TECHNOS

July 27, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Fall 1995 Vol. 4 No. 3

The Internet as School, Or Welcome to Our MUD Room

By Ralph Brauer

Imagine…No walls, no desks, no teacher lecturing at the front of the room. Our little red schoolhouses have changed over the years. But, as they say, you ain't seen nuthin' yet!

10075248.jpg is a wormhole bored across space and time. It's a photograph, taken by the first humans to walk on the moon, and it shows our planet rising over a bleak plain pocketed by craters. My 10-year-old son, Max, downloaded the image from a NASA Internet server with our home computer. He spent an afternoon lost in space, looking at photographs from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs for an independent project. Max found himself so engrossed in his on-line research that my wife finally had to drag him to dinner—which testifies to the changes technology brings to learning.

Earth Rising Over Moon,” or 0075248.jpg, can be found at NASA's National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) site. The address is ttp://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov.

In the 19th century, as wagon trains moved west, we envisioned schools as community centers for athletics, plays, concerts, and town meetings. Families contributed labor and money to build the simple, one-room structures that have ingrained themselves in our imaginations. Education historian Lawrence Cremin observed that schools inspired such support because people believed "a school common to all, teaching a body of materials considered necessary to all, was vital to the maintenance of a healthy republic."

Today America is dotted with abandoned rural schoolhouses, faded to the color of moldering bones, broken windows staring like empty eye sockets. In all too many communities, the schools that remain open stand in need of repair. Some are even health hazards. Even as it faces indifference and lack of finances, American education finds itself coping with technology and the challenge presented by resources like NASA's National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC), where the "Earth Rising Over Moon" photo can be accessed.

Through the Internet, my son can access more learning resources at home than he could in most schools. This morning he can visit the Louvre, and after lunch he can access science experiments, classical music, and The Congressional Record. With a click of his mouse, he can view comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, review data on the Mount Pinatubo eruption, and take a virtual tour of Ireland. If he wants to discuss pressing topics, he can e-mail a question to a Nobel Prize winner.

On the Internet, no one knows your title, age, grade, or test scores. Students can learn at their own paces, in their own learning styles, using primary source documents unfiltered by some textbook's idea of what to learn. The Internet allows them to follow their curiosity unencumbered by bells, rigid curricula, class schedules, or the limitations of the teacher.

To access resources like NSSDC, the only requirements are a $100 modem; a dial-up account, the cost of which is comparable to a monthly cable television fee; and an innate curiosity. Even for adults, the Internet has resurrected the joy of learning.

Kathy Rutkoski, who edits an on-line newsletter for K-12 teachers, says, "The greatest contribution of computer networks will be their seemingly magical ability to encourage teachers to learn and remember the wonder and excitement of their own childhood."

My son and others fortunate to have access to the Internet testify that the very foundations of schooling are shaking beneath us, as if in the throes of an earthquake. What students learn, how they learn, who they learn with, and where they learn are shifting, moved by the cultural equivalent of plate tectonics. Bill Crocoll, superintendent in Chittenden, Vermont—a school district nationally recognized for technology use—says technologies like the Internet will force us to stop thinking of school as a place and focus on schooling as a concept.

Click to www.jasonproject.org, the home page of the JASON Project. The graphic interfaces and point-and-click access of such resources have made the Internet user friendly to any school-aged child. From February 27 through March 11, 1995, JASON Project Voyage VI offered students a visit to Hawaii with a team of scientists. Bonnie Bracey, a former teacher at Ashlawn Elementary in Arlington, Virginia, says an earlier JASON Project so enthralled her class that "there are no bored students." She compares her students' involvement in learning to her own involvement in an earlier exploration. "Most of us had the experience of landing on the moon with the astronauts 25 years ago…and did it make an impression? You bet!" Today, through hypertext links, a simple query can become a fascinating quest that can lead in many directions.

This photo Kilauea, the earth's most active volcanno, is part of JASON VI: Island Earth, the expedition to Hawaii conducted in February/March 1995 by the JASON Foundation for Education. The JASON VII expedition to the Florida Keys is scheduled for April 1996. Advance information can be accessed at the JASON home page now.

The JASON Project is one example of the wide array of learning opportunities already offered by schools, colleges, and others on the Internet. Click to http://web66.coled.umn.edu and find a long list of educational opportunities: a home page on African Americans in the sciences from the Louisiana State University Library, research on El Niño from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, an exhibit of Dante in Print from the Newberry Library, and resources on science education from the University of California at Irvine.

The point about these entries is that at the moment they are totally unregulated. Anyone can offer any kind of learning opportunity on the Internet. All it takes is a minimal amount of money to set up a server. A leased 56 kilobyte or T1 line, a server, router, modems, software, and installation can run from $20,000 to $30,000 of initial investment plus yearly upkeep—a fraction of the cost of a classroom.

