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COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM January 2000/Vol. 43, No. 1 19
Log On Education
Elliot Soloway, Cathleen Norris, Phyllis Blumenfeld, Barry Fishman,
Joseph Krajcik, and Ronald Marx
K-12 and the Internet
The Internet as a learning tool has its highs and lows,
its positive and negative aspects. But wherever you stand on
the bumpy ride, the Net uniquely supports learning.
BEATA SZPURA
Learning is promoted when
information resources and
discourse around artifacts and
ideas are readily and routinely
available to teachers and
students. But classrooms
are islands in their schools
and in their communities.
From the brick-and-mortar
by which our schools are
built, through concerns for
child safety, our classrooms
have come to be sur-
rounded by a nonperme-
able membrane that blocks
the entry of ideas, events,
people, and artifacts. For all
this membrane’s strength, a
thin phone line is breaking
through, connecting class-
rooms to the outside world.
While there is considerable debate
over the value of the Internet in U.S.
elementary education—K-12
(kindergarten through 12th grade,
which starts at about five years old
and finishes at around 17 years
old), the naysayers can only slow
down the process; the Internet is
coming to each and every school
and classroom.
In this column, we explore the
ways in which the Internet
uniquely supports learning. First,
we argue why students need access
to information resources. We then
describe two projects that link chil-
dren with Internet-based resources.
Next, we argue why discourse is
central to learning and education
and present two projects encourag-
ing all manner of communication
over the Internet. Finally, we dis-
cuss a significant challenge that
stands in the way of realizing the
Internet’s potential in K-12: creat-
ing a robust, reliable technological
infrastructure.
DISCUSSIONS OF USING THE
Internet in K-12 have brought
forth the comment that “our skill-
free children are already over-
whelmed by information even
without the Internet. They don’t
need more?”(David Gelertner,
“Should Schools be Wired to
the Internet? No—Learn
First, Surf Later, Nation, Vol.
151, No. 20, 1998). But
underlying this negativism
about providing children with
ready access to resources is a
Neanderthal theory of learn-
ing. Gelertner says: “Tell stu-
dents to sit down and shut up
and learn; drill it, memorize
it, because you must master it
whether it’s fun or not.”
While there are surely situa-
tions where memorization is
appropriate, commanding stu-
dents to learn does not result
in deep learning or create thought-
ful, informed, empowered learners.
Ready access to resources is
indeed key if we are going to sup-
port the high standards set by the
American Association for the
Advancement of Science and the
National Research Council. The
NRC states: “Inquiry into authen-
tic questions generated from stu-
dent experiences is the central
strategy for teaching science.”
Picture this: A class of 30, 12-
year-olds troop up to the school
20 January 2000/Vol. 43, No. 1 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
librarian; each student then asks
the librarian his or her own par-
ticular driving question in search
of resources, such as:
• Why do earthquakes stop?
• How do volcano eruptions
affect the weather?
• How did the last glacial retreat
affect Ann Arbor’s local geology?
No school library—probably
no town or city library—is going
to be sufficiently well-stocked to
provide timely, grade-level appro-
priate, accessible (words, pictures,
video, and so forth) resources to
address the full range of questions
that children raise. The only way
children are going to find
resources that address their ques-
tions is by using the Internet.
Information Must Be
Ready-at-Hand
D. Diderot (1713–1784) must
have parented teenagers. Unless a
book is literally within arm’s
reach, a teenager will not expend
the extra effort to retrieve it. That
observation must have led
Diderot and his colleagues to
compile a 75-volume Encyclope-
dia and thus make all the then-
extant knowledge truly
ready-at-hand—at least to the few
individuals who were wealthy
enough to buy a set.
Diderot would have loved the
Internet. It promises to place all
knowledge within everyone’s
immediate reach.
The Internet promises to make
the cost of retrieving information
lower than it’s ever been. For stu-
dents in particular, keeping that
cost low is especially important.
Short attention spans, short class
periods, lack of expertise, and lack
of professional librarian research
support, lead children to skip the
research activities.
Keeping Our Children
Safe
Because we are talking about our
children, let’s start out by raising
the issue of safety. Estimates vary,
but roughly speaking, there are
one billion Web pages. Preventing
children from consciously finding
inappropriate materials or, even
worse, accidentally stumbling
onto such materials is absolutely
our adult responsibility.
