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Take from: Maclean's Magazine, January 17, 1994. CYBERSPACE SCHOOLHOUSE Written by: Chris Wood in Vancouver Clinton Wright, a Grade 8 student at Beaver Valley Middle School in Fruitvale, B.C., planned to spend part of this week working with a partner on a project to study the activities of North America's First Nations. That in itself is hardly unusual. What is more startling is that the 13-year old's partner is not a classmate at Beaver Valley or even another student in the same school district in southeastern British Columbia. In fact, Wright's companion does not even live in Canada. Instead, armed with the powers of linked computers, Wright will be doing his research and writing his report with a partner in a school more than 5,000 kilometers away, in Holyoke, Mass. "I will use e-mail," the Canadian student explained to Maclean's in an electronic message over a similar computer link. "We will be trading information from each other's libraries. Each teacker will get a copy [of the report] and mark it." That innovative assignment should earn the administrators of Wright's school district an A for initiative. While most Canadian schools have installed at least some computers, those in British Columbia's District 11, based in the city of Trail, are among the first to connect their machines to others outside the classroom. As a result, the district's 3,500 elementary, middle and high-school students can now communicate electronically with libraries, databases and fellow students around the world. Those new powers expand the large role that computers already play at Beaver Valley. School announcements once broadcast by loudspeaker are now distributed on classroom computer terminals. Teachers use the same terminals to maintain students' records, which are filed electronically with the school office - and kept off-limits to students. Many of Beaver Valley's 270 pupils, meanwhile, use the computer lab to draft and correct assignments. Notes Grade 8 student Ryan Parkinson: "Computers help because I can type faster than I can write, and it is much easier." Still, the critical link with other computer users came only late last year. With $150,000 in provincial funding and the support of local volunteers, school administrators first established an electronic network linking all 12 area schools, then opened it to the community at large. The result was Canada's third so-called Free-Net, or nonprofit community computer network, linked to the U.S.-based, international Internet. The two-month-old connection, says Grade 8 student Jennifer Dunlap, "allows me to travel around the world." For teachers like Grade 8 social studies instructor Darcy Samulak, the network is a potent new tool. "I've got kids reading congress- ional records," Samulak enthuses. "They think it's just so cool." Also avaliable through the numerous Canadian and foreign government agencies, more than a dozen other community Free-Nets and a federally funded network of educational databases aimed specifically at schools: the Ottawa-based Canada School Net. But to Wright, the network's appeal has less to do with the staid goals of education than with youthful curiosity. "I like to go to NASA and find out the flight patterns of the space shuttle," he says. "It takes about 30 seconds." For the students of Beaver Valley, tucked into a once-remote cleft of the rugged Selkirk Mountains, such achievements affirm their wider citizenship in a world where computers are making geography increasingly irrelevant.