|USTRUGGLES FOR JUSTICE|U BY DANIEL MARTIN In mid-September of this year, Lou Matrazzo (The Prez), Larry Moonan (The Vice-Prez), and I, interviewed Howard Diamond, the Director Of Educational Markets at CBM on the campus of the State University Of New York at Albany. (See last month's editions of Electric CDAUG and CDAUGVision for the content of the interview.) Howard was extremely excited about an Amiga Vision application, developed by Scholastic Software, entitled "Struggles For Justice" (SFJ). His description of the application fired us to actually see it and Lou, in particular, polished up his silver tongue and contacted just the right people so that we had it to demo at our Amiga Day on October 20. Members of our group also saw it at our monthly meeting on October 18. The following is a preview for you of what "Struggles For Justice" consisted of and an evaluation of the product. |UWHAT IT IS|U "Struggles For Justice" is a multiple media Amiga Vision application designed to instruct anyone on the history of the fight for equality waged by Blacks, Native Americans, and Latinos in the United States. The package consists of software (which is an Amiga Vision application, so you need Amiga Vision to run it) and a laser disk. Therefore, you need a laser disk player as well. The documentation recommends that an Amiga 2500 be used to view it. |UTHE CONTENTS|U The contents, viewing, and manipulation of SFJ are nothing short of wondrous. At the outset, it is difficult to concentrate on the material since the mind tends to explode with ideas about the capabilities of this type of medium for education and any other type of "presentation situation". You are first confronted with a choice of whose story you want to view: Blacks, Native Americans, or Latinos. I chose Native Americans. A screen appears which gives you a choice between seeing an overall history of Native Americans or of a particular incident. Clicking the latter, you are witness to an audio-visual report of the 1972 incident at Wounded Knee at which time a group of Native Americans took over the reservation there and created an armed stand-off with troops representing various levels of government. You see "live" newsreel-type statements by Native American leaders at the site as well as interviews and comments from various participants in this historical situation. It has the flavor of watching the nightly news or "60 Minutes" with the exception that you can stop, rewind, or fast forward the action as you desire. ( A great tool for doing a school report. ) From the educational/perception standpoint, the characters are real, not just names in a history book or newspaper article. You see them, you hear them, you use more of your senses and powers of perception to judge and think for yourself as to the sincerity and veracity of the characters involved. You understand more. This is a crucial point and the crux of the importance of software like this and the entire multiple media impact on education. News reports and studies bewailing and bemoaning the drop in the level of literacy of the current school age population in this country are rampant and have been for years. But let us not forget that this group of kids grew up watching Television. Not just as I did, for entertainment, but for education. These are the Sesame Street/Mr. Rogers/Zoom kids. The television is a friend. It shows movies, makes the kids laugh, teaches them how to count and spell before they get to Kindergarten, and keeps them from being lonely when no one is around to play with. It does it all for them. As they grow up, they don't lose this, it is strengthened. Very few teenagers will go anywhere without their "sounds". But when they are home, where is it ? Not just on the tapes and compact discs, it's on the tube: MTV. Why freeze your butt off at the Meadowlands in November, you get the best seat in the house on TV. Multiple Media forms of communication will be able to harness this "friendly" medium and conceivably give the average kid the impetus and incentive to delve into something that interests him, and at the same time educate him. It is certainly not a magic elixir, but it may just be a step in the positive zone to turning things around. There are other screens and choices to be had in SFJ. Clicking a box called "Biographies" brings up a menu of choices of famous people in the particular module you have chosen (e.g., Martin Luther King in the module for Black Americans). You go into the "time machine" module and clicking on any point on the "time line" calls up an historical outline of what was going on at that point in time. In the Black Americans module, a click brought up the story of the "freedom marches" on Selma, Alabama. Another feature of SFJ is what Howard Diamond called the "talking heads". Images of faces and heads may be clicked on that then bring forth for you the opinion of the chosen person on the current topic. For example, clicking on the head of a black teenager renders a newsreel type statement by an individual who tells the viewer just what the current topic meant for him. The opposite viewpoint is also included. So, for example, you may choose to hear the opinion of a white southern businessman regarding the March On Selma, and to see his face and eyes as he delivers it to you. As I mentioned, a fuller, more varied dimensional view of what happened is the result. It can teach a valuable lesson: people who appear to be on the wrong side are not, of necessity, evil and dishonest people, they may be misguided, they may be mininformed, but they are human like everyone else. It is easy to see from this very briefest of sketches, how valuable a tool like Amiga Vision, when coupled with a professionally developed apllication like SFJ, can be in the field of education. The possibilities seem limitless and, I think, are. SFJ teaches history, but the teaching of any topic is plausible and a realistic goal. The teaching of Music, Foreign Languages, Science, Mathematics, almost anything can benefit from this tool. Imagine a map of France, which, when you click on the city of Paris gives you a filmed tour of the city, or perhaps an overlay map of Paris that can further be clicked to bring up pictues, stories, histories of various sites. And then conversations with "les parissiene" in their native language which then helps to teach the student French. I hope that Scholastic Software and other developers will continue to produce such quality products. Our children will benefit. |USOME DOWNERS|U On the negative side, SFJ required several hours for three of our top people to set up, although part of the problem was with the documentation for Amiga Vision. Also, although SFJ ran very smoothly at our monthly meeting on an Amiga 2500, it did not do too well on Amiga Day from an Amiga 2000 platform. On the other hand, the cost of SFJ seems ludicrously low for what you get, about $300-$400. It may be more than the average citizen will be willing to pay to view it in his home, but it isn't too much for a school district, once the initial investment of an Amiga 2500 is made. Much, of course, will depend on the ability of third-party developers to produce more quality applications like this. No one will buy an Amiga 2500 just to be able to buy SFJ. But I think the future looks bright if "Struggles For Justice" is any indication of what awaits us in the yet unexplored and untapped field of Amiga Vision applications.