery from his military days. I also heard that another operation had left him without an appendix. Students and researchers seeking to unravel the mysteries of appendixdom would just have to turn elsewhere. As a taxpayer, however, I didn’t feel cheated. This was the States, not Bangladesh; did that many Americans die without any remnants of surgery? Jernigan’s cadaver stood head and shoulders above a rival, a woman who was a chronic alcoholic with visible damage to her liver. In the hierarchy of the dissection room livers must have counted more than appendixes.
Before the millimeter-by-millimeter grinding, the scientists treated Jernigan to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI, mixing radio waves and magnetic fields) and computer-aided tomography (CAT or CT, which is like topography except that it’s on the innards of the human body). MRI picks up soft tissue. CAT scans are good for hard tissue, and for the differences between it and soft tissue. The researchers CT’ed Jernigan both before and after he was frozen, and these scans had to correspond with the alignment of the digitized photographs. Imagine the precision required here.
Preparing to slice the icy cadaver into four blocks for convenient grinding, the lab crew sharpened up on a less exalted cadaver. Vertebrae were a problem. “This saw would curve,” Pelster said, “so you wouldn’t have a perfect perpendicular flat cut. It would have a curve to it. So we took the cadaver back to the CT scanner and found the level where we could make a cut.” In the end there were three cuts and four sections of Jernigan—head and torso, abdomen and pelvis just down to the thighs, the rest of the thighs and the knees, and just below the knees to the feet. The frozen pieces went into an aluminum mold, one at a time. And then the researchers poured a blue gel around them (the same blue you’ll see on the edges of the cross sections if you dial them up on the World Wide Web). The result was four chunks of ice, each approximately 20 by 20 by 15 inches.
The grinding area was the next stop. Plexiglass enclosed it. That was a must. Pieces of cadaver would fly everywhere as science turned Paul Jernigan into dust with a spinning, carbide-tipped blade. “You’d think we’d have trouble sectioning bone,” Pelster said, “but that’s not been the case. Bone always cuts very clean. But sometimes we have a lot of trouble with the tendons. The tendons are such that they don’t want to shear off cleanly, and so a lot of time we did hand scalpel work on each slice. So the slices might take ten minutes each instead of four minutes each.” Actually the time varied. “Ninety slices were the most we cut on any one day, and we averaged sixty. Sometimes it was ten a day. It was about four months of sectioning.”
“Were you worried about damaging the goods?” I asked.
“Definitely. We just did the best we could.”
“Any near misses?”
“There were definitely a few. We never were to the point where we torpedoed the whole project. It would be more a possibility of losing a slice. We never came close to botching the whole thing. You look back and you see a little dot of ice here or there, things like that. You do the best you can. But I think it turned out well.”
All along, of course, cameras and lights were clicking and flashing away. The slices went into a black-walled, reflection-proof chamber for photographing by one digital camera and two with film. A table held the cameras. It turned to give each a view of the cross sections from the same angle. The results went into a Macintosh Quadra 840AV with 128 megabytes of random access memory and 2 gigabytes of hard disk space. It was, in other words, many times more powerful and could store at least several times more than the average personal computer. As with the grinding, problems sometimes arose. “You think computers are so precise,” Martha Pelster said, “but they’re not. Things are always going wrong.” Typically working with her and Tim were such people as the man who kept the grinding machine running, a camera expert, and a computer expert (Helen Pelster, Martha’s sister), who would transfer the digitized Jernigan to tape and CD-ROM. Come the end of a hard day of photography, the lab crew collected everything and put it back in the freezer. “And then when we were finished doing this,” Pelster said, “we had many bags of things that needed to go be cremated.” The dust went to a contractor for incineration.
Digitized photos and CAT and MRI images from Jernigan went to National Library of Medicine in Maryland and to the Scientific Computing Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The latter worked with a Cray Y-MP/8 supercomputer and Silicon Graphics workstations to study the results. A headline on the World Wide Web summed up the magnitude of the computational task: “The Visible Human Project: Can It Bring a Supercomputer to Its Knees?” A machine with the power of the Cray could take the 1,878 cross sections, stack them like slices of an upright bread loaf, and create electronic bones or hearts or brains that looked as if they had never been taken apart in the first place.
