L. Carol Christopher

Reston Va. has been home to nearly every major newspaper organization in the U.S. at one point or another. Now, it is also the home of the American Press Institute's recently created Media Center, where nearly 40 leading new media thinkers -- including authorities from both academia and the industry - gathered Oct. 26-28 for the first annual Founders Conference. The focus of this year's conference was "Beyond the Web: Delivering the News in the 21st Century," and the goal was to provide a short agenda of issues on which the media industry should focus.

Intentionally or not, Media Center Director Chris Feola structured the conference itself to reflect the idealized, interactive nature of the Internet: hours of informal and freewheeling give and take among the discussants rather than the traditional formal structure: expert at the front of the room stands and addresses silent and respectful audience. And although the conference program listed sessions - Building communities: delivering the news in a wired world; Show me the money: New business models; Storytelling in the Age of Information; Beyond the Web: New technologies - in the traditional linear manner, the actual discussions seemed nonlinear and hyperlinked - talk about storytelling merged seamlessly with conversations about business models which likewise merged into talk about communities and new technologies.

Recognition of the shift in newspaper audience expectations guided discussion in the first session: Communities on which media have traditionallly focused have been either conceptual, like that of the Wall Street Journal, or geographic, like that of most other newspapers. Lydia Fish, professor of urban folklore at Buffalo State College, said that folk communities, which many online communities resemble, are inherently conservative and are often formed in opposition to authority. She encouraged media to tap into existing well-organized interest groups, many of which have been talking to each other in chat rooms for five or six years.

Participants generally agreed that success in addressing new media communities will come through finding a new balance that sustains the role of trusted information provider, but modifies the authoritative voice that newspapers have traditionally enjoyed.

"Society has changed," said Owen Youngman, director of interactive media for the Chicago Tribune Company. "We didn't want to say 'we're the Chicago Tribune and we're here to help,' but 'we're the Chicago Tribune and we're here to listen. We're not trying to take the authoritative voice of the newspaper out of the mix, but to add so many that you get a better idea of how the community works. People are finding the information they need to govern themselves."

Participants were generally less clear on how newspapers can make money on the Web, a reflection of the uncertainty newspapers continue to have about making serious and meaningful enough investments in web-based enterprises to gain the experience necessary to figure out what kinds of business models will work.

Columbia University Adjunct Professor and economist Jessica Korn reiterated the value of media integrity, and Chris Gulker, business development manager for publishing/entertainment/new media at Apple Computer, argued that while newspapers often get stuck thinking about the technological modes of delivery, they lose site of their core business as editors with an editorial voice. "People trust newspaper stories on the Web versus experts on other sites because the newspapers [have traditionally positioned themselves] as uninfluenced by the outside economic interests upon which consumers and consumer information agents can make life decisions."

Bob Ingle, president of Knight-Ridder New Media, argued that newspapers have been "monopolists" so long "that it has ossified our thinking." The Web provides an opportunity for newspapers to organize both virtual and geographic communities, and to put the customer in charge."Then," he said, "we can figure out how to manage, organize, and get commercial benefit from our sites."

What online newspapers want from technology companies to help deliver that information is better database tools and integration, more bandwidth, and better navigation interfaces, said Ingle.

Ingle isn't the only online guru with a wish list, however. J.T. "Tom" Johnson, deputy editor and technical guru at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wants a device to put a watermark on everything that goes up on his website. Retta B. Kelly, director of InforVentures at the Austin American Statesman, wants to have bettter sound and video technologies "right now." And Uzal Martz Jr., publisher of the Pottsville Republican and past chair fof the NAA, wants geocoding and and integrated database of users: "Then we can move from knowing the territory to owning it." Industry consultant Dave Cole of the Cole Group grinned, "I want a 14.4 modem for every web designer in the U.S."

One participant who is dealing head-on with the problems like memory and plug-ins users encounter with the Web is Todd Rundgren, musician/web entrepreneur who has created a company and written a browser to help musicians marginalized by record companies reach their core audiences directly. Rundgren, who met with the group via satellite from San Francisco, described his particular brand of "disintermediation" as a means for musicians to avoid retailers - via Rundgren's PatroNet.

"People have subscribed to Reader's Digest their entire lives - we can get into that position for artists," said Rundgren. By selling their music via subscription, for example - they can recharacterize the notion of information deliverables to one of relationship - a concept which he believes has a much wider application. Maybe even to aspects of online newspapers.

