TITLE: A Day in the Life of America/Multimedia
 
 EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT: Middle and High School Social Studies 
 and/or Language Arts classes.
 
 INTRODUCTION:
 
The series of books, "A Day in the Life of . . .[fill 
 in you favorite country]" proved to be remarkable 
 collaborative professional publishing effort successful 
 enough to be duplicated in several countries (US, Australia, 
 Russia and Japan are the ones I can personally remember 
 seeing). The "rule" behind each of these books was the same. 
 All of the photographs portrayed events that occured 
 somewhere in the respective country within a specific 24 
 hours. The photographs were taken by an army of professional 
 photographers and displayed an amazing range of diversity of 
 settings. Each page of photographs was accompanied by 
 appropriate commentary that place the scene within the scope 
 of the cultural identity of that country. The total result 
 for each country was an elegant portrait of a country that 
 extented beyond the limits of a single 24 hour time period.
 
"A Day in the Life of America/Multimedia" would adopt 
 the same "rule" as the "A Day in the Life of . . ." That is,  
 gather images of America from a single 24 hour period. But 
 instead of armies of photographers making photographs for a 
 book, it would use armies of school children making 
 digitized video stills and digitized sounds to publish 
 hypermedia programs for the computer. 
 
 EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES:
 
 1.) In planning their participation for the project, 
 students will examine the questions "What does it mean to be 
 an American?" and "What video and sound imagery uniquely 
 express America?"
 2.) Also in the planning stage, students will learn about 
 the requirements for publication and media production, such 
 as gaining permission to videotape sites and getting release 
 forms from the human subjects of their video images.
 3.) Students will become acquainted with the unique American 
 iconography their local setting has to offer.
 4.) After the 24 hr period of the project students will gain 
 a broad sense of "What it means to be an American" from all 
 of the mutimedia materials that have accumulated. From the 
 submissions that come from all corners of the country, they 
 will gain a sense of the cultural diversity their country 
 tolerates.
 5.) Students will express themselves in a variety of media, 
 some of which they do not normally get to demonstrate their 
 fluency in.
 6.) In producing their version of the final product, 
 students in each school will gain experience with expressing 
 themselves in a new form of literacy: hypermedia.
 
 REQUIREMENTS FOR PARTICIPATION:

Schools are just beginning to find good educational 
 uses for multimedia, so not many schools will have the 
 equipment to participate. The schools will have to have a 
 multimedia computer station capable of digitizing video and 
 audio into standard formats. The participating schools will 
 also need tape recorders and video recording equipment 
 (camcorder, VHS recorder, or video still cameras like the 
 Canon Xap Shot will do). Schools will need a way of 
 producing a multimedia publication from the resulting source 
 materials. HyperCard and similar programs are ideal for 
 this, though some word processing programs permit color 
 images to be pasted into their documents. Software to 
 convert the visual and sound files into formats they require 
 may also be necessary.
 
For simplicty, the project will require that all 
 submissions be in text files for text, PICT files for color 
 pictures, and SDN format for sound files. This is what 
 HyperCard likes. Each school that deviates from this 
 standard will need to figure out how to convert to and from 
 those formats to benefit from the project. Advice and 
 communal problem-solving of the technical issues surrounding 
 file format conversions should be tackled in the project 
 planning stages.
 
 PROJECT PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTION:

Ample time is necessary for planning a project of this 
 magnitude. Teachers who originally agree to manage the 
 project will need to post invitations for participation at 
 appropriate Internet sites such as Kidsnet. Since the 
 project will probably produce many megabytes of multimedia 
 source material, they will need to plan how the material 
 will be dissiminated to all of the participating schools--
 perhaps a tempory ftp site on Internet, which will require 
 permission.  Once a sufficient group of participants have 
 been identified a period of discussion in an email group 
 needs to iron out the technical details, such as standards 
 of format and the maximum disk space for each school's 
 submissions, that will permit maximum participation for the 
 members of the project. Everyone will need to agree on the 
 24 hour period that will be the subject of the project. 
 
The individual classes participating in the project 
 will also need to do some considerable planning. Students 
 should examine their culture and discuss how they could 
 express it in writing, pictures, and sound. They will need 
 to work collaboratively to identify who will do writing, who 
 will do sound recording, and who will shoot the video. They 
 will need to identify where and when the uniquely American 
 photo-opportunities in their community will take place and 
 get permission to go record those opportunities. They will 
 need to come up with several cooperative crews that go to 
 each of the photo-opportunities to record sounds, video, and 
 impressions in writing of the event as well as collect photo 
 release permission from the people they record. Teachers 
 will need to make arrangements for the students to be out of 
 school for the time they will be recording events that occur 
 during school time.
 
After the media have been collected during the 24 hour 
 period, the individual classes will be involved in 
 digitizing the video frames and audio segments they wish to 
 submit to the project and writing the commentary that goes 
 with them. Because sound and color picture files require a 
 lot of disk space, it is likely that they will collect 
 considerably more material than the project can handle. The 
 classes will have to cooperate in selecting the best of 
 their material for submission. Students will need to clearly 
 indicate in their submissions, what text files and sound 
 files go with what picture files as well as the time and 
 place of the images. Once they have put together their 
 contribution to the project, they will need to upload it to 
 the agreed upon Internet site that will be the common source 
 for all of the classes in the project to create their own 
 versions of "A Day in the Life of America/Multimedia."
 
In the final publication stage of the project, each of 
 the schools participating will have full access to the 
 materials the project has created. It will be up to each 
 class to edit the material and incorporate it into a 
 hypermedia document. Design, sequence, and hypermedia 
 navigation will all come into play in this final stage of 
 the project. Once the classes have polished the final form 
 of their electronic publication, they will upload it to the 
 shared Internet site for all to enjoy.
 
 EVALUATION:

Planning, cooperation, and team work are all essential 
 to this project, so the principles of cooperative learning 
 should come into play in the evaluation process. Students 
 should be evaluated on their cooperative skills as well as 
 their work. Exemplary multimedia products should be put into 
 student portfolios for portfolio assessment. Every student 
 in the class should have something that shows their own 
 personal participation in the project that reflects their 
 strengths as a communicator of ideas, whether that is in 
 writing commentary, making pictures, recording sound, or 
 scripting hypermedia. If those products are successful in 
 communicating their ideas, they should get good grades for 
 it. If the group project is successful, everyone in the 
 group should benefit.
 
A final contest should be held among all of the 
 participating classes that produced a document. The first, 
 second, and third place winners, selected by votes from all 
 of the students in the project, should be given a more 
 permanent and prominent display in and outside of Internet.
 
 FOLLOW-UP IDEAS:

If this kind of project works for one country, why stop 
 there? An even more ambitious project may be "A Day in the 
 Life of Planet Earth." In that case the focus would be of 
 "What does it mean to be a human on a unique planet that 
 just happens to be capable of supporting intelligent life?" 
 or "What is man's place on this planet we call home?"
 
Another idea would be to have cooperating schools 
 produce multimedia projects that address specific issues 
 common to those schools. One such project might address the 
 state of our urban schools, producing a multimedia document 
 that expresses the challenges, failures, and triumphs unique 
 to urban school districts.