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Home > History, Science & Technology: Lessons from the Virtual Harlem Experience
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History, Science & Technology: Lessons from the Virtual Harlem Experience
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by Bruce Lincoln
Columbia University
Institute for Learning Technologies
New York, New York
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This is the first in a series of articles celebrating Black History Month. Visit AP Central throughout February to read new features focused on the challenges and achievements of black people around the world, including helpful resources for teaching black history throughout the year. Links to other articles of interest can be found below in "See also."
Overcoming the 'Digital Divide'
How can educators produce a convergence of history, technology, and education for African American students? This question has attained new urgency in recent years. Between 2005 and 2010, according to recent studies, American scientific and technological fields will need increasing numbers of workers, even as the overall number of Americans pursuing career pathways in the sciences is declining. We do not know where the next Bill Gates, Stephen Jobs, or Carly Fiorina will come from. As fewer Americans pursue scientific careers, the result will be a downturn in American economic enterprise, which is so often driven by technological advancement.
Teachers might find new entrants into scientific careers among women and minorities, groups that are currently underexposed to science education and the opportunities that science affords. There are a number of reasons for the underexposure of such groups. Dr. Rita Colwell, executive director of the National Science Foundation, speaks of the lack of role models and the financial difficulties associated with earning doctorates in the sciences for minority students. She also points to the "digital divide," where children of color in underserved school systems do not have adequate access to computers and Internet-based resources.
The Roots of a Multidimensional Problem
How should educators address this problem? To begin with, we should acknowledge that the problem is multidimensional, with historical, social, cultural, and psychological roots. Let's look at the historical dimension first.
In 1919, the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey declared, "We need to produce a premier class of scientists and engineers who can harness the science of capitalism for the economic benefit of those who have most recently been released from bondage." His son, Marcus Garvey, Jr., who became an engineer and a historian, examined African history from the standpoint of technological change. Garvey, Jr., discerned a pattern: each time the world at large has undergone a technological transformation, people of African descent, whether on the continent or as part of the diaspora, have found themselves lagging behind.
We saw an example of this pattern during the Internet boom of 1998 to 2001. Very few African Americans were involved in the start-up of Internet companies, let alone owned or used Internet-connected computers. As of today, Internet/computer penetration is still low in the African American community, even adjusting for income variation. Socially and culturally, the use of computer technology is still resisted by a large number of African Americans and their businesses and organizations as something that is not a part of African American culture. Psychologically, many African Americans believe in the myth that "technology is for 'white' guys"!
Taken as a whole, the nonadoption of information technology affects African Americans' access to basic civic opportunities, such as lifelong education, tele-employment, civic enfranchisement, and cultural/economic empowerment. Viewed in this context, the problem isn't simply one of access versus "electronic redlining"; the problem can be looked at as an issue of cultural relevance and community technology dissemination. The problem can't be solved just by deploying greater infrastructure in the form of multimedia computers, local area networks, Internet connectivity, and teaching people how to use a computer.
Looking to Technology
Maybe if we think past wire-line connectivity and computers and consider wireless connectivity and low-cost, mobile, handheld computing devices, we can find a content strategy that will result in the broad-based cultural adoption of the use of technologically delivered content, resources, applications, and services. My colleagues and I working on the Arts and Sciences Collaborative Exchange Network and Development (ASCEND) project have developed an exciting "sociocultural" application, Virtual Harlem or VR Harlem, that aims to do just that.
Virtual Harlem is a virtual environment where the user can interact with a three-dimensional re-creation of the Harlem Renaissance circa 1930. Imagine a young person who only knows Harlem based on walking around streets lined with dilapidated buildings and impoverished individuals. Imagine if we gave that young person the experience of walking along Seventh Avenue as a part of a procession led by the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey. How would this young person feel to be part of that historical moment, joining the parade of proud African Americans "dressed to the nines"? How would that young person feel to see the beautiful buildings that line Seventh Avenue from 135th Street to 110th Street? How would that affect the young person's sense of cultural and personal identity? Such a powerful technology currently exists, and the capability of creating haptic (relating to feeling, sense), tele-immersive educational environments -- where the user literally navigates and interacts with the multimedia data in real time -- is just a few years away.