But first you have to get people interested: "You have to think like a drug dealer," said Rundgren. "Give people free samples until they're hooked, then the sky's the limit until they either get unhooked or run out of money."

To get people hooked into the online newspaper habit, Rundgren suggested "preflying the experience, then designing the technology and content. Articulate the audience. Find the technology that will help deliver the experience to them if it isn't already there, and then enliven the paradigm. But maintain the agenda, and retain your editorial grip."

The Media Center is supported by a $729,000 grant from the Robert C. McCormick Tribune Foundation, and will host a series of forums for discussion of best practices and achievable futures. The conference is on the web at: www.mediacenter/founders

L. Carol Christopher a member the Center's Board of Founders and a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication. The working title of her dissertation is Blurring the boundaries: Technology and the Logics of Capitalism and Automation in the Newsroom.

Many UCSD faculty students and alumni participated in the recent confernence of the International Communication Association in Montreal. One panel was composed almost entirely by UCSD graduates. The panel was titled Dissonant Discourses and Orchestrated Bodies: Mediated Identities in the "Global Community." Sarah Banet-Weiser, who will be teaching at USC next year, persented a paper on "Miss America/Miss Universe: Gender, Race and Nation in Televised Beauty Pagents." América Rodriguez, now at the University of Texas at Austin, presented a paper on "Commercial Ethnicity: Language, Class, Race and the Marketing of the Hispanic Audience." And Joy Hayes, now at the University of Iowa, presented a paper entitled "Nation as Mediation: Negotiating Community and Identity in the 'Global Village.'"

Robert Horwitz' paper on "Telecommunications Reform in the New South Africa" was a Top Three paper in the Communication Law and Policy Interest Group. Yrjo Engestrom was the discussant on an Organizational Communication panel entitled, "Between North America and Europe: Conversations and Texts from Montréal." Dan Hallin presented a paper, co-authored with Kevin Barnhurst and Catherine Steele, on "Nightly Network News Coverage of the 1996 Presidential Election." Graduate student L. Carol Christopher presented a paper on "Journalistic Skills in the Digitalized News Room." And Mauro P. Porto, also a graduate student, presented a paper on "Telenovelas and Politics in the 1994 Brazilian Presidential Election."

Over the past few months, anyone interested in following the public discussion about the coming out episode of "Ellen" expected to encounter warnings from the Christian Right about the danger of celebrating this event as a victory for gays and lesbians. Those who are familiar with queer politics possibly also expected the (defensible) criticism of Ellen DeGeneres' efforts to distinguish herself from the "Joey Buttafucco's" of America's queer population. I was surprised, however, to find well meaning (heterosexual) friends on campus confidently deriding the publicity over the show as celebrity adulation. The fanfare around Ellen's coming out, they argued, took place at the expense of what they had witnessed as the much less celebrated coming out of their own gay friends. "Really, I couldn't care less that Ellen's coming out," one said, " I had a friend in college who struggled through coming out and he never got all this attention."

It's ironic, I suppose, that while these reactions were intended as a display of loyalty to homosexual friends (myself included?), they hurt. Trying to see this from their perspective, I suppose that Ellen was getting a national pat on the back which they had felt powerless to provide to the gay friends they had tried to support when, alone and afraid, they spoke to them with trepidation about their sexuality. OK, but then what about the fact that this gay friend of theirs was left insistently trying to defend the significance of the show. "You don't understand" I'd said, "this is a big deal!"

The rather cynical stance about "Ellen" adopted by my friends was not unlike the position taken by others who pointed out that the show has led many to hail the courage of corporate sponsors who have, otherwise, less than clean records. To be sure, there's some truth here, but in both cases, I think there's something about the cultural clout of prime time TV which, in the great shakedown, should call upon us, if not briefly, to silence our critical tongues and listen to those who do believe that they truly have something to gain from this event. I, for one, may not have been around when Kennedy was shot, but I'll remember April 30, 1997 for many years to come.

The "Ellen" party at The Top of The Park, a hotel in Banker's Hill, drew over 400 women and men. There were four TVs lined up in one large room and a wide screen TV in another room where people were reminded that the local news would be taping the gathering. Each of the 400 people in attendance would have to decide which room to stand in. That simple decision, of course, says much about the silence many people would have to take home with them at the end of the evening - even after Ellen had spoken out on prime time. Fortunate enough to be fully out, I sat in the TV room surrounded by a diverse crowd of mostly women who piled around tables and tightly crammed chairs. The TV was turned on several minutes before the show and a preview of the upcoming episode met with a parallel preview of the cheers and whistles that would fill the room in the coming hour. Clearly, this was not a gathering of people who "couldn't care less" that Ellen was coming out.

