The following excerpts are from the text, "A Teacher's Guide to the Information Highway." The full text is available from the Office of Continuing Education, University of Wisconsin -- Stevens Point. (715) 346- 3838.
"When are you most afraid?" Question asked by a Seattle high school student via email to a friend in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War.
In 1989 Jeff Golub's Seattle, Washington high school students joined the Learning Network. A commercial venture that links school rooms around the world, his students were put in a group with twelve other schools - eight in the US and four in Europe. Assigned the task of exploring global pollution, Golub's class gathered data and once each class period one student would go to the computer in the back of the room, print off information received from the other schools, and type in the information gathered in Seattle.
The endeavor was very organized, very scholarly, very predictable. Students enjoyed having daily contact with their peers around the world, but the quality of the contacts didn't exactly compete with MTV. Then one day a student in West Berlin broke the rules and forgot to sent a message on local pollution. Instead, he wrote about what he had seen the night before. He had been to the wall. So had lots of other people. He wasn't sure what was going on, but people were saying the wall might come down. End of message. Each morning for the next two weeks, students rushed early to their Seattle classroom to read what was happening at the wall. The pollution assignment was abandoned. Golub and other teachers tried to teach 16 year old Seattle students about the history and geography of Berlin, starting with pictures of "The Wall." Students balanced classroom lectures with personal messages and questions to their friend in Berlin. Finally after two weeks came the longest message of them all - "the wall is down, I saw my grandmother last night, she came through the wall" - screen after screen of eye witness description from a peer.
To the students in that Seattle classroom, history was no longer dry lectures and sanitized textbooks cleared by endless state committees. History was a young boy in Berlin writing about his grandmother.
The Internet is less a place than it is a process -- an agreement to communicate information in a set way. It began with an effort at the US Defense Department to find some way to link military installations and university research centers in a way that would handle large amounts of traffic under difficult circumstances. Enter Bob Taylor. Director of computer research for the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, he had already decided in 1966 that getting information from one computer to another might save money. But how? With one million dollars in expense money and the help of Larry Roberts of MIT, they built a small, four-computer network.
Taylor and Roberts made one decision early on that made all the difference. Information would be moved from one machine to another through packet switching, rather than circuit switching. The difference seems abstract, but turns out to be crucial. If I set up a circuit, like a phone connection from one point to another, data moves nicely once the circuit is set up, but setting up the circuit takes time, especially if the network grows to involve lots of computers in lots of places. A circuit is also vulnerable to disruption. Break the circuit at any point, and information flow stops. In time of peace, power outages or maintenance downtime break my circuit. In time of war, any event that destroys a switching node, breaks my communication links.
What's the alternative? Make no complete circuit from a sending computer to a receiving computer. Instead, take any message, break it into chunks, or packets, and send them off. Each packet travels by whatever links are currently up and running, or currently have the smallest backlog. Packets arrive eventually by some route, are stored until the other packets arrive, and then are rejoined and presented to the receiving computer. Pieces of the original message may have taken five different routes to get to the receiver, but they get there eventually, and will get there even if much of the network has been disrupted.
The resulting communication network, the Internet, turns out to be pretty tough. It can handle days when computers go down, and it can handle days when traffic builds from more and more directions. We now have a way to get from here to there under some pretty rough circumstances. And millions of us are doing just that. As of this writing there are over twenty million people around the world using Internet.
Universities and research centers often have large collections of reference material that they are willing to share. They put the material in digital form and leave it on computers that can be accessed through the Internet and other networks. These files of material can then be transferred over the net. Whole books can be transferred in this way, as can photographs, research reports, or anything else that can be put in a digital form.
While vast amounts of information are now available, you can only get the information if you know where it is. Essentially, you need a card catalog for all the thousands of computers on the Internet. Creating such a catalog is no easy process because of all the thousands of sites involved and because the information available changes every day. You also need to know the commands to instruct one computer to copy information from another. These commands aren't all that complicated, but they are cumbersome and easy to mistype. The result is, lots of information is available, but getting to it (and getting it to you) can be more difficult than we would like. Several responses have been made to this problem. The two that are the best known are Gopher and the World Wide Web. We will look at Gopher in this chapter and the World Wide Web in the next.
