Murphy: Hi, Derrel! I'm really glad you could spend some time with me and answer some questions I have about your project, Global Transport. I found it incredibly interesting and I'd love for you to give me some background about your part of the project and your responsibilities.

Derrel: Okay! I’m Derrel and I live in Tokyo, Japan. I go to the American Alternative School and I’m eleven years old. We work on projects together with different ages and grades here. Our Global Transport project is one where I worked with Barb, Teresa, and Donny. I studied the different types of transportation in Japan while they studied theirs. We then compared them.

For my project, I used my keicon [Edpro Autonote: Keicon is a contraction of the Japanese words keitai (cellular telephone) and pasocon (personal computer). The keicon, while about the size of a keitai, has a 24/7 high speed data connection to I2 (Internet2) and its introduction lead to the obsolescence of the keitai in Japan. Even though it is most frequently used as a telephone, many also use the voice recognition features to create continuous diaries of their lives and use the built-in vidcam to record interesting scenes. It may also be used as a computer using either voice input or a wireless keyboard that many carry. If the processing needs are greater than the built-in capacity, it seamlessly passes the request to other computers, or to the user’s home computer. The built-in vidcam has enough resolution that retinal imaging may be used for security if users want it to use more than just voiceprint.] to record scenes of transportation in Japan. They really found it interesting when I took it on the inbound rush-hour train and I held it above my head so that they could see the crush of people. I also showed them the “bug people”. These are the people who are shoved so hard against the doors that they look like bug splats on the windshield. Tokyo is supposed to be getting less crowded but it sure doesn’t feel like it! And you would think that with all of these great electronics, people would work from home and avoid the train. But this is Japan and tradition is very strong.

And they also found it interesting when a mother went by on her bicycle with a kid in the handle bar seat and a kid on the rear seat. She was talking on her keicon. The boy in back was talking on his keicon, and the girl in front was playing a game on a kawaicon. [EA: A kawaicon is essentially a smaller version of a keicon. It has fewer features and it is targeted at children six and under.] The new glasses that are almost like 3D are here in Japan right now, but they are really expensive! Our school may get a donation of a few pairs. Barb suggested that we could think of that virtual reality as a kind of transportation, so we want to try that.

Murphy: The bug=people sound really gross. You'll have to send an hmail [EA: hMail = holograph mail] to me! So, a major project like this takes a considerable amount of time. I find it interesting that some of you only meet at your Face2Face schools as little as one day per week. Talk to me about how you actually did the collaborating and communicating. When and how were you together?

Derrel: Going to one day a week a school was kind of nice, but it actually turns out to be more. Mom says it’s cheaper to send me to school instead of daycare. (I’m 11! I can take care of myself!) Anyway, I meet in a real class once a week. Two other days I week I go to school and work on projects there. They have big rooms where we can work with our portables and they have a lot of other nice equipment as well. Portables are much easier for long use than a keicon. These rooms also have good teleportics so I can have a meeting with a bunch of people even though only a few of us are in the room. These almost look like the people are right there, but you can still see they are just projected on a screen. The school is not very big, and the few days that everybody comes to school, we are really crowded! The school also rents space to English Language Schools and they have more people who come in on the days that we have fewer things happening.

Also we play a lot of games and do sports together then. I’ve become a lot better at soccer this year because we do PE on those days as well. The PE teacher is really cool. He did one game where we each took our keicons and slaved them together, then had to use the GPS system to make geometric shapes with the thirty of us. That was hard since we were in the big park behind the school and we could get no closer than 30 meters to another kid. We could see the shape form on our screens as we were trying to make them. It was kind of like a big connect-the-dots.

The other two days, I play at home or get together with other kids and visit places in Tokyo for our projects. That’s when I did most of the work for this Global Transport project. We met in our vidconference sometimes, but I would have to stay up really late so that we could all get together at once. It took Donny a while to really understand that it was dark here even though he had just gotten up. I also didn’t want the girls to see me in my pajamas at first, but after we had been working a while, Teresa quit trying to make sure her makeup was on before we started. Since Barb was in Tennessee, she usually was the most awake of any of us.

When we didn’t meet, we would leave our observations, video, and notes in our group memory and then people would add as they needed to. Donny took lots of video but much of it was of his dog. Teresa, Barb, and I helped him figure out how to edit it and to get the stuff that we needed, like video of transportation. It was kind of funny once—he tied his sister’s doll to his dog and videoed it. He told us it was “dogportation.” Fortunately, our group memory has lots of storage or Donny would overflow the buffer!

Barb said her teachers liked to use a text-only thing called ClassChat, but it sounds boring—no moving pictures. How
can you understand each other fast if all you have are words?

Murphy: Yes, I love group memory - really makes group work easier. So, now, tell me this: your project is a real-world issue and you have the responsiblity of creating real-world solutions, how you see your project affecting the local community and even the global community?

Derrel: Well, you know, that was interesting. Here in Tokyo trains are still the most common form of transportation because they don’t have enough highways, but Barb’s pictures reminded me of rural Japan. Trains could be efficient there, but she did some checking and found it would cost, gee, millions of dollars to put in a train that would connect people in her area because it is rural. But they are pushing for more fuel-cell buses now. We still have to do a lot of work to get ready for our big presentation in Paris. I’m kind of scared about that but Barb knows what she is doing. Donny is excited—somehow he plans to work his dog into the program.

Since the conference is virtual, we are still figuring out how we will be awake for it. It will be during the day in Paris, but early evening in Japan and about the middle of the night in California! Boy, I hope Donny can stay awake!

Murphy: That's really interesting about the train costs. We have fuel-cell buses in our area and they seem to be alright. I really like our new transporter lanes though; but that's because I'm really comfortable with mine. That leads me to my next question: change. After having spent such a considerable amount of time on this project, I imagine that it's difficult to not be changed, personally. Tell me about your position throughout the project and any changes you see in yourself.

Derrel: The big thing about the project is that it helped me to see the world how Barb, and Teresa, and Donny see it. You know, maybe it wasn’t about transportation after all—maybe it was about us. I may forget about the trains, but I think I will always remember Barb, Teresa, and Donny. My teacher was telling us when she went to school everybody the same age was in the same class. How boring! Teresa and Barb helped me learn a lot, and I know I helped Donny. And Donny helped me to think about little kids as being people, too.

Murphy: That's a great point to make, and makes me wonder: what then, would you alter about this project or what would you do differently on your next assignment?

Derrel: I enjoyed working with them but we are all, you know, American. It would be fun to work with kids from other countries. I know it would be frustrating because their customs are different, but I think we could learn a lot! That’s one reason I’m excited about our presentation—I get to meet more people.

Murphy: Yes, the AUTO at Paris is going to be wonderful! I'll see you there. I have one last question. While every reporter covers the topics he or she needs to record, there are always interesting bits that come from the
people directly involved, that are not always apparent to the outside. What else would you like to share with the world
about your project and the process by which it was accomplished?

Derrel: Barb and Teresa helped me a lot. They showed my how to get the Edpro Editor to automatically explain Japanese words. And, you know, Donny talks a lot and he hasn’t figured out how to make it shorter, but Teresa had neat program that is pretty good at throwing away a lot of junk that didn’t make sense that Donny said, and that helped a lot. I helped Donny learn to do a few things, like how to make sure he was recording and how to turn it off when he didn’t want to record. He once wore it into the bathroom and had left the video on! Gross!

Working together really helped. Barb and Teresa helped me with some of the math we were having to do for our analysis. Donny helped me because trying to explain to him was hard, and then I really had to think about something when explaining, and I found out sometimes that I didn’t know as much as I thought I would know.