As I look back on that night today however, it is not the expressions of the people in the crowd, the jokes in the show, or my friends' reflections following the airing that stick out in my memory. What I think I'll never forget is the face of Kyung Lah, the reporter from Channel 10, who had come to The Top of the Park to report on our party for the 11 o'clock news. About half an hour before the Ellen episode, people were still gathering in the room before the wide screen TV and, curious about Kyung's perceptions as she sat, waiting and surveying the crowd, I approached her to ask. We shared a brief but touching conversation which, contrary, perhaps, to both of our expectations, had everything to do with what I, as a lesbian, shared with this straight, Asian, female news reporter. After exchanging reflections on the gathering, I told her that I had a couple of straight, female, Asian friends who struggled a great deal with the dilemma of being both American and Asian. She had a white fiancee, she told me, and her family couldn't understand it. You see, I had said, we both live in two worlds.

Later on, during a commercial break in the episode, I was caught off guard when Kyung approached me with microphone in hand. "There's quite a gathering here tonight", she said, "What are your reflections on the evening?" I looked over, beyond the camera man to the noisy crowd and raising my voice I said, "Well, it's a great display of community, it's wonderful to see us all gathered together to celebrate this event." I spoke a short while longer and then the camera and mike retreated as the commercial break ended.

It was after this brief interview, when I looked over at Kyung later in the show that I experienced what I will remember as the greatest highlight of the night. Standing on the sidelines, surrounded by a din of cheers, whistles and hollers, Kyung looked out at the crowd and beamed. I could see the energy in the room affecting her as she laughed with us, the joy in her smile which she could hardly hide because our celebration was so obviously moving her. She was not one of us, her family probably wouldn't approve of us, but she had no qualms about being with us that night. And perhaps, just maybe, she wasn't alone . . .

Thinking back now, I wonder if what I spoke into that microphone was all I thought about the gathering of cheering lesbians around me, if the display of community was what really made it significant. Yes, in part, but honestly, for years now, I have seen lesbians partying together in the various spaces where we can 'be who they are freely' , in the sub-cultural pockets of our queer 'ghettos', the parties, bars, and special community events. Minus the Ellen episode, the scene at The Top of the Park can be found in a number of Hillcrest jaunts on any given weekend night. What was significant for me, in fact, was not that I was there, joined by hundreds of other gay men and women, but that Kyung Lah and the Channel 10 cameras were there to witness this gathering. Yes ABC had refused to air commercials targeted to a lesbian audience, but I didn't care at that moment. What was significant was the broad grin across Kyung's face, her laughter which I felt at that moment just might be the same laughter of hundreds and thousands of other men and women across the country who appreciated the tension breaking humor of Ellen DeGeneres.

As I see it, Kyung Lah, with that microphone in hand, was bringing our world at the Top of the Park beyond the barrier that has historically kept it cordoned off from the daylight hours, from the 9 to 5 desks, from the family dinner tables, both with and without chairs for queer members, from the office parties, the dorm rooms, cafeterias and airports, classrooms and restaurants of heterosexual America. Thanks to ABC, Channel 10 and all the grass roots activism that, ultimately, made Ellen's episode possible, we were going public that night. Public and proud.

And so, when I see my well-meaning friends who criticized the hoopla over "Ellen", I want to tell them how thrilled I was to see that smile on Kyung Lah's face. I want to tell them how much it meant to me that my mother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania could learn something about me from a sit-com I was watching in San Diego. I want to tell them that Ellen continued to come out in two more episodes this season because coming out is a process. It never ends. I want to tell them that Ellen was a victory for, not only me, but for the roommate, the friend, who with trepidation and without much celebration, came out to them some years ago in college. I want to tell them that its tiresome to live in two worlds at the same time, (more so, even, for those minority lesbians who live in three) , that it's hard to be two people at once, and Ellen Morgan's coming out on prime time has brought all of us one step closer to sharing the same world. (Printed in May 14th Issue of UPDATE: Southern California's Gay and Lesbian Newspaper)

Today was a lot of fun because I had the opportunity to give a presentation about the Doorway and the Fifth Dimension in general.

