Summary

  • RFC 1746 reproduced the CoVis Network Use Policy from a school networking pilot. Students in participating classes received accounts that gave them minimally mediated Internet services and allowed direct contact from other Internet users.
  • The policy required real names, banned pseudonyms and anonymity, made account holders responsible for activity traced to their accounts, treated mail as private with specified inspection exceptions, and allowed loss of network privileges for misconduct. Those were local rules for the CoVis community.

The account crossed a school boundary

In the early 1990s, a student might encounter the Internet through a teacher who held the account and passed messages between the class and the wider network. CoVis changed the handoff. The Learning Through Collaborative Visualization project, funded by the National Science Foundation, worked in two Chicago-area high schools. Its authors reported twelve science classes and roughly 300 students in the first phase. Each participating student got a personal account as a full member of the Internet community. That meant direct access to its services with little adult mediation.

It also meant anyone else with an Internet account could contact a student directly.

That last sentence is the part a promotional brochure would hide beneath the photograph of computers. The project wanted students to collaborate with scientists, use networked tools and learn by doing. Direct membership made the experiment possible. It also brought strangers, public discussion groups and private messages into a school setting that had previously relied on teachers as gatekeepers. The technology moved faster than the school's usual chain of permission.

Bill Manning and Don Perkins published RFC 1746 in December 1994 as an Informational document about user expectations and acceptable-use agreements. Much of it reproduces an article by Barry Fishman and Roy Pea describing CoVis, followed by the project's own Network Use Policy. The RFC did not prescribe rules for every school. It made one local attempt to govern this new form of participation visible to the Internet community.

An open account came with a name attached

The policy's membership section is generous and narrow at once. Students enrolled in a CoVis class received accounts when they agreed to its terms. Teachers, collaborating scientists and researchers could also hold accounts; other people might obtain special access case by case. Members could use the services their technology supported. The local CoVis community was defined by those accounts. The rest of the Internet could write to them without having joined that local agreement.

The rights section promised privacy in email, video conversations, screen-sharing and private notebook work. It distinguished those spaces from public news groups and mailing lists. It also described a route into private correspondence or files when an administrator or teacher suspected a policy violation. The policy called for an attempt to notify the user whenever possible. Researchers might request access for study, with confidentiality promised. A student's private mailbox was therefore a protected space with stated exceptions, not a sealed room whose rules could be inferred from the word “private.”

The responsibility section tightened the other side of the bargain. The owner of an account bore responsibility for violations traced to its name and was told not to share a password. Impersonation was barred. Real names were required, and pseudonyms and anonymity were banned. A student gained a direct voice on a network larger than the school, while the school retained a way to attach that voice to a person it could discipline. If the account had been just a teacher's shared terminal, that chain of attribution would have been different. The personal account created both autonomy and an administrative handle.

The school kept the complaint desk

Fishman and Pea looked beyond technology for governing ideas. They compared network use with library access, professional duties, school conduct codes and field trips. Their account reports a 1993 policy forum recommendation that schools indemnify providers and warn them about material unsuitable for minors. CoVis's authors wanted a rulebook that also made learning and participation possible. They said a school could not catalogue every place a student might reach on an open network and still treat the student as a full participant.

Their answer was neither an invisible filter nor a free pass. The policy protected intellectual freedom, including unpopular opinions, while banning personal attacks and harassment. It expected school conduct rules to apply to network activity. The authors described interventions after another user's complaint, rather than a system that examined every public message before posting. An offensive post could remain visible; the student could lose network privileges and be encouraged to retract or apologise. The complaint was the trigger, the account was the address, and loss of access was the sanction.

The field-trip analogy shows the same institutional stretch. CoVis envisioned students reaching remote museums and people through audio and video. Ordinary off-campus trips already carried conduct rules and parental permission practices. The project asked how those practices should travel into a virtual visit, while insisting that students understood they represented their schools. The network was physically inside a classroom but socially connected to people far outside it.

The policy recorded the trade, not its outcome

The appendix gives us the text of the agreement, including membership, privacy, safety, intellectual freedom, language, copyright, passwords, real names and the possibility of losing privileges. It does not provide a case log proving how often teachers inspected mail, how many complaints arrived or whether the rules protected a particular student. Those facts would require contemporaneous school or project records. The 1994 RFC establishes what CoVis said it would allow and what consequences it reserved.

The striking arrangement is a school making students first-class network participants and first-class subjects of local accountability at the same time. The account removed a teacher from the middle of every exchange. The real-name rule, password obligation and complaint process put an identifiable student at the end of each exchange. CoVis did not merely connect a classroom. It wrote down who could speak, who could look inside a message, and who could close the account after the speaking went wrong.

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