By fall 1994, Michael Ackerman at the National Library of Medicine was ready to tell the world about the electronic Jernigan and to have his images posted on the Net by way of the weather forecaster’s facilities. “We hold this out as an example of the future of health care,” Ackerman said. He predicted that the study of medicine would become increasingly visual. No one talked then of a murderer, and so the first stories on the wire services blandly mentioned an anonymous thirty-nine-year-old donor from Texas who had died of a drug overdose.
Learning that a digitized corpse would go on the Internet, not everyone greeted the news with unalloyed praise. Some reviled this as a waste of Net resources. Why not use CD-ROMs to distribute the information? To an extent I could see their arguments. The Library was releasing sixteen gigabytes of images at the start, and even someone with a deluxe Net connection could spend a week or so downloading it. Critics believed that this squandered bandwidth, that it was a bit like cruising down a narrow country road with an overgrown tour bus and fifty cars honking at it from behind. The strain on the Internet was far from that bad. But even by Net standards this was indeed a behemoth, and much more importantly, the bandwidth defenders worried about the precedent being set here. Sixteen gigabytes of images was equivalent to 8 billion pages of double-spaced typing. Individual e-mail messages commonly took up only a page or two.
Even so, the Visible Man had his friends out there in cyberspace. Anxious to beat rivals to the data, one company kept its modems pumping away for a week until it had received all of Jernigan. It didn’t want to wait weeks or months for tapes. Thanks to the Net, many people throughout the world could receive Jernigan at the same time. In the first few months of the release, more than 900 companies, schools, and people wrote Ackerman about licenses giving them permission to use the data in experiments and products. Some 100 actually followed through—everyone from pharmaceutical firms to a young artist who, according to Ackerman, assured him that she would make tasteful use of the images.
Luckily from a bandwidth perspective, you didn’t have to download all of Jernigan. Each slice was a mere seven megabytes in a spatial resolution of 2,048 by 1,216 pixels (several times sharper than that of a typical personal computer). A maker of software for ophthalmologists could pull down only the images dealing with the eye and related brain areas. Those aiming for the podiatry market could focus on the feet and ankles. What’s more, even without a license, ordinary Net users could dial up Jernigan Lite, so to speak, from the World Wide Web.
Coming over the Net eventually would be more than just the raw, unprocessed images. Refined versions—for example, animated Jernigans, rotating in 3-D, or even virtual reality versions—could go anywhere in the world. And when they did, researchers and students would be wanting their own pet views. CD-ROMs just didn’t store enough data to anticipate all the possibilities. Typically they could hold maybe 650 megabytes of data. Even extended, the storage would offer a fraction of what could be available via high-speed connections to sites from Paris to Melbourne.
Jernigan, you might say, was more than just the material for a medical experiment. He was also a focus of a research project to develop special formats for libraries of visual information on the Net. Eventually people would be able to download not just images but also the “objects” that made up the images.
“These objects will have knowledge in them,” Michael Ackerman said, “so they know how they relate to each other and the rest of the scheme. Say you ask for the heart. What you get of course is the not a picture of the heart but the objects that made up the heart that your software has now rendered as the heart. If you point to something on the heart, it can open up because it’s made up of these objects. And if you point to something on the margin of the heart and say “What is attached here?” that object on the margin knows what its nearest neighbor is even though it’s not in the picture. And it knows to go back to the database and bring up what’s attached to it.”
Such an approach might even take advantage of Web-style technology to link together libraries at a number of locations. So you might smoothly travel from, say, a processed image of a blood vessel done up at School X to an animated image of a heart as tweaked by Company Y.
Those uses would increase the load on the Internet, of course. But ultimately the principle of the expanding pipeline might work to the benefit of all. That is, the heavier the traffic on the Net, the heftier the connections would be built. So in the end, everything would be cheaper—from image transmissions to sending one-page notes by electronic mail. The challenge, of course, was for this to happen without the costs of ordinary Net users being driven up by the workload that the image libraries and similar endeavors would bring about. That’s where TeleRead might come in. It could systematically promote the mass use of electronic forms for tax documents, business transactions, and other purposes. And indirectly the money saved on paperwork could go not only toward a national library but also to help upgrade the present Internet for researchers and the world at large.