The presentation was part of the Computer Media workshop for the Eighth Annual Binational Encounter of Schools of Communication of the Californias, held at UCSD. Annie was supposed to do the presentation with me, but she had another matter that she had to deal with.

The workshop was in the Copley Auditorium at the Institute of the Americas. A laptop computer was provided, with connection to the Internet and a projector that displayed images from the computer screen onto the large auditorium screen.

The auditorium was about three-quarters full, with what appeared to be mostly college students, many of whom, judging from their questions and comments, and discussions before and after, were from the Mexican universities. I thought they were very friendly and interesting, and added a lot to my experience.

Also in the audience were Jose, Honorine and Catherine (all from LCHC), Communication graduate student Mari (who was a TA in my Communication/Social Force 100 class last year), and Department Chairperson Dan Hallin. I was the first to present and Jose sat at the table with me as an interpreter and colleague.

Honorine and Jose had done a presentation on La Clase Mágica earlier in the day, and I also provided some background about the Fifth Dimension before I began discussing the Doorway. I talked about some of our goals and results, and showed many of the Web pages. I think the total presentation was about 20-30 minutes.

At the end, the audience and I discussed several questions that were presented. One was about language. How do we address language differences in the Doorway and with individual Web pages at various 5D sites. I used LCM's bilingual format and the Ronneby, Sweden, pages as examples. That we incorporate different languages as representative of the communities at the individual sites, encouraging these to be expressed while we strive to communicate on various levels. We all learn from this experiences, and together new understandings, meanings and cultures are derived.

The conference itself was an example of this. Even as Jose translated for me, and Mari helped Catherine with translations during parts of her good presentation about Distance Ed, which followed the Doorway, there were times when all of us (audience included) had to collaborate on definitions and phrasings. It was very collaborative, interesting and fun.

Another question addressed the possibility of children with physical, learning or mental challenges, having access to 5D programs and a presence on the Doorway. I mentioned the efforts underway to establish a 5D for deaf children in Washington, D.C., and that I thought the principles and practices of the 5D could be applied for these children and others, and also benefit them and the undergraduates associated with them. Regarding the Doorway, I said that it was our hope that such children will eventually be represented on the Doorway or associated 5D Web sites, either by these children themselves, or by family or friends of these children who wish to express the impact these relationships have had on their own lives.

These questions, about special-needs children, were asked by a group of students from UABC in Mexicali, which sponsors a program designed to help children with problems adapting into society. After the conference I spoke with several of them for a little bit, exchanging e-mail addresses and some other information about our respective programs. They spent a long time speaking with Honorine in Spanish about the 5D in general. They seemed very interested and were quite friendly.

It was a good experience. I wish Annie had been there. I think the Doorway is represented better, fuller, when we do the presentation as a team. But we'll have a chance to do that again at the end of our Mentorship in May.

I hope to be able to participate in next year's Biacom conference in Mexicali.

Two other books co-edited by Agre also appeared in 1997: Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape, (edited with Marc Rotenberg), MIT Press; and "Computing as a social practice," in Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Studies in Computing as a Social Practice, Philip E. Agre and Douglas Schuler, eds, Ablex, 1997. In addition, Agre contributed a chapter to the book, "Living math: Lave and Walkerdine on the meaning of everyday arithmetic", in David Kirshner and Tony Whitson, eds, Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic, and Psychological Perspectives, Erlbaum, 1997; and published the article, "Lifeworld analysis" (with Ian Horswill), in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 6(1), 1997.

Agre also gave summer school courses in conceptual design for distributed media at the Central European University and the University of Linkoping, as well as invited talks in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Ljubljana.

Cynthia Chris received the 1997 Criticism Award from the Lyn Blumenthal Fund for Independent Video.

Chris' essay, "Witkin's Others," about the photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin and originally published in 1988 in the journal exposure, was reprinted in Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present, edited by Liz Heron and Val Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, London: I. B. Taurus, Ltd., 1996).

L. Carol Christopher, has just been made the Associate Director of the Extended Learning Center at the American Press Institute in Reston, VA.

Christopher recently presented paper entitled, "Journalistic Skills in the Digitalized Newsroom" at the ICA conference in Montreal, in the Mass Comm division ; and she has a chapter, "Technology and Journalism in the Electronic Newsroom," in the 1988 book The Electronic Grapevine published by Lawrence Erlbaum & Assoc.

