Education and the Internet: Moving Through the Eye of the Needle
The fact that the Internet is growing exponentially is well documented. In just a few years, the Internet has changed the way we do business and the way we communicate, creating a globalized dimension to the world. Social networking is rapidly becoming popular, enabling individuals to collaborate with others around the world in ways never before possible. It is becoming the universal source of information.
According to Jefferey I. Cole, Director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School of Communication,
“the emergence of online communities is demonstrating that opportunities to be involved in common projects and idea sharing about any subject we choose and with people anywhere on Earth is possible and practical.”
Indeed, the growing participation in online communities is beginning to have a profound social impact in America and the world. Yet, many, if not most, of these social groups have little to do with scholarly pursuits. A view of the top twenty most popular websites around the globe paints a picture of who is using the Internet and the purpose for which they are using it.
America’s School Kids:
Are they learning to use the Internet?
In spite of the gigantic increase in access to more information than ever before in history, a noticeable downside is beginning to appear. Without adequate training in how to properly use the Internet, the reading habits of Americans are beginning to decline.
In a landmark study, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) gathered statistics from more than 40 studies on the reading habits and skills of children, teenagers, and adults, which reveal recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores. These are trends that are likely to have severe consequences for American society.
While increased Internet usage cannot be fully to blame for this downturn, the anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that it is not helping to improve student achievement. Some educational researchers believe that the key to successfully using the Internet as an educational tool lies in building fluency in some of the basic tasks, such as touch-keyboarding, boolean searching, and learning productivity software, like word-processors, spreadsheets, and others. Political and social pressures have played a significant role in the slow pace taken by the education community. The greatest concerns have been about access to inappropriate and inaccurate material on the Internet by young children.
Federal and state legislation has created an environment that is increasingly costly for public education institutions in terms of both dollars and manpower to combat these concerns. According to the U.S. Department of Education, almost all public schools with Internet access (96 percent) are using a variety of technologies or procedures to control student access to inappropriate material on the Internet. This has occurred largely as a result of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) enacted in 2000.
A visit to the Information Technology (IT) Department of most school districts will reveal that public schools in America are making an effort to stop illicit and inappropriate material from entering school networks. There is an absolute war being waged over the intellectual freedom to view materials on the Internet and the need to protect our youth in America.
But, schools do not control access outside of the educational environment. Indeed, there is a distinct difference between the popular commercial search engines that facilitate access to anything and everything and the scholarly focused web resources typically found on government and higher educational Internet sites. Web search engines, like Google and AltaVista, do not judge the reliability or authoritativeness of the information when a website is indexed. Wikipedia, one of the most popular online encyclopedic resources, lacks an adequate method for insuring the authority of its sources, a problem that is well-recognized by many in the educational community.
The Dark Side of the Internet
Pornography
The fact is that pornography pervades the commercial side of the World Wide Web. It is the most profitable business on the Internet. The pornography industry is larger than the revenues of the top technology companies combined, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink.
Whether an odd twist in an evolving free marketplace or a calculated duplicitous tactic, it is notable that China, which leads all other countries in the production of pornography, is also one of the top countries in the world that bans pornography in its own country. The worldwide pornography marketplace is dominated by the Asian countries, most notably China, South Korea, and Japan, bringing in over $100 billion a year.
It is no coincidence that pornography is seen as a major factor in the moral decay of society. And,Americans view pornography on the Internet more than every other country on the planet, combined. Just about anyone who has used the Internet, from young children to grandparents, knows that pornography is just a click away. To make matters worse, pornographers are aggressively implementing new strategies in marketing and technology.
Propaganda
The propaganda that pervades the commercial side of the Internet is equally disruptive to the educational community worldwide. Millions of private and commercial websites promote the causes and agendas of individuals and groups, many of whom are profit-motivated or whose ideologies are counter-productive to the good of the society as a whole.
In some ways the problem of propaganda on the Internet is more insidious than pornography. While visually-obscene materials can readily be identified, most types of propaganda are by their very nature difficult at best to recognize. Radicalism, racism, and hatred are examples of propaganda that can show up in the most innocent searches by the average individual.
While most public school systems are equipped to filter out much of this material, few are able to combat the problem in the homes of the millions of students across America. Yet, the demand for students to do their homework sets up the situation that educators are trying to avoid.
Lost without a Compass:
Discovering how to use the Internet
The Digital Future Report, sponsored by the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, has found that the Internet is perceived by users to be a more important source of information, over all other principal media, including television, radio, newspapers, and books. Eighty percent of Internet users age 17 and older consider the Internet to be an important source of information for them — up from 66 percent in 2006.
The real concern with using the Internet for finding information is that, while most of the information is reasonably accurate, we don’t know exactly how much. And, because of the sheer volume of websites, you have to really fine-tune your Boolean search and sort through the assorted commercial and personal websites to find what you need.