Right now people tended to see the applications of the Net in terms of one use versus another—in terms of money for low-cost networks for consumer education versus high-bandwidth connections of the kind that Ackerman wanted. With a TeleRead-style approach and enough imagination, however, we could take full advantage of the economies of the technology. And so although we would not end the clashes between Net users with different priorities, we could at least reduce them.
Several other cost-related questions arose beyond those of the expense of the network connections. I wondered how much patients would be charged to see a picture of the innards of Jernigan or a Visible Woman. Robert Butler doubted that his client, Glaxo, was ready to say. However, he left me with the impression that this probably would not be pay per view. Glaxo had its own reasons for going ahead—for example, showing doctors the effects of its pharmaceuticals on the body. So, no, he said, this was not a plot to gouge the public with peep shows.
A related issue, arising from the involvement of drug companies, was the question of proprietary information. While the images were on the Internet for all to see, this project was not entirely in the spirit of the Net’s openness. Butler, for example, might have feared that I was working for a rival corporation, and he waited several weeks to return my calls. I could understand his reasons. Still, I was startled to learn that Ackerman at the National Institutes of Health would not even release to me a list of the companies that had licensed the use of the images. Nor had NIH organized a newsgroup or a mailing list. Surely all the hundreds of licensees would have common problems, common opportunities, that they could discuss without imperiling each other’s projects.
Yet another question went back to one of the main reasons given for the project. Could medical students really learn by hooking into the Net and dialing up the images from the Visible Man? David Dean should have been a complete booster of this endeavor. He was, after all, a Ph.D. who worked in medical imaging and taught anatomy at Case Western Reserve University. And yet he told me, “I feel you can’t replicate the experience in the anatomy lab. Students will have no time for this stuff. They’re totally overwhelmed. They can see the same structures again and again in different bodies.”
At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Gerry Oxford, professor of physiology, said that seeing organs in three dimensions wasn’t the same as feeling them. “Physicians in training need a visceral appreciation of the fact that they will have responsibility for the human body.” Even a believer in the project, Marc Nelson, assistant dean of medical education at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, worried that electronic anatomy could lessen contacts between students and teachers.[5.8]
Real bodies, however, cost universities $600 each—assuming they could get them in the first place. And students would not have eyeballs, hearts, hands, and livers to themselves.
Of all the boosters of the project, Martha Pelster may have been the most persuasive. She worked as a lab assistant, had cut up dozens of bodies, and now was headed to medical school. “When you look at this cadaver,” Pelster said of the digitized Jernigan, “everything is still in its orientation. When you go in and dissect, you take a lot of stuff out. If you cut something wrong or cut through something and toss the object into the reject bin, you’ve lost it. But with this visible male, you can go back in again. You can see what happened before your lab partner went in there and messed up your cadaver. This cross-sectional anatomy is going to be the be-all and end-all. A book can’t have this many cross sections, this good.”
Just as important, no one in the project, from Ackerman to Pelster, was touting electronic cadavers as a complete substitute for the real ones that the medical students studied. The digitized versions would simply augment the real cadavers, the ones that you couldn’t reboot if you cut them the wrong way. In the new era, medical schools could even require students to put the human body together, not just take it apart.
Cadavers in cyberspace would offer yet another advantage: even schoolchildren could study them. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and some rock-n-roll musicians such as Pearl Jam were asking schools to “cut out dissection” and use computer imaging or model frogs. Thanks to the Visible Human Project, however, students someday would do better than just viewing pixels flashing across the screen. They would be able to tour the body of an actual human. Potential medical students, moreover, could get a head start. Long before they reached the slicing rooms, they would be familiar with electronic cadavers and be able to make better use of the real ones. What’s more, the digitized Jernigan could revolutionize training in laparoscopic surgery, where doctors inserted tubes in patients and operated with tiny instruments and TV-like monitors and cameras. The view on the video screen of a training computer could be true to life.