In states with open enrollment policies, students can register in any district. With the Internet, they could get a diploma from anywhere in the nation. http://www.gnacademy.org—the home page of the Global Network Academy-represents this possibility. It includes hypertext links to the Virtual Online University, Ta-Ming Virtual University, and the Global Electronic Multimedia University. All offer learning opportunities on line.

In Seattle, Puget Community School is one of several "virtual schoolhouses" in America that connect home schoolers. Anyone who has any inclinations toward home schooling can find books, lessons, laboratories, videos, and music on line. At the Johnson Home School's home page. There we learn about Stephen, Heather, Kathi, and Kirke. Heather's page has a picture of her playing the harp along with information that she studies harp with Sister John Therese and flute with Anna Peterkort.

From such family ventures, it is but a small step for someone to start a school that exists only on the Internet. Put the curriculum and resources on a file server, add interactive video, chat areas, and e-mail, and you have a virtual schoolhouse. It won't be long before some community strapped for space and cash will set up an electronic school, rather than build a brick one.

This leads to some difficult questions. What if students can get a better education from a district a thousand miles away through an Internet server? How can local school boards control how children will be educated in such an environment? The answers to these questions could cause the American education system to topple like a row of dominoes. If the Internet threatens local school boards and superintendents, it also should cause state bureaucrats to fear for the future. What if students prefer Wisconsin's requirements to those of their own state?

http://learning.turner.com/ is the home page of Turner Adventure Learning. A Gopher server contains a wealth of materials on the Battle of Gettysburg coordinated with the Turner-produced movie, including battle photographs and the Gettysburg Address. As multimedia conglomerates like Ted Turner's enter the doorway the Internet offers to the education market, the lines between K-12, higher education, and business will blur further, multiplying educational offerings on the Internet. Corporations already fund extensive training programs to make up for the educational deficiencies of their employees. Why not offer diplomas over the Internet? For-profit ventures like The Edison Project and Education Alternatives Incorporated could set up Internet servers and hire their own teachers. Expect the network to produce some questionable education offerings—mail to school@edutain.org, for instance.

Click to http://www.ed.gov, the U.S. Department of Education's home page, which includes a wealth of information on national programs like Goals 2000. The Internet raises some questions about the federal government's role in the hyperspace education of the future. If the Internet makes it possible for students to receive degrees from anyone, anywhere, who will regulate this anarchy? One option could take us closer to a federal system. Certainly, higher education lobbies will not look kindly on Internet educational entrepreneurs. Washington could also choose to fund Internet-based national charter schools.

If the where of learning is changing, so also is the how. The old industrial system schooled children in assembly-line fashion. Treated like interchangeable parts, each student followed the same plan with little variation. We laid out classrooms in rows like factories, preferably in alphabetical order. The same structure used for the seating chart characterized grade books, lesson plans, report cards, and daily schedules. The curriculum became a bewildering grid of specialized subjects. Using tests with grids of multiple-choice questions, we sorted students like pieces of mail, filing them in the proper box to decide their future: Harvard or the unemployment line.

This is the first image students see when they reach the Interactive Frog Dissection, or Net-Frog, from the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. The address is listed at the top of the page at “Location.” Via the World Wide Web on the Internet, students experience dissection on line without the smell or mess. Net-Frog, which was originally a videodisc-based program, provides both still images and QuickTime movies that demonstrate dissection techniques.

http://curry.edschool.Virginia. EDU:80/~insttech/frog and http://beavis.cba.uiuc.edu. These two home pages that my son discovered symbolize how the Internet challenges not only the political structure of American education but also its pedagogical structure. One is an on-line frog dissection, the other an assortment of products from "Beavis and Butt-head," including Windows icons, computer images, games, and even a screen saver. A network that can offer such variety argues against assembly-line learning. Anyone who goes on line can write his or her own curriculum.

10075248.jpg offers the promise that technology can finally provide a way of teaching individuals. In 1986, the National Task Force on Educational Technology reported, "It is becoming clear that individual learners (and teachers) need no longer conform to one standard teaching/learning pattern for all. Programs can be custom-designed to serve each learner." Those programs exist now—on the Internet. If a student is a visual learner, has special talents in art or music, or has an interest in dinosaurs or volcanoes, he or she can follow those inclinations. He's not restricted to the limitations of a textbook, the school library, or a computer disk. Of course, she may choose to play with Beavis and Butt-head.

