Solon students use Facebook for 1920s history

The information on Alphonse's Facebook profile is fairly standard.

He was born on Jan. 17, has a wife, Mae, and a son, Albert, and is from Chicago. A recent status update indicated that he was looking forward to Valentine's Day.

What is remarkable is that Alphonse “Al” Capone, the infamous Chicago gangster, died decades before the existence of personal computers, the Internet and Facebook. His profile was created by Solon High School freshman Matt Quinn, 14, as part of a project in teacher Lauren Cannon's American history class.

Each student in Cannon's class created a fake Facebook profile of a major historical figure from the 1920s to better understand the decade's events. Cannon said the project helped her students think of history as being more than just dates and events.

“It allowed my students to connect more with the personalities of history and realize these are real people with real connections to the world,” she said.

Inspiration for the project came from a similar effort at a school district in Alabama. Cannon learned about it through the social networking website Twitter.

To complete the assignment, students had to think about the personal, social lives of people in their history textbooks. They needed to find the answers to questions such as: what music did Amelia Earhart listen to, who were Albert Einstein's friends and would Herbert Hoover have left nasty comments on Al Capone's wall?

Quinn said he researched Capone's social life. Facebook is best known for its ability to let people “friend” their social contacts, so Quinn set out to fill Capone's friends list.

“I looked at some other famous people he might be friends with, like Jack Dempsey, the boxer,” Quinn said. “He was a bootlegger, so maybe he got Albert Einstein to give him a better moonshine recipe.”

Freshman Charlie Jedlicka, 14, created a profile for baseball legend Babe Ruth, which led him to research the ballplayer's statistics.

“I put things on his profile, like how many home runs he had hit,” Jedlicka said. “I set his status as ‘Calling my shot.'”

You cannot see these profiles on Facebook. Cannon created a blank document template with the appearance of a Facebook web page that her students modified.

Almost all of the students in Cannon's class have their own Facebook profiles so they are no strangers to the website's process of classifying personal information. Cannon said this helped her class see the historical figures as people who actually lived. “Everyone could relate to this, even the kids who are struggling,” she said.

Jedlicka said, “Facebook is pretty awesome, and it's not every day we get to use it in class.”