All this was not even to mention other applications—for example, computer-simulated crash tests to improve auto safety, efforts to study the range of wrist motion and reduce carpal tunnel syndrome in typists, or investigations of ways to protect athletes against injuries.
I asked Mark Ticer if Jernigan’s family had ever thought of suing for any of the wealth that the project might create from medical products and the rest.
The answer pleased me in this litigious era. Ticer said that if anything the family would be offended that anyone raised the issue. That was the way Jernigan and his kin were. “There wasn’t a condition attached to his gift,” Ticer said.
Sharon Kuster, Jernigan’s sister, said her brother would “probably be happy about it. I am.”
“Now he can be remembered for all the good he did rather than all the evil,” Ticer said. “I think he’d be quietly delighted.” I picked up on the “quietly.” Jernigan’s invisibility, prior to his crimes, was not just because of his station or lack of station in life. That was his way. Many other inmates on death row gravitated toward microphones. Jernigan spurned them. The true crime book, if one ever resulted, would never have come out while he was walking and breathing.
Shortly after I talked to Mark Ticer and Sharon Kuster, my friend Karen got the results of an intensive examination by a second doctor. It seemed that Karen would not be undergoing the heart surgery. But even now she couldn’t tell for sure. What’s more, if Karen received drugs instead, the medical benefits of the Visible Man might still help her someday; a major pharmaceutical company, after all, was hoping to use the digitized cadaver as a tool to explore and demonstrate the effects of its products.
My thoughts shifted back to Jernigan the human. Lying on the death gurney, awaiting the poison, would he have wanted to make The Gift if someone had rushed in and asked at the last minute, “Do you realize you’ll be all over the Internet? That you’ll suffer the ultimate invasion of privacy? That strangers from here to Oslo will see your guts?” I’d like to think that Jernigan would have nodded and the Learjet would still have flown the body up to Denver. For the sake of Karen, of other sick people, of those who just might live longer and better if their surgeons were slightly more skilled, or if they themselves could make the right decisions about their medical care—for the sake of them all, I was not-so-quietly delighted that the invisible man was now visible.
Schools: Park View Educational Centre
The big motto out of the United States, in the 1990s, seemed to be, “Build jail cells, not classrooms.” Again and again, politicians would promise to shrink the bloat in school budgets while Fighting Crime; I shared some of their skepticism toward the edutocracy. Washington, D.C., was Exhibit A here. In one recent year the city had shelled out half a billion on public schools but paid just $2 million for books.
Suppose, however, that U.S. schools had been spending their money in a way that helped keep children out of jail and helped them learn. Americans might do well to study Park View Education Centre. It is a high school up in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and something weird and wonderful had been happening there over the past few years. At Park View the Internet was not reserved just for the usual suspects—the would-be Bill Gateses, the local Steve Jobses, the prodigies who already owned PCs and Macs and were dialing up Christie Brinkley photos on electronic bulletin boards. Many of the children on the Net were the at-risk students, those in danger of leaving Park View because of academic or disciplinary problems.
They were in the “general-stream” track. And just as in the States, the college-bound children looked down on them. That was unfair. Many of the general students were bright and simply didn’t want to go to college. Some of the general boys, not all, wore black leather jackets, tight jeans, and black boots. And they used razor blades to tattoo the logos of Ford and Chevy onto their skins. The at-risk girls were less colorful. But some had disciplinary problems of their own, along with the same lack of interest in academics. What’s more, certain teenagers in the area were doing marijuana and hashish and boozing it up; teachers at Park View worried constantly that the wilder of the students would turn up on the police blotters.
Fighting against pot smoking and other behavior of the Jernigan variety, some teachers at Park View systematically used the Net to bolster the egos of the general students while also improving their scholastic skills. Yes, alarms went off in my head when I heard the word “self-esteem.” Too often, at least in the States, this quality came at the cost of academics. Saying, “You’re good!” was not enough. Gold stars—if dishonestly earned—would just teach the children that the educators were liars.