Susan Davis' new book, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience, came out from the UC Press in October of 97.

Davis presented a paper on nature and retailing at a conference on the future of urban space, which coincided with the 5th anniversary of the Mall of America. The conference was held this Fall at the Weissman Museum of Art in Minneapolis.

Robert Horwitz's article, "Telecommunications Policy in the New South Africa: Participatory Politics and Sectoral Reform" was published in the October 1997 issue of Media, Culture & Society and in volume #1 (1988) of Communicatio, a South African scholarly journal run through the University of South Africa. Horwitz will also publish "Broadcast Reform Revisited: Reverend Everett C. Parker and the WLBT Case (Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ v. FCC)" in The Communication Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1998. This same paper was published as a monograph by the United Church of Christ, in 1997.

Susan Davis and Ellen Seiter, along with Robert Allen of UNC Chapel Hill, hosted a panel called "The Familization of American Popular Culture" at the American Studies Association Conference in Washington, DC last Fall. The papers for the panel explored some of the ways in which the "family" has become the driving force behind much of popular culture in America. Davis' paper is entitled "Space Jam: 'Family Values' in the Entertainment City." Seiter's paper is "Boycotting Barney: Fundamentalists and Family Entertainment."

Dennis W. Mazzocco ('96) earned his sixth Emmy Award for work in conjunction with NBC's coverage of the Atlanta Olympics. Dennis worked as a Videotape Producer/Director in the network's virtual Olympic Broadcast Center at Rockefeller Center in New York last year.

Mazzocco has also accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant professor of Communication with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The appointment began last Fall semester, with UNLV's Hank Greenspun School of Communication and its newly organized Greenspun College of Urban Affairs. Dennis teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in media production and theory, with an emphasis upon developing student-produced programing for UNLV's full-time channel on the Las Vegas city cable system. He produces documentaries of his own as a UNLV artist-in-residence.

Chandra Mukerji's book, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, has come out. Mukerji had a book signings and shows with her photographer and friend, Becky Cohen, at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, at the Porter Troupe Gallery in San Diego, and at the Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco.

Mukerji also spent about a month this summer in France working on 17th-century French maps and some relationships between representations of place and demonstrations of power.

Michael Schudson published "Paper Tigers: A Sociologist Follows Cultural Studies into the Wilderness" in Lingua Franca, August l997. It is an assessment of cultural studies and a critique of some of Donna Haraway's work and it will appear in the fall in a longer version in Elizabeth Long, ed. From Sociology to Cultural Studies (Blackwell). He more recently published two articles, "Toward a Troubleshooting Manual for Journalism History," the lead article in Autumn, l997 Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly and "Why Conversation Is Not the Soul of Democracy," in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, December, l997. Schudson also gave a lecture at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, at the University of Maryland in December entitled, "Why the Kennedy-Nixon Debates Were Better than the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (and what this means for understanding citizenship)."

Schudson is president-elect of the "Sociology of Culture" section of the American Sociological Association.

Gregory Stephens' article, "Frederick Douglass' Biracial Abolitionism: 'Antagonistic Cooperation' and 'Redeemable Ideals' in the July 5 Speech." came out in Communication Studies during Fall 1997. The title refers to Douglass' oration "The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro," delivered in 1852. Stephens analyzes Douglass' multiple discursive strategies, by which Douglass protested the hypocrisy of a slave-holding republic celebrating its democratic ideals, while simultaneously using the Bible and natural rights philosophy to construct a multiracial "imagined community."

Doug Williams gave a paper, "The Enemy is an Infectious Disease", on Cold War cinema, at the Christine Saxton Memorial Film Studies Symposium, "Foreign Bodies in the Cinema," on April 19th.

Williams also had his paper, "Pilgrims and the Promised Land: A Genealogy of the Western", accepted as one of the chapters for The Western Reader, (Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman, eds.), forthcoming.

For over two years, I have been studying the practice of voluntarism, i.e. volunteering and philanthropy. I have been focusing on the Pop Warner Little Scholars Football Association, a volunteer organization that funds and operates youth football leagues in the U.S., Mexico, and Japan. I had personal experience with the program. My husband had coached for years. I raised funds and drove kids who had no rides. Both my sons played. What interested me about Pop Warner football was the dedication and diversity of the adult volunteers. Early into the research process, I had anticipated the possibility of complications, e.g., conflicts of interest arising from doing ethnography among people I knew. As the project evolved my focus shifted from the current organization to the history of the association. I discovered that very little had been written about the Pop Warner football organization which had started as a local youth league in Philadelphia in 1929. It became clear that to study the early history of the association I would have to do archival research in Philadelphia.

