K-School Class Harnesses Web's Resources

Twelve students in a Kennedy School of Government course have taken surfing the Web to new heights: employing the full resources of the World Wide Web to imagine themselves as national political campaign strategists.

The students in the course, taught last fall by Kennedy School assistant professor David King, were called upon to design a master strategy memo for a potential third party presidential campaign in 1996.

And the in-class experiment was so successful that the new, concerted method of using the Web will be employed in three, larger sections of the same course in the spring term, for as many as 200 students, as well as in courses at several other universities.

Professor King's introductory "Politics, Advocacy and Leadership" class was the forum for the newly-designed interactive case study which was prepared by the Kennedy School's Case Program.

Campaign '96: Third Party Time?, [http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/third-party/], the first web-based teaching case, makes use of selected home pages and data bases on the web, linked, via "hypertext" to literature and data developed and identified by the School.

The result of linking all of the data is a virtual library, which brings students instant access to the sort of information high-level strategists seek: up-to-date public opinion polls; historic election returns; state ballot access laws; prices of television advertising and state-by-state demographic information.

"I imagine the Web as a kind of neural network, a network of ideas and resources," said King. "I love the idea of placing students at the intersection of so many ideas and resources that enables me to pull together elements from the whole course, from the whole of American politics, and to show how they relate in a concrete assignment."

The case attempts to cope with one of the more daunting problems posed by those who would make use of the World Wide Web: its enormity and lack of central organization, which combine to make it difficult to gain ready access to information one might wish to use.

"You can think of the World Wide Web as a vast, out-of-focus landscape of information," said case designer David Eddy Spicer. "We've crafted a lens that enables students to focus on the information they need without spending all their time wandering around the Web."

The case provides a classic presidential strategy memo for students to use as a model: a 1947 memo to President Harry S Truman, written by former Roosevelt Administration aide James H. Rowe Jr '31. Rowe's memo dealt specifically with key "third-party" insurgences of that time.

With that memo as a starting point, students are called upon to develop their third party strategy memo.

The case is designed to provide them necessary ammunition, both via links to relevant sources of information on the World Wide Web, and through comment from campaign experts, data bases and historic documents assembled by the Kennedy School's Case Program.

This library contains an additional special feature: the chance to converse on-line with consultants willing to answer questions or review strategies devised by students.

For the fall term, two of the six consultants who agreed to serve as on-line sounding boards for strategies devised by students included R. Clayton Mulford, key advisor to the 1992 H. Ross Perot presidential campaign and Donald Kellerman, founding director of the Times-Mirror Center for the People and the Press.

In the long-term, the Case Program hopes to preserve the interactive exercise in CD-ROM form--in effect, to take a snapshot of the information relevant to Campaign '96 and to save it, so that students and scholars of the future will be able to put themselves in the shoes of those involved in this year's political season.

The new Internet case is part of a larger effort to explore how new media can be used to support and enhance the teaching, research and communication efforts of the Kennedy School.

The School's new Web Site, recently named "One of the Top 5 percent of Sites on the Internet" by the Point Come survey, is located at http://kagwww.harvard.edu

The case provides a classic presidential strategy memo for students to use as a model: a 1947 memo to President Harry S Truman, written by former Roosevelt Administration aide James H. Rowe Jr '31. Rowe's memo dealt specifically with key "third-party" insurgences of that time.

With that memo as a starting point, students are called upon to develop their third party strategy memo.

The case is designed to provide them necessary ammunition, both via links to relevant sources of information on the World Wide Web, and through comment from campaign experts, data bases and historic documents assembled by the Kennedy School's Case Program.

This library contains an additional special feature: the chance to converse on-line with consultants willing to answer questions or review strategies devised by students.

For the fall term, two of the six consultants who agreed to serve as on-line sounding boards for strategies devised by students included R. Clayton Mulford, key advisor to the 1992 H. Ross Perot presidential campaign and Donald Kellerman, founding director of the Times-Mirror Center for the People and the Press.

In the long-term, the Case Program hopes to preserve the interactive exercise in CD-ROM form--in effect, to take a snapshot of the information relevant to Campaign '96 and to save it, so that students and scholars of the future will be able to put themselves in the shoes of those involved in this year's political season.

The new Internet case is part of a larger effort to explore how new media can be used to support and enhance the teaching, research and communication efforts of the Kennedy School.

The School's new Web Site, recently named "One of the Top 5 percent of Sites on the Internet" by the Point Come survey, is located at http://kagwww.harvard.edu