Some teachers at Park View Education Centre, however, were mixing self-esteem with reading and writing in a way that true Net nerds would love. And it was happening in a cash-strapped place a continent removed from Silicon Valley in both distance and technical expertise.
This was not borderline Canada. Park View Education Centre was a good two days’ drive from the state of Maine. The school served Lunenburg County, a mostly rural area settled by German-speaking people whose descendants still reverted to dialect. Bridgewater (pop. 9,000 or so) was the nearest town. Named for the modest bridge across the La Havre River, it was in many respects All Canadian—with streets with names like “King” and “Queen” and “Prince.” Businesses such as Gow’s Hardware and Rofihe’s Men’s Wear had been in the same families for generations. The Bridgewater area boasted a Michelin tire plant, too, and a mall and twin cinemas. And it was growing. But many inhabitants were displaced farmers, lumberjacks, and cod fishermen; tensions from work or the lack of it could show up in some homes, to the disadvantage of the children. When I was researching this chapter, Canada’s unemployment rate was 10 percent, while Lunnenburg County’s was 12-13 percent.
In at least one way, Park View Education Centre may have reflected both the business climate and the Canadian winters, or perhaps just some of the educational crazes of yesteryear. Park View was built in the late ’70s with narrow little windows that more or less cheated the classrooms of a river view. Those slots were somewhat emblematic; many children hadn’t been outside Nova Scotia. Even among the academic-track students, fewer than 40 percent were making it to college. Park View, then, was not quite the stereotypical place for educational high tech.
Still, the provincial government, colleges, and the business community had been quietly working with Park View and other schools to upgrade the workforce. In this spirit an education professor at Mount Saint Vincent University, in Halifax, organized a project called Learning Connections. Pitching in was the Nova Scotia Technology Network. One idea was to use computers to hook students in with employers by way of the Internet to give them a taste of the workplace. It would happen. But something would overshadow it—student-to-student communication over the Net.
Jeff Doran, a technophobic English teacher at Park View, wasn’t sure what to think when he first heard of the grand plans. His tenth grade class of general students did not exactly teem with computer nerds. Many of the children had flunked a grade. “Some of them had reading levels down around grade three or four. One or two maybe would have been considered at a grade ten level. I didn’t have any goal except to try to keep them in school and keep them in class.” He also had his share of questions about the project itself. “All we were told was that we would get some computers, and then we’d get this connection through the phone lines, and the students would be able to write to people around the world, and then when the project was over at the end of the year, we could keep the hardware. I had no idea what we were then going to do with it, and I certainly had never used it before.” Doran didn’t even own a television or answering machine. “I still had a phonograph. But I didn’t even have a tape player, and I had been writing on the typewriter all my life.”
But Doran had something else going for him, something even more helpful than technological expertise. And that was an abundance of good, teacherish skills and empathy for his students, even the ones with the tattoos. He himself had rebelled. A Harvard graduate, he had fled the United States during the Vietnam War to avoid the draft. Doran’s exact political beliefs weren’t the point here, though; a dare-devil Green Beret might have shown the same ability to brook the foibles of the general students. What mattered was that Doran cared more about results than about whether the children followed every little rule. Above all he cultivated rather than feared the students’ ability to think on their own.
The Nova Scotia Technology Network provided some technical help, but would not instantly answer every question. “So,” Doran recalled, “we did a lot of muddling through ourselves and a lot of teaching of each other. And that was one of the best things. Some of the students became teachers because they learned by experimenting, and then they showed each other. And invariably they showed me, and so I learned from them. The first thing I discovered was that there could be no front of the room. It had twelve computers in it that circled around the walls. And there was no way that I could stand at any point and demand everybody’s attention. I learned that in about three minutes of the first period.”
Significantly, Jeff Doran’s English class for general students had a one-to-one ratio between students and computers, a stark contrast to those in just about all other public schools in Canada and elsewhere. Students could use the machines not only for networking but also for word processing. In fact, they started using the machines so often that in those early days, Doran was holding classes in the computer lab regularly rather than in the scheduled rooms.
