About this Issue

About the March Issue

by Jeffrey Barlow

This issue of The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet (Interface) comes at an exciting time for us at the Berglund Center. We have closed the application process for Berglund Fellowships for 2002, and have a number of strong submissions from a variety of interesting scholars and practitioners of the various Internet arts. Look for a list of the new Berglund Fellows and their projects in our next issue. Watch also for our invitation to join them in a series of workshops in Forest Grove, Or., during the week of June 16-21, 2002. Participants in these low-cost workshops become Affiliates of the Berglund Center for the coming year. Credit is also available for educators. In addition, we offer a series of how-to hands-on introductions to the basic elements of working on and with the Internet. The Berglund Summer Institute can become a major milestone in developing an understanding of the impact of the Internet on your own work, whether as a student, educator, computer professional, or businessperson.

This edition of Interface features perhaps a more technically complicated series of pieces than we have yet published. While we intend to continue to appeal to our usual broad audience and do so with a number of pieces here, we also felt that it was time that we pushed the envelope a bit.

For our broader audience, we publish our second piece by Berglund Fellow Deborah Wheeler. Deborah's first piece for us, "September 11 and its Global meaning" has been our most popular piece to date in Interface. Deborah's new piece "Islam, Community and the Internet: New Possibilities in a Digital Age" was researched and written as part of her Berglund Fellowship for 2001. It provides a fascinating entry into a little known world of obvious concern to us all. Deborah shows us a talented and thorough scholar at work and models the sort of understanding that we should all hope to achieve regarding this extensive religious culture, as well as giving us an increased awareness of the impact of the Internet on other societies world-wide.

Perhaps as a sort of transition into deeper technical issues, we also reprint from our partner publication, The Journal of the Association for History and Computing a piece by Kenneth King of Northern Illinois University, "One Hundred Percent Efficiency:" The Use of Technology in Science Education Since 1900." Kenneth's work both gives us a history of the introduction of new technologies into the classroom (remember filmstrips?) and some perspective on why it is that some of these have proved useful, and others have become trivial byways.

Our Education editor, Mark Szymanski, discusses a useful and very timely site, Teaching Tolerance. The grants provided by the host of this site, the Southern Poverty Law Center, may provide means for many teachers to create useful activities and lessons during a time of great social turmoil.

With this issue we also introduce a new editor, Kathleen Bies. Kathleen, a technical writer of some reputation, will produce a regular new feature for us dealing with more technical issues. She begins with "Internet Security Overview 101." In this piece Kathleen introduces the basic issues (and the common vocabulary) that confront those many of us who are increasingly concerned about security issues on the Internet.

Also of interest to those with a strong technical bent is our editor Matt Ernst's piece, "Introduction to Using Python." Matt has, we believe, a flair for writing clearly and concisely about complicated technical issues. In this piece he introduces some of the culture and practices of the programmer, while introducing a powerful new programming language, Python. Matt makes it possible for those of us with no background whatsoever to "follow along" and perhaps discover our own inner programmer.

Book Review editor Drew Harrington introduces two recent books that are also related quite directly to the programmers' culture. One of these, Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho, by John Katz, introduces us to the problems and prospects of the central figure of computing culture, the geek. In her review of Pekka Himanen's work, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, she discusses the ethical beliefs and practices of the "Hacker" subculture (White Hat programmers, not to be confused with the Black Hat "Crackers" who you should keep at bay by reading Kathleen Bies' piece).

Finally, I continue in an editorial essay "American Power, Globalism, and the Internet" my own exploration of the impact of the Internet on contemporary society and culture. In doing so, I discuss two very useful books in some detail: Manuel Castells' The Power of Identity. and Joseph S. Nye's work The Paradox of American Power. Each of these authors has a great deal to say about the world in which we find ourselves following the events of September 11, 2002.

Interface welcomes all communications. We are interested in the impact of the Internet upon society and individuals, including business and education. To inquire as to our interests in publishing particular pieces, please see our Call for Submissions. We pay for pieces published as "articles."

We are also interested in working with editors who might be responsible for regular features to be published in Interface. to inquire as to our interests, please contact <barlowj@pacificu.edu>.

We hope, as always, that you find The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet , useful to your work and a complement to your own interests in the impact of the Internet.

Jeffrey Barlow
Editor, Interface