In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Institute in Geneva. Researchers at several locations were preparing reports on joint research. Combining the documents they were preparing was often cumbersome and time consuming. Berners-Lee wanted a way to let these research groups write independently, but then later combine their work into a single document. He decided to create a hypertext system in which documents could be linked in many ways. Reading the resulting documents would be novel in that readers could jump from a topic in one document directly into a similar topic in a related document. At least they could if there were software to create this link.
To accomplish this end, Berners-Lee had to establish a language for creating hypertext, a systematic approach to moving such documents from one computer to another over networks, and a system of addresses. This took three years and a great deal of help gathered from electronic mail discussion groups, alt.hypertext and comp.infosystems.www (Wiggins,36). At roughly the same time Marc Andreesen, a student at the University of Illinois, created Mosaic, a "browser," or interface to the system. Mosaic was attractive, relatively bug-free, and instantly popular. Meanwhile, important extensions were added so that the Web could handle images.
To those who were used to staring at screens of straight text, the Web looked like a totally different animal. It had color, multiple text sizes, and full color images. The old Internet was dull; the Web was beautiful. Suddenly it was cool to have a "home page" on the Web. Music groups, sports organizations, even the White House, created home pages on the Web with attractive graphics and links to a variety of documents. You could download the President's latest press release or last year's draft picks just by clicking on a place on the screen.
For students to experience real science, they need access to more data, to real observations rather than numbers pulled from a lab manual. From time to time, they also need to deal with numbers that just don't make sense -- false readings or unexpected phenomena. Experience with real data can begin at an early age. One of the principles of KidsNet is that elementary school students should have some opportunities to collect data, share it with others, and form conclusions from the data they receive. In one exchange, students collect information about pets and send it to other classrooms on the net. Students then graph out the kinds of pets that are found around the country looking for patterns. Such activities may not be "science" in the way we usually think of it, but this is actually a good way for young students to gather data and try to make sense of it -- the heart of science.
Dick Upton's middle school students in Platteville, Wisconsin connected to a project called "Journey North," in which a group of arctic explorers send back data they gathered as they crossed to the North Pole. They tagged a number of migrating animals, and let schools collect data from radio collars. One of the more interesting moments came as one of the signals remained stationary for days. The event was unpredictable and left students wondering whether they were looking at broken equipment of a dead animal. There was no way of being sure, so students were introduced to the inherent uncertainties of science.
John Thompson's eighth grade classroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin demonstrates this approach quite well. He spent hours making email connections around the world until he found a teacher in Mamelodi, South Africa who had similar interests. Once they found each other, they planned a series of activities that would let their students interact directly. John and his South African peer framed the discussion as a cultural exchange. What are the major daily experiences of people across the world? They had students take a look at their own cultures -- housing, schooling, clothing, recreations -- and then send a description of that daily life to peers across the world.
To facilitate exchanges, students were paired up and wrote to each other several times. The hope was that once students got to know each other, dialogue would be easier, and might lead to deeper discussion of daily live. Much of that seems to have happened. Email connectivity in South Africa is more limited than in the US, so responses took several days, but students were able to connect directly to a student like themselves and compare the basic elements of their daily lives.
As is often the case, students found they had much more in common than they had thought. Reared on movies that make Africa appear to be nothing but a backdrop to Tarzan adventures, American students were surprised to learn than their peers in Mamelodi wore shoes, lived in houses, and took the train to school. In short, in many ways their lives were like the lives students in Milwaukee were living. Unfortunately, both groups also found they were afraid of all the guns in their community and wanted to move away from all the violence.
In October 1995 ENGLISH JOURNAL, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of English, dedicated an entire issue to the Electronic Classroom. They had ten high school teachers describe the uses they were making of the Internet for writing instruction. Here is an encapsulated description of several of these articles:
"Reading and Writing in a Virtual School," Harry Noden
Noden began with email by using a PBS bulletin board called Learning Link. His eighth grade students were instructed to email their compositions to the bulletin board where students in other schools around the country read the essays and commented on them. Readers were advised to use PQP (praise, question, polish) as a commenting strategy so students received positive comments along with reminders to correct spelling errors.
"The I-Search Paper Goes Global," Chris Davis
To help his high school sophomores find more information for research papers, Davis helped his students find a newsgroup on the Internet that was related to each of their research topics. One student was able to use this approach to receive comparisons of various colleges, and another student was able to enliven his report on aliens with lots of first hand reports from people who were absolutely convinced they had been visited from outer space. The real advantage of these newsgroups may be an awareness by students that there are people out there who are currently discussing any topic they could possibly think of. Whether the topic is alien visitors or the works of Thomas Pynchon, there are ongoing electronic discussion involving thousands of people.