I asked Doran which students he remembered most vividly from those first days on the Net, and two came to his mind: Betty* and Mac*. Betty was the only girl of the twelve students on the first day of school. “She was, uhm, kind of an old-fashioned, sweet-faced girl,” Doran said, “with one of the foulest mouths that I ever encountered. Yeah. But she had to be to hold her own against these boys. She was surly and sullen and stubborn with me, and I don’t think she ever actually came to blows with any of the boys, but she came pretty darned close.” Betty was brighter than most in the class. And yet, feisty or not, she lacked self-confidence. Many would have written her off. More than a few teachers regarded the general classes as a dumping ground. “She was pretty unimpressed by what she could do in the computer room,” Doran said. “She at first was doing most of her assignments by handwriting.”
Meanwhile Mac was hardly off to the most promising of starts. His head was shaved into a Mohawk. A reform school alum, he was short and stocky and looked a bit like a small World Wrestling Federation champ, according to Doran. Mac’s face bore scars from the fights he got into. He would regularly pound the bejeezus out of other teenagers. “I’m not sure why Mac was in school,” Doran said. “It may have had something to do with the law—either school or jail. He was not happy to be here. And his skills were very, very low. He was about the lowest I had ever seen in a student.”
Okay, so this was the raw material. I didn’t expect Doran to turn either Betty or Mac into Oxford dons—everything was relative—but I wondered how far he had gotten with the computers and the Internet.
“Well,” Doran said, “once she finally started on the computer, she started writing more than she had ever written before. And I believe that’s how you learn to write, by writing.” She organized her sentences and paragraphs better, her vocabulary expanded, and fewer spelling errors popped up in her work—not just because she could spellcheck but because she cared more. Her scrawlings in a loose-leaf notebook hadn’t looked so impressive. But now she could use a computer printer and see the same, beautiful results as an honors student doing a ten-page thesis.
“The second big difference,” said Doran, “was that she was writing e-mail to other students. Suddenly she had an immediate audience. This wasn’t some make-believe English project where we would pretend to have a pen pal somewhere and pretend to write to them. This was a real person who was going to read that message and respond right away, and that kind of feedback made her, and made all of the students, suddenly aware of the importance of an audience. And an audience in writing is something that they had never experienced before, because the audience was the teacher and who cares what the teacher thinks? Except that the teacher gives you the mark, so you just write what you think the teacher wants you to say.
“But now Betty and the others had people who would write back and forth about their weekends, and their boyfriends, and their dates, and their sports, and their hobbies, and their cats, and so on. And I think it opened up a sensitivity to what was acceptable in print, and how your words can affect people, and the differences between people—especially over great distances, because a large number of the students that we were writing to in Vancouver were Asian. In fact they were fairly recent immigrants to Canada, so their English wasn’t that great. So actually Betty’s writing skills were better.” And that, in turn, helped her think better of herself.
Meanwhile Mac, too, was progressing. At the start Doran gave Mac and others a list of twenty words; they were then to look up the definitions and use the words in sentences. The time limit was four weeks. Mac needed the month. He couldn’t even cheat well; copying others’ work, he blundered because he did not know what he was cribbing. “The last thing that he could ever see himself doing,” Doran said, “would be sitting in front of a computer, you know, at a keyboard. With these beefy fingers of his, he was gonna tap away? I mean, that was out of the question.”
Doran, however, managed to stretch out Mac’s attention span to put up with the limits of the machines—to give them the detailed instructions they needed. In computerdom, people use the term “boot up” to mean turning on their machines or loading programs into them. And, Doran recalled, “There were times I half expected he was gonna literally boot this thing across the room.”
“Yes,” Mac snapped back at Doran, “I’ll boot the friggin’ thing up!”
“And yet,” Doran recalled, “within that one year he was writing messages to pals in other schools and to me as well.”
By then Betty wasn’t just sassing back the boys when they teased her. She was actually teaching them how to use the equipment. Her marks shot up to the 90s. Not content just to write a few short paragraphs, she was turning out well-organized letters several hundred words long in a professional-looking business format. That was unimpressive by the standards of academic students, but a true triumph for Betty; she even zapped off a paper letter to a suspense novelist she admired. The writing skills she developed on the Net had helped make this possible.
