Topic: Getting

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

Responsibility for teaching and mentoring must be shared more widely than in the past. Classroom teachers can not be expected to have expertise in all the areas of knowledge their students are encountering. The Internet provides new opportunities for teaching by people who primary work is not formally teaching, but who have expertise in industry and other public sectors. Incentives to perform these part-time and out-of-school teaching and mentoring roles need to be devised. Communities and school districts making an investment in new curricula or technology should not attempt to overlay such innovations on outmoded methods of operation of school; rather they should look broadly for new opportunities to engage people in nontraditional roles.

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

Responsibility for learning and managing information must be shared by all. The pace of change is too fast for individuals to depend totally on others to structure their learning and information for them; pre-planned courses, textbooks, teacher training programs, technical support staff, and the like may not always be available to meet an individual’s particular learning need. New curriculum frameworks, instructional materials, assessment and testing schemes, and teacher training programs should take into account … increased responsibilities for information management.

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

Developers of educational applications and tools… spend a substantial proportion of their very limited resources inventing and creating such services. Progress could be much faster and more efficient if each project did not have to invent basic services but rather could build upon a common services infrastructure.

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

Individual schools are not autonomous: they are part of a school district, a local community, and a state education system. If internetworking is to support educational reform, the infrastructure must encompass the entire school district and community.

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

Active construction of knowledge, participation in learning collaboratives, and building on the learners’ interests and experiences outside of school are major threads in educational reform … As television, video games, telephones, newspapers, libraries, and computer networks begin to be connected and woven together, they will be seen and experienced as essentially a “virtual world” in which we spend much of our time living, learning, working, and playing. The Internet provides a model for the future information infrastructure in which children do participate in the construction of simulated worlds and learn to make connections between the physical world and simulated worlds.

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

By adding other mechanisms for interaction and putting more responsibility on the students for creating and sharing knowledge, we can try a broader range of models for distance learning. Rather than one organization or person being responsible for all the teaching, responsibilities can be distributed among different groups and locations.

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

Because schoolchildren are located all over the world, they can often monitor many more sites for environmental studies than the professional scientific community could support. Eventually, when large numbers of students and teachers have the appropriate tools and skills and network participation, they will fill an important role in areas such as monitoring atmospheric ozone, ultraviolet light, water and soil pollution, and bioindicators of global, regional and local change.

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

There is a danger that the networks could be used to transmit and amplify traditional and outmoded elements of schooling instead of providing a mechanism for the transformation to lifelong learning needed by all citizens … The way we shape and engineer the technology, tools, organization of knowledge and virtual communities on the expanding Internet information infrastructure will directly impact on the potential productivity, roles, and equality of opportunity of young people both in the near and distant future, and thereby will affect the kind of society we evolve into.

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

The central value of internetworking to support learning and teaching for our changing world is that internetworking can support or enable authentic learning experiences and cross-institutional collaborations needed for reform of education.

Learning and Teaching on the Internet: Contributing to Educational Reform

Educational opportunities for all could increase as more people participate in the Internet if networking infrastructure, services and applications develop in ways that help people contribute to the information infrastructure.

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