"Using Telecomputing Technology to Make World Connections," Donna Graves
Her eighth grade students sent their essays to a service from America Online called "World Classroom." Her students were free to exchange writing with classrooms around the world that seemed to have similar interests. Several of her students had a lively exchange with some Russian students about Russian music, but the topic quickly turned to current events when President Boris Yeltsin opened fire on his Parliament Building. Students in Moscow gave her students daily eyewitness accounts of the action.
"Canada's Wired Writers," Trevor Owen
Canada has established a Writer in Electronic Residence (WIER) Program that assigns professional writers to groups of classrooms around the country. Students send their writing to the professional writer and to other schools. They receive reactions both from peers and from the professionals. It gives students an opportunity to learn what professional writers might think of their poetry. For the local teacher, it is a chance to bring additional expertise into the classroom, while the professional can "meet" with students without having to travel around Canada.
A social studies class is reviewing the political ads displayed in the Campaign 96 Web site. After discussing the use and misuse of political advertising, the teacher suggests a joint assignment with a English class that is currently writing argumentative papers. Students will write papers that support or attack one of the national candidates. Students with the same position meet to share evidence and help each other strengthen their arguments.
A computer studies class is teaching students how to surf the net, and has students write their own Web page as part of the unit. Part of each page is to be about the history of technology in America and students' perceptions of where technology will take civilization. A history teacher makes that part of the Web page an assignment in her class as well.
Interdisciplinary projects and student cooperation are hardly new in schools, but a number of forces are ensuring that joint assignments will become more common. One major force is the entire school restructuring movement. Jerry Villars sums up the reasons for this movement with his comparison of school emphases in the industrial age and the information age.
One of the first choices we have with using telecommunications is how much we actually want our students to see. Elementary school teachers regularly hide virtually the entire process from their younger students, using adult volunteers to type in messages and send them out. Meanwhile in many high schools, students are expected to run the entire process from logging on to downloading files.
Maybe a good way to start is to list the skills that telecommunications requires. We will look at each and let teachers decide for themselves whether their students are ready to perform these tasks unaided.
Keyboarding: It is now common for students in third and fourth grade to receive some instruction in touch typing. But using a computer is more than learning basic typing. Students have to be able to find some of the specialized computer keys. For email it is crucial that they can find the @ character. They also have to understand that spaces (and lack of spaces) are important. If they send a message to me at this address:
bwresch@fsmail.uwsp.edu
the message will arrive. If they add just one space, like this address
bwresch @fsmail.uwsp.edu
the message will not arrive. Typing email addresses may require more attention to detail than young students are ready for. For that reason, many teachers have their young students type the message, but parent volunteers (or librarians) type in the email addresses.
Network Connections: Establishing a link between an individual computer and the network that will carry email traffic can vary from the simple to the complex. Professional networks like America Online supply software that creates a simple interface on the screen and does most of the work for users. University networks tend to be much more complicated. You may need to know a particular phone number and answer a series of questions about your machine so the university computer can arrange your screen in a readable manner.
Helen Adams, Library Director of the Rosholt, Wisconsin Public Schools has developed a high school library with a mix of all the resources listed above, plus a range of the traditional materials -- books, magazines, and encyclopedias. Given that environment, it is common for teachers in the school to expect their students to do multiple searches. They are supposed to look for local books in the card catalog and university books in the UW-Stevens Point on-line card catalog. They are to use on-line encyclopedias and printed encyclopedias. They are to use several different CD-ROM article collections.
Library staff will help with searches and will provide training for students in general library skills, but students are expected to do most of their own work. They cannot settle for one information source -- like books, but must use all the avenues. To prove that they have actually checked through the CD-ROM article collections, they are asked to print out a paper or two showing their search results. This evidence is attached to the end of their research paper.
As a result, it is clear students are being expected to learn two things simultaneously. First, of course, they are learning about the subject they are researching. Given these new information channels they are getting more data and more timely information than they could have before. So they are learning in their content area. But it is clear there is a second agenda through all these assignments. Students are being taught general information skills. Specifically, they are being taught 1) information now exists in digital form 2) it is stored in a range of formats 3) it can be searched for with multiple tools 4) connections exist to "reach" for information anywhere in the world.