One popular technique
employed by schools is Web filter-
ing. Through a range of technical
mechanisms, sites deemed inap-
propriate are unable to be viewed.
But there are problems with filter-
ing. For example, children won’t
be able to see medical sites that
contain the word “breast.”
Brick-and-mortar libraries don’t
filter; they vet. By their code of
conduct, librarians are not sup-
posed to act as censors; rather,
their job is to identify beneficial
resources. And the Internet most
definitely needs the services of
librarians. Curiously, though, pre-
cious few search engines employ
humans to review Web sites. As
schools become more sophisti-
cated with their Internet use, they
will demand more than filtering,
and they will put their subscrip-
tion dollars behind that demand.
WebQuests: New
Mimics Old
WebQuests are a pedagogical
classroom strategy for using Inter-
net information resources. The
basic strategy is for teachers to
provide students with specific
questions and specific URLs to
help find the answers to these
questions. Based on information
on the WebQuest home page
(edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/
webquest.html) it’s clear that
teachers and students are finding
this activity rewarding.
WebQuests are not an unrea-
sonable place to start. Children are
gaining access, most likely, to
timely information; this is defi-
nitely a plus as children—for bet-
ter or worse—tend to see even last
week’s stories as old news. And
certainly, this strategy protects
children; access to Internet search
engines is not needed, and thus
access can be disabled.
But make no mistake,
WebQuests are just “questions at
the end of the textbook chapter”
in HTML-clothing. If the Inter-
net is used simply as a vehicle to
deliver an electronic version of a
textbook, then Net access is not
worth the Herculean efforts
required for schools. We are not
going to beat textbooks: $20 per
child per year per subject matter
supplies the student body with
glossy, colorful books that parents
can see their children schlepping
around. (Reading them, of course,
is another matter.) The marginal
gain of WebQuests over compara-
ble textbook-based activities sim-
ply does not justify the enormous
expenditures schools must pay for
Internet access.
The Middle Years Digital
Library Project
Resisting the natural temptation
to give children our adult ques-
tions, the University of Michigan’s
Middle Years Digital Library
project (See mydl.eecs.umich.edu/
drivingquestions/) has created cur-
riculum units supporting teachers
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM January 2000/Vol. 43, No. 1 21
Log On Education
that allow students to generate
their own driving questions. The
children care about the questions
they generate; their focus, energy,
and final artifacts reflect that
motivation.
Now, having a class of 30, 11-
year-olds right before lunchbreak
construct scientifically meaningful,
open-ended, topic-related ques-
tions is no mean feat! In fact
teachers involved in the project
they say that supporting, cajoling,
and scaffolding children as they
develop driving questions is the
most pedagogically challenging
activity in the curriculum unit.
While the MYDL project ini-
tially had students using standard
Web search engines to find infor-
mation relevant to their driving
questions (such as OpenText), we
found that even well-intentioned,
kid-oriented search engines (such
as Yahooligans)
• Return too many hits (14,000
hits sorted alphabetically are sim-
ply unmanageable by 11-year-
olds within a 50-minute period);
• Include inappropriate material;
• Provide no place to store results
and observations; and
• Provide no thesaurus (children
need help generating good key
words).
We attempted to address these
search engine problems when con-
structing the University of Michi-
gan Digital Library (UMDL).
Some solutions:
• Instead of filtering out material,
librarians vet materials for
UMDL inclusion. We replaced a
Sisyphean Task (exclusion) with
an almost impossible task (inclu-
sion). Children, then, do not
search the Internet per se; rather
they search the materials regis-
tered in the library. Instead of a
search engine returning 17,000
hits for, say, the comet Shoe-
maker-Levy, the UMDL returns
seven hits that are relevant.
• Artemis, UMDL’s interface,
employs learner-centered scaf-
folds to help children over rough
spots when conducting research.
Teachers like the UMDL/
Artemis; by explicitly addressing
the problems children have with
search engines, teachers’ loads are
lightened, allowing for more time
to focus on pedagogy as opposed
to technology. Check out
UMDL/Artemis (www.science-
seeker.org) and may your firewall
and our Java code play nice with
each other.