I received funding from the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) and was able to visit Philadelphia in July, 1996. I looked forward to the trip because I would be able to stay with my aunt and uncle in Malvern. They had been the first to leave the area of Delaware County where most of our extended Irish Catholic family would remain. They were the first of my parents' generation to move into a detached house. My uncle was a mechanic for the Red Arrow Trolley Line. My aunt was the only working mother on either side of the family. They bought a little ranch house more than forty years ago. The rest of the family thought they were odd, but enjoyed going "way out there" for parties and reunions.

I was born in Darby, and grew up in Collingdale, both about one mile outside South Philadelphia's city line. My parents, one the youngest of ten, the other the youngest of eleven, lived with my maternal grandparents. Most of their siblings lived within walking distance or a short trip by trolley (which was free if another of my uncles were driving). My childhood memories revolve mostly around St. Joseph's School and parish (processions, incense, kneeling, and nuns brandishing rulers) trolleys (riding, sliding down the embankments on broken-down refrigerator boxes from the appliance store, playing chicken with ears to the rail), and cousins (too many to keep straight). We left Philadelphia when I was twelve.

I had not anticipated that my research trip would be a significant emotional event. It was, however, a profound cultural shock. Now that almost a year has passed and the Pop Warner qualifying paper is circulating, I feel like I can share a trip report I wrote immediately after my return:

July 8, 1996

It was very strange to go to Philly as a university researcher. I flew in and rented a car. I saw aspects of the city that I had never really seen, i.e., the middle class. It was very unsettling. I became profoundly aware of how my childhood experiences had constituted my perspective on the city. This trip changed both me and my vision of Philadelphia. In interesting ways discussing my research with my uncle and my father changed their vision as well. My dad kept saying that things like Little League and Boy Scouts and Pop Warner did not exist in his area of the city when he or my sister and I (two oldest of five children) were young. Of course, they did. They just didn't exist for people who could not afford them. We all became aware of this. It was the first time I had ever heard my father discuss his background as "blue collar."

I had never been to the Philadelphia airport. When I flew in, I was surprised to see business people who were "well-dressed" in suits and designer clothes. There were college students and academics. I found this amazing and recognized that affluence and higher education were not part of "my" Philadelphia. I felt more at home in the train stations I passed through on my trips to and from Center City. Many of the people in the train stations sounded like the Philadelphians I remembered. Men who said, "Yo. How's it goin'?"; "Here ya go, dear."; and women who greeted everyone with "Hiya, hon."

My research was very productive. In addition to working in the Free Library of Philadelphia, I spent three days in the Urban Archives at Temple University. Temple is (according to all my relatives) in the worst part of the city. It looks like a bombed out area, like the South Bronx, only three stories high. I was self-reflective about my growing fear in going in and out of that area alone. The race relations are tense. There are subtle differences in body language in interactions between Blacks and Whites. The tension is just below the surface. I was afraid and uncomfortable with my fear.

While I liked the nostalgic feelings the familiar sounds evoked, I was also uncomfortable with the fears and prejudices of my relatives. I was particularly uncomfortable with my own fear. As the trains I took got closer to Temple, the cars emptied. I was generally one of two, or the only one remaining in two or three cars. As the trains approached Temple, there were no smiles, no words, just quick movements and furtive looks.

The train station at Temple is elevated and open to the air. To one side there are rowhomes that look abandoned. The windows are broken or boarded up. There are weeds, broken glass, and bricks all over. To the other side there is a vacant lot and then "project" rowhomes. To leave the station you go down two flights of cement stairs. At the bottom there is a glassed-in kiosk in which a Philadelphia policeman sits. The walk to the university is two short blocks. One is between derelict mills. The boarded up windows are hung with bright red banners, each with a stylized Temple "T". A little further up a vacant lot is used for university parking. Across from the lot, the chain-link fenced yards of project rowhomes overflow with kids and adults. There is a banner hung across the road that says that the people of the neighborhood and the university welcome you. There were very few pedestrians in the area. Those approaching or leaving the university tended to walk quickly and with purpose. The neighborhood residents would look up as the university types passed. No greetings were exchanged. Most times that I made the two block walk, I passed three or four patrolmen and two police cars.

