Fulbright’s Father of Social Media:
A Scholar Ahead of His Time
It all began in 1982, with my Fulbright Award, while I was researching policies and programs, in the U.S., on the development of language and writing abilities in children. At the Laboratory of Human Cognition, University of California, San Diego, I was handed a hard copy of a letter, which had been sent from a student in the village of Wainwright, on the arctic coast of Alaska. It read like this: The letter was the catalyst for what became Computer Pals Across the World (CPAW), a global program in computer communication for primary school, high school, and university students, as well as community groups over a period of twenty five years. Initially it was called The AustrAlaskan Writing Project, where high school students in Sydney followed a program devised to encourage writing in a variety of genres as they wrote for a real and extended audience in Alaska. The Alaskan students were at first suspicious of the validity of the writings coming all the way from Australia so conference telephone links were established to reassure them that real people were sending this writing. Being quite novel at that time, a Sydney newspaper covered the story, with the headline reading Students Rub Noses with Eskimos via Modem. I saw this electronic writing as not only improving writing skills but also fostering the imagination through introducing students to a wider context of meaning and experience.
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The communication was at first primitive with the use of an acoustic coupler linked to a personal computer and two service providers to carry the data. We were fortunate to have the technical support of the then Australian overseas provider, the Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) and the U.S. provider AlaskaNet but it meant that students had to be patient to receive replies as the online communication was not instant as we have grown to expect today. In 1988, the Apollo command module pilot on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Mission, U.S. Astronaut Vance Brand, became the first Patron of the CPAW Global Network during his time in Sydney for Australia’s Bicentenary. We did work hard to have his Soviet Cosmonaut counterpart as the other Patron but that never eventuated. (Right) a souvenir badge from the Epson-sponsored CPAW program; a signed photo of astronaut Lance Brand, students transmitting messages for the AustrAlaskan writing project
