Welcome
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Project Coordinators: Jack Crawford and John Ominski
(Teachers: please email this link to your colleagues and interested students in grades 9-12!)
We invite highly motiviated high school school students from around the world to build a sovereign "Online Nation" of their own collaborative design on the Internet. Adult educators are also invited to look in on the project as observers.
This is a strictly non-commercial, volunteer-based project. There are no fees of any kind. Period! It is ongoing and need not be classroom-based nor interrupted by school vacations.
Picture in your mind a web page that depicts a map of a town. A large, central avenue predominates it. At the head of this avenue you see a building that could be the seat of a government. At the other end there may be a court house. All along the avenue are shops and businesses where daily commerce is carried out. Off to each side there are residential streets lined with houses. At the edges of the map there is farmland. Click on any building or house and you will be taken to another student-created web page that describes it in detail. It will be an "Online Nation"!
This is a real, live political environment. Each web page and the government and community which joins them together will be created and managed entirely by student "Citizens". They will decide whether it is to be a "simulation" or develop it into a "real", sovereign micro-nation. The mission of this project is to help students discover how to work together in an international collaboration by designing and building their own "online nation" on the Internet. The goal of the Citizens will to design their own government, political, judicial, economic and law enforcement systems and develop all other policies and offices they deem necessary to make it vibrant, viable and long-lasting. They must also create their own occupation and earn their own (hypothetical) income. The Citizens will collectively decide what their common goals are and create and persue the various activites to meet them. They may wish, for example, to claim legitimate national soverignty and establish diplomatic relations with other nations, corporations or celebrities or even create their own language if they so choose. Or, a hybrid online economic system could be created, etc. They could even develop their own "national cuisine" if they want to! The possibilities are endless! (The Kingdom of Talossa is a fine example of a "nation" your students could build. It inspired this project.)
Each OnlineNation will be a "closed community" with a population limited to 100 colonizing Citizens from around the world. The initial colonists will start out with only a minimal structure such as a "General Assembly" forum. From this starting point they will collaborate in the design and development of the entire infrastructure of their new new nation. They must also learn to supervise themselves. Most of their initial activity will be in asynchronous private conference forums where they will explore, discuss and debate goals, issues, ideas and research pertinent to nation building and create their own trade and livelihood. They will also reasearch and develop their own "occupations" to become productive citizens. These might include "Politician", "Sysop" "Constable", "Web Designer", "Farmer" or whatever the needs of the nation dictate. Eventually they will construct a central, publicly accessible website which represents the culmination of their efforts.
The Citizens must develop effective skills in online collaborative research, development and decision making to make their nation prosper. In fact, the new Citizens will probably quickly discover that their very first order of business will be to collectively decide how they will make decisions. They will, for example, need to decide on a name for their new nation. They will also need to explore the vast technical resources available on the server and teach each other how to use them. A formalized leadership structure of administrators and "technocrats" should evolve soon. Each citizen will be deeply involved in researching, teaching and debating the pros and cons of various forms of governmental, economic and judicial systems, immigration policies, etc. They will also become involved in governing themselves and collectively dealing with any citizen who behaves inappropriately. We expect there will be a considerable amount of online discussion and often heated debate on most issues. Eventually, as the nation begins to take shape, the citizens may proclaim their "statehood" in a publicly accessible website. As this is an ongoing activity with no particular ending date it could provide a source of ongoing learning and a special sense of international comaradery for these students for years to come.
Server space is provided at no cost for:
- Up to 16 Citizen-only conference forum topics at any one time for asynchronously discussing all aspects of "nation building".
- A common website for Citizens-only
- A publicly accessible website to house the "map" described above, government offices, etc.
- A publicly accessible website for EACH individual Citizen in which to construct their own "residences" and "shops" that will collectively make up their nation.
- Sophisticated menu-driven "web page builder" environment--knowledge of HTML is helpful but not required.
- Real-time "chat" sessions
All activities, including the forums, require access to the World Wide Web using a recent version of Netscape or MSIE. An email account is also necessary. (A free email account can be obtained at Yahoo!) Access to the OnlineNation site can be from school or home at any time, night or day.
John Ominski and Jack Crawford volunteer their time, resources and expertise to make the project possible. They will provide the initial technical and administrative infrastructure, "seed" some opening dialogue and then assume an increasingly background role as your students begin to develop their own direction and learn to govern themselves. John is a parent who has had years of experience with online forums and is the Vice-President of ETI, Inc., a firm that develops software for K-12 schools. Jack has been an Educational Technology Coordinator with the Wayne-Finger Lakes Teacher Resource Center for 12 years and was one of the original founders of K12Net in 1990. Both are veteran online community builders.
(Our thanks to MaxPages for this web space!)
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