No matter how hard we try to box in students, they will find a way around the box. This presents an acute challenge for educators and parents. Districts that might consider scrapping old buildings for electronic schools also may scrap textbooks. Producers of learning resources will have to be more imaginative to compete with the Internet. To keep up with individual learners will demand new feedback mechanisms that actively allow everyone to take part in constantly updating and redesigning learning tools.

lamda.parc.xerox.com.8888. Connect as "Guest" to LamdaMOO—a MUD, or multi-user dungeon. These real-time, network-based, role-playing games allow users to create an identity and participate in an ongoing, on-line adventure. Although LamdaMOO is text-based, creator Pavel Curtis is working on a version with audio and video. MUDs represent a prototype of on-line, individualized learning because they can allow participants to control the game. As classroom becomes MUD room, this interactive ability will gather momentum. Learning resources will have no boundaries.

Check out the k12.ed.math or k12.ed.music or k12.ed.tech or k12.chat.teacher newsgroups. These are but a few of the many education newsgroups on the Internet. Here the specialization of our world is mirrored in abundance. There is a discussion group for every interest one can imagine. Yet something is happening here that has profound implications for schooling and the rest of our lives. The greatest minds in the world are but a mouse click away. Put a query on the Net, and you will quickly learn more than you ever wanted to know about any arcane subject.

Such developments argue for an increased need for teachers, rather than their extinction. However, the days when teachers stood in the front of rows of desks expounding on the multiplication tables or drilling students in the rules for placing a comma or reciting "i before e, except after c" are fading. My son can find an expert on any topic with a great deal more knowledge than any teacher merely by dialing up his modem.

10075248.jpg points to the need for facilitators and guides who can help students navigate through the growing neuroverse of information, aligning their compasses, providing maps, and schooling them in how to steer through unexpected storms. These navigators will help students learn how to ask questions, analyze answers, evaluate data, access information. All are skills Socrates would not be uncomfortable with. Homer provided us another paradigm in the figure of Odysseus, the hero who lived by his wits rather than his brawn. Homer referred to his hero as a "man of many resources," an apt description of teachers in the next century.

Teachers who are comfortable with their disciplinary boxes, lecture notes, and canned drills will be poor Internet navigators. They are the equivalent of those medieval Europeans who traveled only where they could see the shore, relying on familiar landmarks and rote instructions. To show how obsolete such teachers are, one could propose an educational version of the famous Turing test for artificial intelligence. Pit a team of students with modems against a team of specialist teachers and quiz them, College Bowl style. Today the specialists might win, but as the speed and sophistication of networking technology increases, Team Modem will have the edge.

Facilitators who are skilled navigators will be in high demand; their reputations will spread quickly on the Internet. The charter school mechanism and technology will allow them to create their own schools with a network of like-minded colleagues across the country. Back in the time of Socrates, students such as the young Plato could study with learned masters. Why couldn't some modern Socrates advertise for students on the Internet?

If the Internet is changing where and how students learn, 10075248.jpg promises that what they learn also will change. In the new world of the next century, our children will need entirely different skills from those that sufficed for their parents and grandparents. As the SCANS report and other projections testify, they will need to cope with sudden career shifts, comprehend increasing amounts of new information, and master rapidly changing technology in a world with constantly shifting boundaries and instantaneous communication.

Constructing a curriculum to meet these needs is at the center of the struggle over the emerging new technology-based education symbolized by 10075248.jpg. When education focused on Carnegie units, letter grades, multiple-choice tests, and a common core curriculum, those well-defined outlines provided certainty and comfort. Now technology is undermining that structure.

Click to http://www.seti-inst.edu, home page of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Among other resources, it contains a life-in-the-universe curriculum. The SETI home page points to one of the major problems confronting schools, the obsolescence of information. Every learning resource we have other than the Internet is out of date the day it is issued. Today's new idea will end up in tomorrow's remainder bin. Today's new scientific discovery could be tomorrow's flat earth. Walk into a media center, pull a print-based encyclopedia off the shelf, and leaf through its pages. It won't take long before you start chuckling. Facts and contexts change so quickly that only a constantly evolving entity like the Internet can keep up. Like our brains, the Internet can create new synapses.

The second problem the Internet presents lies in its ability to make linkages. For generations, we hired college and K-12 teachers based on their credentials in a particular specialization. The Internet raises serious questions about this specialized knowledge. If the rapid pace of change makes textbooks obsolete, what does it do for their writers? One masters some arcane field only to find it is no longer relevant or its basic assumptions have changed. Specialized knowledge no longer has high value when it can be accessed so easily. Why should a student spend time memorizing facts, when he or she can easily access the latest data with a modem click? Why should such memorization decide who gets into Harvard? The Internet will present an even greater challenge to fact-based knowledge than the calculator did to traditional math.

In the 21st century the buzzword will be "connections." Constructing linkages has made Bill Gates of Microsoft fame a very rich man. If our children wish to become as successful as Gates, they will need to become just as adept at making connections, and this will require us to rethink the entire curriculum.