The Role of Discourse in
Learning
As computer science professionals,
we spend a healthy chunk of time
attending conferences, participat-
ing in workshops, and interacting
with colleagues. It’s the only way
to keep up; it’s one of the ways we
learn. Yes, we need to spend an
equally healthy chunk of time qui-
etly digesting what we have
shared, but engaging in discourse
is a very legitimate professional
activity.
Similarly, after searching the
Internet, 11-year-olds need to talk
about why they found three differ-
ent temperatures for lava. The
group of 13-year-olds who have
become expert in air pollutants
might well be able to help
younger students who are coming
to that area of science for the first
time.
The following is a list of the
kinds of discourse that ought to
be conducted in education but
can’t right now due to the con-
straints of the classroom:
• Audience. Children, especially,
need an audience for their work.
• Critiquing. An audience that
provides critical feedback. Only
by expanding outside the con-
fines of the school can children
find knowledgeable and inter-
ested readers.
• Team work. Children have a
knack for being interested in
idiosyncratic topics. Working
alone on such topics, hitting the
walls and dead ends, is just plain
difficult. But working with a
companion makes all the differ-
ence in the world.
• Tutoring. There are simply not
enough teachers to go around;
children can help teach each
other.
Brick-and-mortar schools do
not provide enough opportunities
for these kinds of discourse. The
Internet is the only mechanism
that can provide the diversity of
opportunities for discourse that is
needed in K-12.
ACCORDING TO METCALFE’SLAW
the value of a network grows as
the square of the nodes connected
to the network. For K-12, the
value of the Internet, then, lies in
the dramatically increased oppor-
tunities for discourse. The follow-
ing are two examples of Web sites
leveraging Metcalfe’s law and pro-
viding unprecedented opportuni-
ties for student discourse.
The Jason Project. Remember
those field trips taken by bus dur-
ing the school day? No? Most
weren’t all that memorable, which
is precisely the point. Creating a
“real-world learning experience” is
a serious endeavor. The Jason
project (www.jason.org) provides
this experience. And, with the
growth of Internet, the experi-
ences will continue to improve.
Robert Ballard, discoverer of the
resting place of the RMS Titanic,
founded the Jason project, provid-
ing children year-round scientific
expeditions in their classrooms.
Using live-feeds, video cameras,
and telecommunications technolo-
gies, students can see and talk with
deep-sea divers, archaeologists, and
others. There are currently
750,000 children, up from
300,000 two years ago, utilizing
Jason.
As the number of teachers and
students participating in Jason
increases, the variety of opportuni-
ties increases dramatically; teachers
find other teachers who are inter-
ested in exploring particular geo-
graphical regions, and students
find other students to correspond
with on a particular interest.
MaMaMedia.com. Alan Kay
observes that learning is “hard
fun.” Yes, there is stress and
anguish and sweat in the process
of learning, but good educators
can create learning contexts where
joy and pleasure go hand-in-hand
with developing deep understand-
ing. Moreover, schools have no
monopoly on learning; Tinker-
toys, puzzles, card games, and
drawing all lead to considerable
learning at home.
There is no better example of
“hard” fun on the Internet than
MaMaMedia.com. Children
between the ages of six and 14 use
MaMaMedia.com after school
hours to play—to create an image,
a cartoon animation, a greeting
card, a story about today’s events,
and to converse with a digital pen
pal over a new installment of, say,
a comic book story.
MaMaMedia implements an
educational philosophy pioneered
by Seymour Papert called “con-
structivism.” In an appropriately
created environment, kids will-
ingly spend their time thinking
and doing, doing and thinking,
not just passively watching televi-
sion. Instead of spending the typi-
cal few minutes on a Web site,
children spend upwards of 30
minutes engaged on
MaMaMedia.
In October 1998, MaMaMedia
had 100,000 children logging on;
in October 1999, 700,000 users
logged on. Interestingly, besides
children and teachers finding
MaMaMedia.com engaging,
essentially all the big Internet
companies, from AOL to
Netscape, from AT&T WorldNet
to high bandwidth provider Road-
Runner, want to associate them-
selves with MaMaMedia and link
through their sites.
Challenges
There is less than a 50% probabil-
ity that on any given day kids will
be able to access the Internet from
their computers in the public
schools in Detroit, Mich. All the
mamamedia.coms and Jason pro-
jects in the world are for naught if
computers and/or networks aren’t
functional. The challenge is mak-
ing the Internet a routinely usable
resource in K-12 classrooms.