Simultaneously her opinion of herself rose to the point where she was one of the chattier participants in a video that Park View students helped make, and that was later shown on a Halifax television station. Students shot scenes to send across Canada to counterparts at a school in Vancouver, British Columbia. And Betty showed up again and again on camera. It would have been nice to write that she went on to college, but she did not. She ended up a waitress. Partly due to the Net, however, she surely was a better waitress—more at ease with her customers, and better material someday for management if that was what she wanted.
And Mac? “One of the last things I got from him,” Doran said, “was a message about how he felt he had been changing that year, and how he had been improving. And I agreed—I thought he had, too. And then just about that time, he pulled this stupid move and got drunk while he was on a class trip and got kicked out of the school.” But the story didn’t end then. “Mac moved to British Columbia and is gainfully employed. In the boys’ cases, the measure of success is that they are not in jail. In 1990, probably ten boys were at risk of failing and dropping out of school. Two were at risk of ending up behind bars or dead.”
Reflecting on past and present students at Park View, Doran noted the little triumphs which led to the big ones. The Net helped whet the children’s interest in school—to the point where, often, just about all the students in his first period showed up. It was a virtual miracle, given the sleep hunger of adolescents.
Clearly the Net could be a truant officer’s best friend. “I use computers a lot,” one enthusiastic student e-mailed me from Bridgewater. “I come in on any free time that I have, I even give up my lunch hour to play with the computer, but I would really like to have more class time in the computer room.” She said that computers “hold so much wonder to a person. Like me. Writing on a computer does help out with reading and writing skills.” Another student, a tenth grader who lacked a computer at home, told how much he’d enjoyed corresponding with an aunt and uncle in Winnipeg. At the time he e-mailed me, his relatives had just had a son, and his e-mail was going into their baby book. Textbooks alone would never, never have encouraged him to look forward to school the way the Net did.
I asked Doran if there were any test scores for the children to document the Internet’s benefits to the children at Park View. He said that scores by themselves would mislead since he had improved as a teacher in other ways. And yet he believed the Net had helped; since he couldn’t supervise the class constantly, he had learned to foster curiosity among the students as they explored the Net on their own. He and some other teachers in the experiment understood that they and the children would be learning from each other, that the old authority models were gone. The same trend was gradually happening in industry in Canada and the world at large. So if Doran wasn’t turning out Ph.D.s, he at least was creating better workers.
Other reasons existed for his success. The videotape reinforced the Net experiences. The Park View students looked forward to seeing their counterparts. Much more importantly, Doran let children use the Internet in ways that meant the most to them. The Net was like the videotape. Doran had expected his students to shoot pictures of quaint homes, of beaches, of the usual, touristy sites, when they were showing off the Bridgewater area. Instead the students photographed the places where they worked and shopped. And that told all. The e-mail was the same way; students would most benefit from the technology if it was on their own terms. At Park View, some virtual romances even developed between the students and those elsewhere. One boy wrote to a Florida school asking to be put in touch with a cheerleader.
Yet another explanation for Doran’s success was that students could spend hour after hour on their computer. So they had plenty of time for school compositions and for writing letters to friends in Vancouver and elsewhere. (That wasn’t true of all the students in latter years. Although Doran felt they did well, they might have done still better with more time.)
Perhaps most important of all, the machines didn’t put down the general students the way so many humans did. “It’s been my experience that the technology benefits the struggling student much more than it does any other student—in literacy growth, self-esteem, tech skills,” said Lorri Neilsen, the education professor at Mount Saint Vincent University who had started the Learning Connections project at Park View and elsewhere.
The positives aside, the Bridgewater experiment was not a complete triumph. “It’s very important to know the spirit of this project was carried by a handful of teachers,” Neilsen said. In fact, just eight of forty teachers in the school participated in the project. Skeptics were worried about it taking time away from the usual curriculum. Yet another problem was the authority question; some teachers had to know everything and were nervous about students learning behind their backs. A third complication was gender: Many female teachers were uncomfortable around technology.
