School to School : Irvine, Soviet Youths to Talk via Computers

Fifth- and sixth-grade Irvine students will soon be using computers to talk to their counterparts in two Moscow elementary schools, comparing notes on their favorite music and exchanging scientific research on such worldly concerns as acid rain.

In what officials have entitled the Global Common Classroom, a unique project nurtured by UC Irvine Prof. John M. Whiteley, students at three Irvine campuses will be speaking electronically to youngsters in the Soviet Union as early as March.

Soviet citizens “are very eager to have these kinds of exchanges,” said Whiteley, who has traveled to the U.S.S.R. three times in the past year, in part to arrange the project.

Soviet Visiting UCI

“It is exciting for me because (Leningrad) university gets its students from the schools,” said Ludimila Verbitskaya, senior vice director of Leningrad University, who was at UCI this week for an educational conference.

Verbitskaya, the highest-ranking woman in Soviet education, said through an interpreter that she will try to have elementary schools in the Leningrad area join the hookup.

But Verbitskaya and Whiteley are not the only ones excited by the concept.

“This is a project . . . that’s really likely to be a cutting-edge initiative in local education . . . providing an opportunity for fostering understanding,” said Joan Bissell, assistant director of teacher education at UCI, who will provide materials on alcohol and drug abuse for classroom study in the program.

Officials at the Irvine Unified School District said this week that they also are eager to make the Moscow connection.

“The whole notion of exchange of instruction and student talent is a viable part in keeping close contact with people in this world,” said Turtle Rock Principal Ron Moreland.

“Obviously,” Irvine Schools Supt. David E. Brown said, “at some future phase we are looking at exchanging results of studies. But none of that happens unless we establish the personal relationship.”

The “personal relationship” between Soviet and Irvine students will begin in March when two Apple IIGS computers and the devices necessary to connect them to telephones are delivered to Moscow Public Schools 57 and 279.

Delivered to Moscow

The computers, which were made available by the UCI Foundation, will be delivered by Lori Warmington, a founder along with Whiteley of Global Common Classroom, and Monica Bradsher, representing the National Geographic Society, which is providing the computerized curriculum.

The study plans will allow Irvine and Moscow students to conduct scientific experiments, record their findings and be able to study each other’s data on their computer screens.

Bradsher and Warmington also will bring back videotaped pictures of the Soviet children. And the Irvine schools--Turtle Rock, Vista Verde and University Park--will send information packets, including videotapes, to give Soviet children a glimpse of the kids at this end of the computer line.

This isn’t the first time that U.S. schools have linked up by computer with classrooms in the Soviet Union, but the Irvine-Moscow hookup will be the first involving a specialized curriculum designed by National Geographic, according to Whiteley, a professor of social ecology and social science.

“In the last couple of years schools in Oakland and New York and maybe others” have linked with Soviet schools by computer, Whiteley said. “But this is a very special curriculum.”

The Education Angle

“They often exchange long questions about themselves and their lives,” Whiteley said of the existing computer exchanges. “We’re just making sure that part of (the communication) is serious education. We want to use music and literature as sort of a catalyst for informal communication.”

The first phase of the computer hookup this spring will serve to introduce the Soviet and Irvine children to one another.

The students will be able to exchange greetings and personal information at a $10-an-hour rate for the telephone hookup through the Institute for Global Communication’s PeaceNet based in Palo Alto. The PeaceNet system and a similar nonprofit San Francisco-Moscow telephone-computer connection have been operating for 2 years, providing a “high-speed, low-cost” means “to facilitate communication among peoples of the world,” Whiteley said.

In the fall, students will use National Geographic’s “acid rain module” to study the effects and amount of acid rain in their respective regions. Students will collect rainfall, measure acidity and record the data, then share their findings, which can be displayed in map and chart form.

But the program also will allow for direct student-to-student conversations, via computers and phone lines, Whiteley said.

‘Responsible Global Citizens’

“Educating children to be better, responsible global citizens . . . is a problem most people think has to be solved,” Whiteley said. “Personally, I’d like to expand to China, West Germany, Israel, Bulgaria, Italy and Brazil, where there have been expressions of interest.”

“In the meantime, my goal is to make the Moscow connection this spring and work with Ludimila (Verbitskaya) in Leningrad,” he said.

Whiteley gained approval for the Irvine-Moscow hookup from Yevgeni P. Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But he concedes that there still may be unforeseen bureaucratic delays.

“It takes longer to make agreements work sometimes than it takes to enter into them,” said Whiteley, whose efforts to establish the program began last year. “We may get there and find the principals of (public schools) 57 and 279 haven’t been notified. That’s how the system works--slowly.”

Nevertheless, Whiteley said, such communication between schoolchildren in the U.S.S.R. and United States would not have been possible only a few years ago.

Some things take even longer to change.

In his presentation Tuesday to Irvine school officials, Whiteley mentioned that “we believe the KGB and the CIA both read the (telephone) traffic.”

“It’s their obligation to check all electronic communications,” Whiteley allowed later, adding that neither the information nor the technology being shared is sensitive to national security.