One day a conservatively-dressed, clean-cut young African American man and I were the only people waiting at the Temple station. When the train came, I went to show the middle-aged White conductor my ticket. He smiled and waved it aside. As the young man started to board behind me, the conductor partially blocked his way and with a hostile demeanor demanded to see a ticket. While waiting for the train, the young man had stood erect and quiet looking vaguely preoccupied or busy, but calm and purposeful. Now his stature diminished. He looked down and curled his shoulders, showed the ticket, then hunched into the first seat. Nothing had been said but the word "ticket." For more than half an hour, the young man sat rigidly, without moving. Then he deboarded.

Memories of nonchalant bigotry expressed mostly by the men in my extended family flooded back. I remembered my grandfather who had no time for anyone who was not Catholic and, preferably, Irish. He made an exception for my French grandmother, but only because she was Catholic and hid her use of French.

Research-wise, I was able to review 50 years of clippings which support my argument about the relation of the practice of volunteering and structural changes in society and the economy. It was amazing--like finding a treasure. All the pieces (after 1.5 years of preliminary work) fell into place. The historical methods class with Chandra and the work with Michael Schudson on civil life helped me to organize the very interesting data. I have 60 pages of notes and thirty pages of copied newspaper clippings. While I was reviewing the material I was aware of dual purposing--a qualifying paper on volunteerism and Pop Warner, and a thesis on community education and community building. The data strongly suggest an apprenticeship model.

Thank you for making this trip possible for me. It was one of the best and most educational experiences I have ever had.

I naively embarked on a research trip that made me confront where I came from. The uneasy blend of nostalgia and repulsion was very discomforting, somewhat like a mix of Catholic guilt and expanded consciousness. Using analytical tools acquired in our department has helped me to begin to make sense of my personal journey. I continue to deal with the unexpected emotional impact of this research trip, and I continue to learn from it.

On Tuesday, September 30th and Sunday, October 4th, Communication Professors Michael Cole and Olga Vásquez, and several Communication graduate and undergraduate students, along with researchers from the Lab of Comparative Human Cognition appeared in a program about the "Fifth Dimension" on UCSD-TV. The show was part of UCSD-TV's "Focus on Education."

The Fifth Dimension is a specially designed afterschool activity system that Cole and his colleagues at LCHC have been building for over a decade. Each incarnation of the Fifth Dimension has a different name. In Solana Beach, these include La Clase Mágica, the Mágical Dimension and the Fifth Dimension The program allows undergraduate and graduate students to earn credit and gain valuable research experience in community settings (e.g. Boys and Girls clubs, YMCA's, schools and churches) in the after school hours. Undergraduates enroll in the "Practicum in Child Development " (locally, through Communication/HIP 116 or Psychology 128) and work and play with children on computer mediated activities.

The children have the opportunity to alternate between teaching and learning, working and playing with these older people. Undergraduates and kids are amused and intrigued regularly by the eccentric behavior of an electronic wizard who sends and receives email, engages in live chats, confers certificates of achievement, and seems to know everything that happens in the Fifth Dimension except for when he or she has forgotten and needs help. Postdocs and visiting scholars at LCHC study various aspects of the growth, adaptation, dissemination and long term sustainability of this innovation. Sources close to the wizard are still unable to confirm the true identify, gender, age, or computer platform preference of the Wizard and his/her avatars. Further research on this issue is always demanded by the children of the Fifth Dimension.

One reason that this model system of community-university partnership seems to endure because of its ability to meet research, teaching and service goals of institutions of higher education with the help of communities who open the doors to their "real life" laboratories in exchange for the time and effort of undergraduates. The pedagogic principles and synergistic design of the Fifth Dimension have helped it spread to colleges and universities in several states, and to each campus of the UC system. Other colleges and universities around the world (in Sweden, Australia Russia, and Mexico, Spain and Israel) are adapting the model for use with several populations and age groups.

The broadcastt provided an opportunity for the UCSD Television audience to learn about a program that demonstrates one way to meet the research, teaching and service goals of the University of California, to see interviews with Fifth Dimension colleagues and teachers, and to watch them put theory into practice.

Copies of the broadcast are available at the UCSD Bookstore.