Answers and solutions existed to all those challenges. In the case of academic students, I could appreciate the need to cover a vast range of subjects that colleges demanded. But with a TeleRead-style arrangement, just about all the major resources would be online anyway. Old material over a period of time could be scanned into the national database—a highly economical way to distribute it, and even better by archival criteria alone since unread paper material might well disintegrate anyway without anyone caring about it.
Even with the Net as it existed then, students of all kinds learned many shortcuts that enabled them to turn out better papers. The knowledge on the Net was far, far shallower on the whole than at, say, the Library of Congress in the States. But it may well have exceeded what the students could find in some small-town libraries. If nothing else, by logging onto the Net, they could learn how to stay up with the most current knowledge—no small edge in an era when new products replaced old ones in months rather than in years, and when academic journals proliferated.
What about the authority question? That could diminish in time if schools of education shifted gears and encouraged teachers to foster curiosity rather than have students focus just on textbooks and teacher-certified facts. Would it happen in the United States without a concerted, TeleRead-style effort? Maybe. But I doubted this.
If nothing else, public schools needed to give their teachers more time to master the hardware and the Internet so they would not feel so lost when their students roamed the Net; the equipment alone wasn’t enough. “Basic technology training is one of the most neglected aspects of educational reform,” said Andy Carvin, the Net-oriented educational expert at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “More often than not, when a school or a school district implements a major technology overhaul, teachers are introduced to the Internet and all of its tools in a day or two of ‘training.’” Carvin told me, and he was right, that teachers should enjoy regular use of the technology at home and at school so the knowledge wouldn’t fade away. Too, they needed to know how to “combine that knowledge with traditional teaching and curricula....It’s like learning to use a telephone—you can be taught to pick up the receiver and press a few numbers, but if you don’t have anyone else’s number or don’t know how to give out your own number it’s useless.”
I asked Lorri Neilsen about Canada, and she said that schools of education up there were making good progress toward correcting deficiencies. They had better. In the new era of giant databases there should be more emphasis on finding and evaluating information from many sources, and less on parroting textbooks. Teachers should encourage children to look for malarkey in all media, but especially on the Net, given all the self-publishing there. Perhaps with more women growing up with computers, female teachers in the future wouldn’t suffer so much from the old bugaboos about networks and smart, curious, uppity students.
That still left another issue—the possibility that students might send offensive messages over the Net and perhaps fixate on its wilder areas such as the alt.sex series of newsgroups.
“We did have a couple of cases of students in the school sending threatening and hateful messages,” Doran said, “but these were not my students. These were what I would call hackers, computer nerds.” Later Park View forced students to sign agreements under which they would lose their privileges if they abused the Net. This was not a hypothetical issue to me. As I was researching this chapter, I found “Fuck you all” in the subject line of a public message of a list devoted to educational uses of the Internet. A student at an American school had taken over someone else’s account. Making students sign agreements wasn’t a total solution, but it was a good one. If a student misbehaved and lost Net privileges, then he or she would be at a considerable disadvantage in competing with peers.
Addressing the newsgroup question, Park View filtered out the groups it deemed objectionable. I suspected that a smart student could circumvent these precautions, but if that happened, he might well have been intelligent enough to cope with the virtual temptations.
Off the Net, at any rate, students could just as well find questionable reading material. I remembered the pictures of Marilyn Monroe that my classmates passed around in elementary school back in the 1950s. Did anything change? Should we really deprive children of the glories of the Net under the assumption that the kids were all potential pervs? The best approach was the Park View—one making children sign agreements that they would be responsible for their own actions, and suspending or ending their much-cherished Internet privileges if they abused them.
Risks aside, the Internet was a natural place for students of all kinds. Only a fool would dwell on the hazards of the net to the exclusion of the possibilities there.
Would that all activities of government be as benign (well, for the most part) as those of the schools. In the next chapter we’ll learn about Phil Zimmermann and his brushes with the darker, almost Big Brotherish side of government.