Ironic How a Newsletter was My Early Gateway to Web Building

I’l dial back my mockery of the email newsletter being the new definition of a web site (not here), but the Wayback Web Machine that is in my head went to remembering how a big effort/motivation the first year I set up a web server (what do I win for it being in 1993?) was to put on the web a newsletter from the center I worked on.

The memory was nudged by a recent email from Steve Crawford who currently directs the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI) the faculty development office at the District Office of the Maricopa Community Colleges, the place that hired me as a “Programmer/Analyst Instructional Systems” in 1992. Steve shared that MCLI was moving from the office building where I spent my 14 years working and they came across some memorabilia he thought I could explain.

One was a framed award certificate

The Innovation of the Year was a program from the district office of Educational Development (later Academic Affairs) that recognized innovations from across the entire system. This one was for the staff of the MCLI for “the Forum/the Labyrinth” a newsletter MCLI published in print form and sent out to all Maricopa staff and faculty in good old fashioned interoffice mail to department mailboxes.

Ironically, in my memory (and I can show proof) the title was always The Labyrinth/Forum a two part publication in one mailing- the Labyrinth was Sharing Information on Learning Technologies and the Forum was Sharing Information on Teaching & Learning. The first issue date of October 1992 means it was still like the first 6 months of my employment. I was not directly on the planning of this effort, it was led by our Director, Naomi Story, and editors were the two instructional designers in the office. Cynthia Leshin was the editor of the Labyrinth and I believe came up with the title and metaphor.

My role was a “only a technologist” (don’t ask me to explain the quote) was to write a few articles.

Now my hyperlinks are ahead of the story, since the Labyrinth/Forum did not appear on the web until 1994 (my earliest MCLI web site copy was June 1994).

So my first article on digital resources and sharing was describing how to connect to a shared file server that could be accessed (by Mac users) across the entire district (noting the photo showing where the AppleTalk port was on the back of a Mac). The Maricopa district had though users of both Apple and Windows machines (there is a note on that first server that all files on the Apple file server were available on… wait for it, a Gopher server I had set up on a desktop Mac in the office at gopher://tapeats.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/

Before going into the Mac/Windows divide it’s worth knowing that before I arrive, I think it was in the late 1980s, the visionary leaders in the Maricopa System had used funds raised through funding from a bond election approved by voters in the county to build a single system wide data/telephone network, that is connecting 10 colleges and the district office- that’s 40+ miles east to west from Chandler-Gilbert Community College and maybe 20+ miles south to north from South Mountain Community College to Paradise Community College.

I vaguely recall that between campuses data was sent via microwave (I found a 1994 report with a schematic map of the Maricopa network), but in essence this community college system was on one single data network. Every office, classroom had the same wall ports with jacks for a telephone and a jack for cat-5 ethernet. The main interface Maricopa staff and faculty user was a terminal into the VAX at each campus, and all of our email was via the DEC All-in-1 or A1 system. The parlance was not that “did you get my email”, it was “did you get my A1”

I had like 3 of these jacks in my office where I was able to plugin in desktop machines that were assigned a dedicated IP address, meaning I could make them into internet servers.

My Labyrinth “column” called KnoWare (I cannot claim creating that name) from February 1993 described the world of Gopher. There’s even a diagram of the structure of the MCLI Gopher server, visible as some might find it via the VAX interface and via a Mac client app:

I recall that the print Labyrinth/Forum was created by our staff member Tina using what was then Aldus PageMaker software (I am not quite sure how articles were written, maybe as Word docs or just text sent to her via A1?). I think the newsletter was published back to back, so you could flip the Forum over and see the front page of the Labyrinth.

On that first year, 1992, I sought what ways it could be shared digitally given the mix across Maricopa of faculty/staff using Apple and Windows desktops.

Since I had taken over an English grammar project that at the time was built in HyperCard (LEE is another story), and was doing a few other projects at the same time learning HyperCard scripting, I recall making a version of our newsletter as both a HyperCard stack and then converting it to a Windows viewable version using ToolBook. I don’t remember if I even got as far as completing one issue or chalked it up as an experiment, but the amount of work to do it was steep. I am guessing I was able to have Tina export the articles as text files? I must have put text versions of the articles and maybe the image files on that Gopher Server.

The gift a Phoenix College colleague named Jim Walters handing me in October 1993 on a floppy disk changed everything. On the excitement discovery that with editing text files I could create internally and externally hyperlinked/connected information was huge, but also, the same content could be used on any computer system. Creating for the web removed the whole Mac/PC divide, and I saw it clearly the way to publish our Labyrinth/Forum newsletter (and more).

I can even see in that August 1994 issue of the Labyrinth I referred to more as “Mosaic” like describing “Mosaic servers” all though Nuts and Bolts of Mosaic seems to describe what we called then wth all three W’s the web that was world wide.

There are 9 years of issues of the Labyrinth-Forum newsletter with tons of history not only what I was doping but our whole department and larger what faculty were doing and thinking about with both technology and pedagogy. All the web pages were flushed after I left Maricopa 2006, but I took all my HTML with me, so I have my own archive (though a good number of full url links broken, make use of relative links!). The layout is definitely dated, text heavy, and not responsive to window width.

it was not until 1998 that we added PDF versions of the Labyrinth/Forum, I am not 200% sure if they had the same fonts, but that gives a sense of the print version.

And it evolved in 2001 when we combined the newsletter info a new look/publication as simply the mcli Forum. While still using HTML table layout, actually the web pages now hold up fairly well (to me), e.g. the Fall 2003 issue;

In that issue some technology whacko was writing Pssss… Have You Heard About RSS?

All through the 1990s I was pretty adamant in our projects that anything we published in print ought to have web versions, and then later even extending the idea to build web-based systems then for taking applications and reviewing of a faculty professional growth program.

They were heady days, and not just for technology. The more I sift through those old issues and remember the energy of Maricopa faculty for innovation in teaching, not just technology, makes me realize how lucky I was to land there in the early 1990s.

So indeed, the idea for making electronic versions of a newsletter was a big push on my early web thinking. I am glad I have my own archives of much of that MCLI work.

Newsletters were something I saw, among others, as gate way to the web for me, a reason to go further. Much more was in the other side. Thanks Steve for jogging this memory!

Maybe it’s time I start a newsletter?

Nah, I only need this here blog.

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Featured Image: Entranced flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license modified by me to insert screenshots of the Labyrinth and the Forum early issues.