The Internet is an interactive medium. One cannot be a passive learner while surfing through cyberspace, for its organic, constantly changing form continually presents new challenges and opportunities. Today my son can get replies to his questions from dozens of people. Shifting through those answers teaches him a great deal more about learning than the memorization of rote answers ever could.

To cope with this environment, students will need a whole new approach to learning. They will need the ability to:

Understand systems—the organizing principles of connections
Organize, analyze, and synthesize information—the tools of connections
Recognize patterns—the structure of connections
Appreciate and relate to diversity—our potential connections to others
Understand and facilitate communication verbally, spatially, and mathematically—the tools to make connections.

The Endeavor space shuttle expedition STS-61 took place in December 1993. This image is at the NSSDC site.

This list may sound downright blasphemous to those who would take us back to the basics, but the moon's eye view provided by 10075248.jpg should tell us, as nothing else does, that the basics of the past have become obsolete.

Click to http://www.anoka.k12.mn.us/education/
school/school.php?sectionid=10299, the Internet server of Minnesota's Champlin Park High School. Here one can find copies of the student newspaper and examples of student writing projects. The most interesting section of this node on the Internet, however, is the students' own home pages. They can post anything they want on their home pages—new projects, recent work, clever sayings—and they do. Ask, "What did you do in school today?" and get an answer by modem.

Rebel_web suggests that being able to see and evaluate a student's work will put pressure on our current credentiallers. Now our objective tests measure very little, if any, of the more complex reasoning the next century will demand. This has spawned a cry for more authentic assessments that require a student to demonstrate what he or she knows. In the world of the Internet, the system will become more accountable to employers, other teachers, and, most of all, to parents. The Internet will allow students and parents to intersect directly with network-based assessment instruments, thus providing instant feedback. This, in turn, will provide a monitor of local schools. Test preparation companies like Kaplan will also set up operations on the Net. Couple instant tests with instant test preparation, and the whole notion of standardized, multiple-choice tests may disappear. With artificial intelligence, one can construct an interactive test that presses students to explain the whys of their answers.

But, why have traditional tests at all? The Chittenden, Vermont, district is planning to provide every student a CD-ROM that contains actual examples of his or her work: art, music, plays, essays, videotapes of building a bookshelf. With a CD jukebox, parents and students can access these from home. If you can see actual examples of the student's work, why would you rely on an "A" grade to prove your knowledge of a subject? Another prediction: With each of us having a lifelong learning CD-ROM, clever programs will navigate through a student's disk and tag appropriate samples. Why rely merely on the disk? Using the Internet, admissions counselors or personnel workers will query prospective applicants on line, creating the virtual interview.

If we add up all the dimensions of the new schooling that 10075248.jpg portends, it is clear education will be vastly different for our children. We forget that the American common school is a fairly new way of educating children. There is no preordained conclusion that the present system will survive the next century. Still, it would be tragic if America's tradition of local independent school districts disappeared.

Public schools and school districts can play a major role in this new universe, if they will accept it. If, instead of resisting or opposing the new learning the Internet promises, they embrace it, they can serve a critical function of facilitating our access to and use of these resources. Just as citizens in their little houses on the prairie needed schools to serve as their links to one another and the larger world, so in the Internet Age schools can perform a similar role. Schooling will become an infosection, fostering intellectual connections in every community. With links to the Internet, any community can be a doorway to the future.

The link of schooling to the community has provided the engine for our democracy during the last century and a half. If someone else—a for-profit company, the federal government, entrepreneurs—provided infosections for local communities, America would be changed profoundly in ways we can now only dimly perceive.

The problem our nation now faces is how to provide infosections for everyone. Those like my son, who are fortunate to have these links, are a giant step ahead of their peers. Adequate access to technology must not become a lottery system where those lucky to land a grant or pass a bond issue succeed while others lose. Not long after Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposed giving each American a laptop computer, members of his own party proposed the virtual elimination of federal funds for school technology and the abolishment of the Education Department's technology office. If we are to cope with 10075247.jpg, we should get our signals straight. We must provide every school in America with Internet access, give every classroom the technology it needs, and provide every teacher with the training and support to make it all work.

I once asked some teachers in Brainerd, Minnesota, about what skills they thought students would need in the next century. One of them turned to me and said, "They will need to be like cats. They will need to land on their feet." Let's hope we all land on our feet.

The print version of this article contains computer images captured and enhanced by David Gudaitis of AIT.

Ralph Brauer is executive director of the Transforming Schools Consortium, a national organization of K-12 school districts dedicated to redefining schooling through sharing resources. In that position he has served as a consultant to school districts, particularly around issues of technology, and has participated in national meetings devoted to restructuring education. Brauer is working with several national education groups to address the issues of systemic change in school districts. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Newsweek, and various professional journals.