Interviewer: You also do the year end event?

Susan Abdulezer: Yes, I do a multimedia showcase. The multimedia showcase is more of a gallery where the teachers come to view and present work. There are usually three or four year-long classes that present their projects from CD ROM. They can go through each other's projects and get a chance to meet each other and ask, "How did you do that?"

In some other contexts, it's a much more formal presentation. There are many approaches. Sometimes you have a group present their project buy sitting in front of the room as a collaborative team. I act as an assessment facilitator and ask them some questions about what they did. The audience can ask some questions about what they perceived about their stories. They can give some reflections on what it was like to go through the process of creating the story. This process can be very interesting. I really haven't gotten an audience at schools to do something more theatrical in terms of a student presenting.

Interviewer: When we create multimedia projects in a classroom setting we know we're doing projects as a work in progress, and contextualizing where the person came into the process, what they achieved within the context of the process, and how they feel about the process, that story, if you will, adds tremendous value to the product itself. In multimedia pieces, I think those "making of" stories are really interesting. The success of our process is predicated on showing the student work at the end of the workshop, and having everybody lifted if not by their own work than by the work of some other student. That they're just amazed at what they pulled off in the time allotted and in the context that they were asked to do it.

Susan Abdulezer: That's why I have put work on CDs since I started this process and have people coming together at the end as well. But because our work is not linear, I don't show it in a formal presentation in front of a group as much as have people interact with it.

Interviewer: And most works are meant to be viewed on a one to one basis as opposed to a group presentation. This is one of the reasons we have avoided interactive authoring, is because in a presentational context, it doesn't create that same power that you mentioned, the narrative power of the short linear piece.

The Web, as an interactive environment, has its own special value, in that it is available to a large audience to be viewed in many different contexts. What have you done in the area of the Web?

Susan Abdulezer: That's a really very interesting area. To me the neat part about the Web is that every individual can add to the kind of sum of what we know about one another, and publish in a way that is so fast and reaches such a broad audience, that it's amazing. I've been teaching Web design to teachers and also working with teachers on projects that are Web-based to have students tell some of their stories and also have schools tell some of their own stories. In New York, there are obviously hundreds of schools, with names like PS53 and PS39, and these numbers say nothing about who the school is or what they do. Most of the time the schools think that what they need to do on the Web is say, "This is my principal, and this is the doorway." And it's like. "So?"

What I encourage teachers to do who want to reveal something about their schools is to find something about their school that would really interest somebody in a historical sense or in a modern day anthropological sense. When we were working on the Website for the School for the Deaf there were lots of different areas to it. One of the things we did was reach into the archives and scan some photos in of deaf children at the turn of the century and publish them on the Web. We presented the school in the context of now, there were some current projects, and then, a little history of the school that was written by some deaf alumni. We want to reveal and add to the sum of what people might want to know about the world of the deaf community. We sought to bring to the public eye something that would never be seen by most people, not even the people in the school.

What I encourage people to do is to find that little niche of information that tells a story that nobody would ever have an opportunity to hear before. Just as 99% of everything in museums is in the archives now, we want to uncover all the priceless material that resides in our personal little caches here and there. That is what we're doing with our school Web projects.

Kids are doing much more in terms of research projects on the Web. This research process is inspiring kids to use things like spreadsheets for processes like the interviews that they collect over the Web. They're also able to tell stories that feature themselves and that give them an opportunity to branch out and bring other kids along with them.

A few years ago I began work with some deaf children on immigration stories. They brought in a picture of themselves in their home country, and a picture of themselves in this country and put that on the Web along with a little interview each of them did with their parents about why they came to this country. And in that little bit of text any mention of their home country became an active link to the home page of that home country. We had a party in the library to introduce our Web page. The kids were the guides to the Web page and the Internet.

It was great because it brought in other kids. They went to these Web stories that they created, and then they branched out and introduced other kids to the home pages of their own countries. I don't know how many countries are represented in our school, but there are very, very many.
There are many more possibilities for doing Web-based projects. Like the whole idea of publishing street signs on the Web, the interactive sign language to spread accessibility. Some of those ideas, while they're possible while they're in Web form, still have limited application. The availability of the Web in households and the speed of the pipes puts a bit of a damper on some of the types of projects that I would like to pursue. I just have been hesitant because people fall asleep waiting for things to appear on their screen.