When the state of Texas began creating the Texas Educational Network, it began with the premise that a computer linked to TENET would sit on the desk of every teacher in the state. The network would be first and foremost a teacher's resource. A essential part of that resource would be nothing more complicated than simple electronic mail. Their sense was that teachers need email even more than students.
Why email? If you think about it, teachers are virtually inaccessible during the work day. They can call out at lunch (if they don't have lunchroom duty), or during a prep period (if they actually get one), but are totally tied up the rest of the day. Enter email. Like voice mail, you can leave a message even if the person is busy or out of the room. Unlike voice mail, you can leave a message even if the phone lines are busy -- the network will keep retrying until it can pass the message on. The value of this avenue of communication is best demonstrated by two teachers at Rosholt High School. They teach in the same hallways of the same building. Yet they never get a chance to talk during the day. Their response? They send email messages to each other before and after school.
If getting a hold of one teacher seems difficult, image trying to speak with a group, all at different schools. Yet that is the situation faced weekly by district athletic directors. The solution? Athletic directors in Wisconsin are in the process or forming their own electronic mail connection so they can exchange scores from local competitions, and information about their teams. One of the most critical times for these directors is tournament time when football teams may be playing games all over the state. Each team wants to know the outcome of games elsewhere in the state so they know who they will play next. Email will give them that information faster and with fewer phone calls.
Pornography: In January 1996, the German government charged Compuserve's German operation with allowing pornographic materials to circulate on the local net. They wanted it stopped. There are two issues at play here, free speech and commercial responsibility. In the case of free speech, we have the traditional problem of when erotic materials cross the line and become pornographic. This is a difficult line to define and is often left to local values. Since the Internet is international, we may now be faced with the novel situation of one judge in Bavaria deciding the matter for the entire planet. The second issue for Compuserve was whether they had any responsibility for the messages traveling across their system. The argument they made is that they are just like mail carrier -- they just move messages without reading them. If the post office can't be sued for sending pornographic materials, how Compuserve be sued? They are not like television that sells a product and therefore has some responsibility for what that product looks like.
While these arguments will be the focus if intense political and legal debate, there are two things certain at the moment. The first is that Compuserve agreed to shut down several sites that carried pornographic material. Compuserve gave in. The second certainty is that there is material on the net that people find objectionable. Some material is shocking to adults, and certainly is not something we would like to see in the hands of children. How much such material is there? Pick your survey. One study frequently cited by religious fundamentalists implies most of the net is carrying pornography. This is the famous Carnegie-Mellon study. The problem with the study is that it was done by a graduate student, is apparently very flawed, and was never approved by Carnegie Mellon University -- he just happens to be a student there. Other studies indicate the problem is far smaller, a minuscule slice of Internet traffic.
As teachers we need to be aware of the real problem so we don't overreact or underreact, but we also need to have policies and procedures in place that will insure our students use the Internet for educational purposes. More on that later.
What's lovely about the Internet is to be able to click on a World Wide Web button and be in France, looking through the Louvre. Click on another button, and you are touring the White House. Click on a third and you are in England. This is pretty heady stuff. One minute I am in Wisconsin, the next I am anywhere in the world. Suddenly geography stops having any meaning. Now I am be a digital presence anywhere in the world just by using my magic computer.
Or can I? Those of you in rural Wisconsin already know something about technical barriers. It all looks easy on TV, but when you try to hook up your classroom, suddenly you realize not every place is equipped. Well, what's it like in the rest of the world? Who is hooked up, and who isn't?
Let's look at that issue, not just because it is a good lesson in modern economics, but because it also has a very immediate connection to my classroom. Schools that aren't wired are schools my students can't talk to. The Internet Society tries to maintain information about who's on the net and who's not. To illustrate the connectivity of various countries around the world, they regularly update a world map showing which countries have access to the net.
The map shows that most of the world has internet access, but there are many countries, especially in Africa, where access is more limited. I spent the 1993-93 school year teaching at the University of Namibia in South Western Africa, so I know something about access limitations. In fact, my experience tells me that things are actually much worse than they appear in the map.
