ABSTRACT

Working in the strife-torn atmosphere of Northern Ireland in the late 1980s, Harry McMahon and Bill O’Neill, both teacher-educators at Ulster University, developed a new approach to the use of computers to support citizenship (McMahon and O’Neill, 1993). As is so often the case with new discoveries this happened almost by accident. Harry had a Macintosh computer and, one Christmas, he was given a book on creative ways to use Macintosh’s simple multimedia authoring programme, HyperCard. He tried this out by making a children’s story about his dog Ginny. He showed his story to his friend Bill who told him that it was too adult centred – too much just Harry’s ‘voice’ – and it did not reflect how children saw life. Harry responded by adding thought and speech bubbles for Ginny and the other characters in the story. His idea was to pause the story at key points and ask his audience of children to fill in the bubbles.