So, what is the real issue for the institution of education?
It begins with the origin of the information. Much of what is placed on the highly commercialized Internet does not originate from the individual or group who publish the information. People are taking what they have heard about and putting it into their own personal web sites or third-party sites, such as Wikipedia. Remember, too, that commercial search engines thrive on advertising for their existence. The likelihood of obtaining the most accurate information is reduced, because of the requirement for marketers to attract you to their site, and the search engine publishers know this.
The fundamental issue is about reliability and authoritativeness of what we are learning as students and teaching as educational professionals. Before the arrival of the Internet, reliability and authoritativeness were based largely on professional reputation, whether it be scientific researchers and practitioners, the university intelligentsia, government experts, or other individuals who had established a reputation in their profession.
We simply need to focus on providing digital resources that are based on the same standards that we relied upon before the Internet came along. Traditional book publishers know this and are jumping to create digital replicas of their time-honored traditionally hard-bound materials. Yet, many educational researchers and futurists note that this is the same old thing in a new digital binding.
The Internet has literally let loose the reigns of the scholarly and academic information that was formerly tethered in the corrals of the traditional textbook publishers. Scholarly materials are being made freely available through a wider array of digital nodes than ever before in the history of the world. Government agencies around the world are enabling access to more information than ever before. Numerous publications that were formerly for sale through the Government Publications Office are now freely accessible via the World Wide Web. Likewise, universities, colleges, and numerous other research agencies around the world are providing access to knowledge like never before.
A Matter of Fluency
Fluency is a result of learning in terms of frequency, accuracy and appropriate stimulus control, which produces retention, endurance, application, and performance stability of the changed action. Fluency in mathematics, for example, might begin with the basic numbers 1 through 10 and develop up to and including equations leading to infinity and beyond. Fluency in reading the English language usually begins with the 26 letters of the alphabet and develops to the ability to read and discover the world’s greatest treatises.
Man’s ability to synthesize new ideas from the things in which he has become fluent is the essence of learning. As the young child grows, the mind develops through the process we call learning, achieving higher and higher levels of fluency through repetitive attention to the concepts provided to them. The child can learn some concepts on his or her own, yet the formal pattern for achieving this development of the young child’s mind is through what we formally call education.
It is widely recognized that young children first develop the capacity for concrete thinking. And, as children increase their knowledge base and patterns begin to emerge, abstract thought processes begin to develop. Fluency demands that the individual begin at some basic concept and build on this concept, adding additional concepts, until the mind has developed to a point that the individual can begin to independently process new ideas. This is the essence of abstract thought.
In the United States, public education institutions are tasked to instruct young children in the conduct of reference and research. Most state education standards emphasize this, identifying goals, standards, and conditions in education legislation that pertain to reference and research.
Wanted: Software Applications designed for Education
The design of educational support software applications must enable a student to quickly and easily learn how to use the resources within the application. The student should have a digital media retrieval application (via integrated web browser) that can provide direct access via the Internet to reliable and authoritative materials without the interference of personal and commercial websites. This will greatly reduce the problems associated with confronting illicit, inappropriate, and otherwise, innocuous materials.
Similarly, the application should provide a tool for performing word processing tasks from note taking through writing extensive reports with footnotes. A presentation tool is also a necessity in the education environment. Likewise, access to a spreadsheet program would greatly enhance the student’s ability to perform higher level analytical research. A resource for including graphics in student-designed work is also important, particularly the ability to create and design graphic images exclusively for original student work. Likewise, the burgeoning growth in popularity of concept mapping as a tool for learning should also be considered in the design and creation of educational support applications.
ARC Light: Providing the Needed Focus
ARC Light is a tool that facilitates quality searching for reliable and authoritative information on the Internet. It is significant to note that ARC Light overcomes most of the pitfalls associated with the commercial web that are described in this article. It does not prohibit the user from going to any site on the Internet; rather, it simply provides the user with easy access to quality reference resources. For all of its simplicity, ARC Light is in reality a collection of some of the most powerful resources available for use in the education environment.
Fowler’s Internet Library, LLC, has designed an application that gives the user easy access to the major portals for scholarly information. These resources focus on individuals and organizations that have had their scholarly works published on the World Wide Web, predominantly in Government and higher educational institutions. All resources have their own search engines that facilitate finding needed information, without interspersing the thousands of commercial web sites that are common in commercial search engines.
ARC Light is an example of the type of educational support software that teachers and students can quickly adapt and integrate in any curriculum. The applications support both individual and group work. As students become fluent with the resources in ARC Light, they discover that the notion of reliability and authoritativeness are, indeed, alive and well on the Internet. And, the powerful thing about ARC Light is that it can be used from the conception of an original idea and continue through the completion of the final, polished, product.
David Fowler