Virtual Harlem began as a high-end educational application designed to showcase the instructional possibilities of the Internet 2. Dr. Bryan Carter, the original developer, used the application in the Harlem Renaissance literature courses he taught at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Dr. Carter taught his courses in a Virtual Environment Instructional Lab (VEIL), a lecture hall/auditorium outfitted with a special screen at the front of the room that displayed three-dimensional visual data delivered from a Silicon Graphics computer and an Onyx Reality Engine where the VR Harlem dataset resided. The students wore active virtual reality goggles that created the stereo-optic sense of being in three dimensions. Dr. Carter guided students through a photo-realistic re-creation of the world of the Harlem Renaissance and assisted them in their understanding of the social, historical, political, and cultural forces that shaped the literature of that time period.
Interacting with History
The next iteration of Virtual Harlem was a low-cost learning environment for children. It was developed to reside on a hard drive and be accessible from a stand-alone device -- a kiosk. This version was installed at the Children's Museum of Manhattan during Black History Month in February 2001. Geared to small children (as young as three), it is activated by a joystick and a green button. A child standing up can easily see the screen, manipulate the joystick, and press the green button when prompted. This version includes an interactive module with a game interface. The premise of the game is that the child has been sent back in time to 1930s Harlem and only has so much time to navigate a sprite through Virtual Harlem, which we re-created as a cartoon. The object of the game is to get to the Apollo to "jam" with the house jazz band. The child has an eagle's eye view of Harlem and along the way can stop off at different historical hotspots, such as Small's Paradise or the HotCha Club, where Billy Holiday was discovered. For a short period of time, the child can activate and "jam" with a virtual six-person band, serially controlling the drummer, the piano player, the scat singer, the stand-up bass player, the trumpet player, and the soprano sax player.
Where are we taking this in the immediate future? The next step in the development of Virtual Harlem is to turn it into a wireless, mobile application that can be accessed by some type of portable, handheld device. In this scheme, Virtual Harlem will function as a cultural, geographical information system, or "C-GIS." Students will have VR Harlem on a handheld device, which will also use geopositioning to pinpoint their location as they actually walk through Harlem. Say, for instance, that a student is on 126th Street between Fifth and Madison, trying to figure out whether the yellow house with the flag is Langston Hughes's original residence. The student queries the environment through stylus input, voice input, or even gaze approximation through special goggles. The computing distributes the query over the network, finds the response in the VR Harlem C-GIS database, and then plays a multimedia clip from the relevant time period. We plan to pilot and deploy such a system in the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone within the next two years.
The advent of these technologies means that the convergence of African American history and culture, technology, and education leads us five and maybe 10 years into the future, when cultural and historical experience will be mediated through the educational use of advanced immersive environments inspired by such early exemplars as Virtual Harlem. The underlying strategy revolves around exposing young people to the educational technologies of today and tomorrow, in order to excite them about future scientific and technology-related careers.
A New Form of Cultural Expression
It is difficult to draw a direct correlation between educational environments as the basis for people making certain decisions about their professional lives, so it's a reach to say that if more young people of color are exposed to Virtual Harlem, more of them will decide to become scientists or technologists over time. Increasing the number of currently underrepresented groups in science and technology will come about through a collective effort that must include the federal government; state and local school systems; the nonprofit sector; corporate, industrial, and information-based businesses; and the underrepresented groups themselves. But what is clear is that when African American students master new media technologies -- whether the written word, music and recording, photography and film, radio and television, computers, virtual reality, or the Internet -- the result will be a new, fresh, and relevant form of cultural expression.
Bruce Lincoln is an educational technologist, a design scientist, and a multimedia designer/developer. He was the first Ford Fellow in Educational Technology in the United States, and since then has been involved in a variety of research, design, and development projects. Bruce is currently the senior educational technologist at the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University, where he produces advanced digital networked multimedia demonstration projects such as the Harlem Environmental Access Project (HEAP). Bruce also runs two virtual companies: Sirius B Productions, Inc. and the Urban Cyberspace Company.
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