From the issue dated May 19, 2000

SYLLABUS Africana Studies 4900, 'Cyberspace and the Black Experience,' at U. of Toledo Scholars are already looking at questions of race and cyberspace. Now it's time to bring the topic into the classroom, says Abdul Alkalimat, director of Africana studies at the University of Toledo. He will be teaching a new course in the fall that examines the impact of the information age on the black experience. The class will be open to 25 students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. "We're trying to rethink the course so we don't use an old organizational delivery system to teach something new," Mr. Alkalimat says. That's why students will spend only three weeks in lectures and discussions. Then they'll spend eight weeks in a computer lab exploring and evaluating World Wide Web sites that relate to black studies, such as one by the Library of Congress on African-American history and culture (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/intro.html). The final three weeks will be devoted to group projects. The reading list: Students will read from anthologies like Cyberghetto or Cybertopia? (Praeger, 1998) and Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 1999), as well as online articles at sites like Culture, Class and Cyberspace (http://www.igc.org/amcgee/e-race.html) and Mr. Alkalimat's own site (http://www.eblackstudies.net). "We'll start out with the concept of the digital divide -- the notion that there are information-rich and information-poor divisions in the country," Mr. Alkalimat says. "We'll look at how all the old inequalities just get translated into these new categories -- who has computers, who doesn't, who's on the Internet, who's not." The assignments: Group projects will play a key role in the course. For example, students will take part in a continuing project in the Africana-studies department to put a major street in the city of Toledo entirely online. "Dorr Street runs the length of Toledo," Mr. Alkalimat says. "It starts in lower-income housing projects, goes past the university, past corporate headquarters, and ends up in farm country." Students will help create an online archive of information about the street, such as census data, and will help black families on the street set up their own Web pages. Students in the course will also take part in other departmental projects, including one to help black churches obtain computers and become Internet-savvy. What does Mr. Alkalimat want students to get out of the course? "My wildest aspirations are for them to become missionaries for cyberspace. The survival of black institutions -- indeed the black community in general -- has to involve cyberspace." http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A18 Easy-to-print version E-mail this article