Modems
The principal requirement of telecommunications is that your computer somehow be linked up to a phone line. That connection is generally made by a modem -- a "modulator/demodulator." What does a modulator/demodulator do? It takes the information coming out of your computer and "modulates" it. This is to say it overlays the computer signal onto the phone signal. In the process it deals with such problems as analog phone lines, error codes, and transfer speeds. What does that mean? It has to change the signal coming out of the computer so it matches the signal used by phone lines, it has to add error checks to determine whether the signal is arriving at the other end correctly, and it has to send out the signal at a speed that is different from the speed of the computer. This is actually a lot of work, but it is done by boxes that usually cost under two hundred dollars.
What kinds of modems are there? There are two choices you get to make. Do you want an internal or external modem? What speed do you want it to go.
Internal versus external modems:
Most home computers are being sold with internal modems. This means the circuitry that does the translation of the signal is all put on a printed circuit board in one of the expansion slots of the computer. The board is about three inches by four inches and is often very cheap. The only part of it that you will see is the place at the back of the computer where you can plug in a phone line.
An external modem is usually a small case about one inch high, four inches wide and six inches deep. It has one wire that goes into the computer and a place for the phone line to go. It also has a series of lights on the front. It usually costs about fifty dollars more than the internal modem.
Which would you want? There are two issues at work. One is visibility. Since an internal modem is locked away inside the computer we can't see it work. Why would we want to? Because if a connection breaks down, you will want to know where the break occurred. If you have an external modem, you can look at the lights on front and at least see that the equipment on your end is still working. This may sound like a small thing, but it only takes one frustrating afternoon trying to make a difficult connection, and you may be glad to pay the extra money for a modem you can actually see work.
A recent front page photo in the Chronicle of Higher Education showed a long line of students at the University of Texas waiting to get access to a computer. During the course of interviews students explained how important it was for them to get to a computer to write their research papers at the end of the semester, and how angry they were that the lines were so long. The lines weren't long two years ago. It has been ten years since universities have experienced this kind of problem. Then, in the initial crunch of computer use in the early 1980s, the problem was also bad. Some universities threw up their hands and decided students should buy their own computers when they came to campus. Most universities muddled along and gradually built up fairly large computer labs that seemed to handle most student demand.
Then came Internet. Now a new surge of students hit the labs, wanting both word processors to write papers and access to the World Wide Web to do their research. Then there were students who just wanted to send email to everyone in the world, and others who just wanted to surf. Add it all up, and there were too many students spending too many hours on limited numbers of machines. So colleges are buried again. Nobody is happy, everybody thinks somebody ought to do something.
We also have exactly the same process hitting America's high schools. We had just about worked out a large enough set of computer labs so English had theirs and math had theirs and not too many toes were stepped on, and now everyone is trying to get to the one lab that has limited access to the net. It looks like 1985 all over again. Here are some recent Internet access figures
While technological developments may give us more and faster connections, politics also has a part to play. Two recent developments, Thomas and C-SPAN, demonstrate that government can become more open. In one we get on-line access to congressional information, in the other we get live coverage of political activity. Lest we get too enthusiastic, we need to pinch ourselves and remember that the cameras are often turned in C-SPAN broadcast so we can't see that the impassioned congressman is screeching at an empty house. And Thomas tells us nothing about what goes on behind closed doors or over drinks in Georgetown clubs.
Yet there is a general sense that the people have a right to know. And we are seeing more legislative information being places on the Web. Those wanting to explain the workings of government to children should have a growing array of artifacts they can show in class. Here is what a bill looks like -- here is what your congressman said yesterday -- here is the President's schedule for tomorrow.
While government becomes more transparent, the recent CompuServe pornography suit makes it clear we will have national and international action to limit what gets on the Internet. Some of the early actions seem heavy handed and could bring dangerous doses of censorship to the net. But a healthy discussion of what is acceptable in the school and in the home could take some of the more bizarre elements of the Internet out of our classrooms.
At the same time, we can expect a continuing discussion of access rights. Newt Gingrich's call for tax deductions for laptop computers is just one of the more visible moments in an ongoing debate over how we make the information highway the property of all the citizens of our nation. That debate generally centers on the cost of technology and the need to reduce the costs for those with low income. But the debate also includes discussions of training and "information literacy." The point is made that children who do not know how to drive on the information highway are disadvantaged in seeking jobs and in understanding political issues. We should expect calls from citizen groups that schools demonstrate we are making information literacy a part of the curriculum and that our graduates have proficiency in identifiable information skills.