Making the Infrastructure
Work
“Internet availability is experimen-
tal. Access and speed of access is not
guaranteed.”
This is the official policy of the
Ann Arbor Public Schools
(AAPS). How does a teacher read
this policy statement? “I am com-
pletely on my own when I use the
Internet in my classroom.”
A teacher needs to create two
lesson plans—one for when the
Internet works and one for when
it doesn’t. It’s no wonder why Ann
Arbor teachers might not choose
to use the Internet.
Let’s be really honest: AAPS is
no different than most school dis-
tricts with respect to classroom
Internet use, except that they at
least publicly admit that it’s not a
supported resource.
If computers in the school are
misconfigured, then a working
network is irrelevant. As Barry
Fishman has pointed out: “Calling
school computers ‘personal com-
puters’ is an oxymoron.” They are
used eight hours a day by different
students, teachers, curriculum
coordinators, technology teachers,
and school media specialists; they
are anything but personal.
In Detroit, use of a Windows
program requires setting the mon-
itor to 256 colors; it crashes at
other settings. Heck of a program
but not atypical. Now, what’s the
probability that 30 kids using 15
computers in a lab can change
monitor settings at the beginning
of class and restore them at the
end of class? Zero. And forget
about those cute macros that
could carry out this particular
task. Who is going to set it up and
restore it when a child inadver-
tently (or not) deletes it?
PCs are simply not appropriate
for general use in schools. Public
schools are not equipped to keep
PCs up and running. Figuring in
viruses, computer crashes, ill-
22 January 2000/Vol. 43, No. 1 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
behaving programs, games loaded
by children and others, playful
exploration of the settings, and
cheap plastic keyboards and hous-
ing, PCs become rubble after a
year of student pounding. Thin-
client computing, or timesharing,
where there is only a monitor and
keyboard on the child’s desk, is the
only way to go for schools.
A major reason we see so many
problems with school computers
and their networks is that the IT
departments in school districts are
primarily focused on supporting
the needs of the administrative,
financial, and personnel groups of
the school district. Unfortunately
curricular needs are the lowest pri-
ority. Historically, computers were
first used not for curricula but to
deal with accounting, payroll, and
record keeping. Only recently has
the curricular side of school dis-
tricts demanded routine and reli-
able computing. Unfortunately
curricular needs take a back seat
when the payroll must be done, or
when attendance records must be
processed, or when 180,000
lunches need to be ordered.
In order for computing to
become a first-class citizen in the
curriculum, a major change in
mindset needs to occur in the
school district’s organization.
Teachers are not going to use
unreliable, improperly outfitted
computers on a routine basis. And
why should they? For our children
to gain the benefit of the technol-
ogy, the curricular and the admin-
istrative groups must work
together to iron out their needs
and priorities.
Conclusion
While education is continually
beset by fads, the Internet is not
one of them. The Internet is a
technology closer to fire than to
BetaMax or the Edsel. It is with-
standing the test of time. More-
over, the Internet is a natural
resource for K-12 education; it
supports access to resources and
access to discourse opportunities.
To make this point stronger:
• The only way children are going
to find resources that address
their driving questions is by using
the Internet.
• The Internet is the only mecha-
nism that can provide the diver-
sity of opportunities for discourse
needed in K-12 education.
That said, there is sincere push-
back from those that argue the
Internet’s high cost: we didn’t have
the Internet to learn when we
were in school, there’s pornogra-
phy on the Web, and so on and so
forth. While we suppose there
might be some merit to these
arguments, we can’t let ourselves
be deterred. Today’s students truly
need the Internet; it is this genera-
tion’s opportunity to revitalize
public education’s key democratic
institution.
Elliot Soloway (soloway@umich.edu) is
a professor in the College of Engineering,
School of Information, and School of Educa-
tion, Univeristy of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Cathie Norris (norris@tac.coe.unt.edu) is a
professor in the Department of Technology and
Cognition in the College of Education at the
University of North Texas.
Ron Marx, Phyllis Blumenfeld,
Joe Krajcik ([ronmarx, krajcik, blumen-
feld]@umich.edu) are professors in the School
of Education at the University of Michigan.
Barry Fishman (fishman@umich.edu) is
an assistant professor in the School of
Education at the University of Michigan.
© 2000 ACM 0002-0782/00/0100 $5.00
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