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Illinois School Board Journal
September/October 2001

Does this all compute?

by Linda Dawson

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 98 percent of all U.S. public schools had access to the Internet by the fall of 2000, compared to just 35 percent six years earlier. Online education, whether as an adjunct of classroom environment or as an individualized learning experience, is growing exponentially across the United States.

In a forward to "The Power of the Internet for Learning: Moving from Promise to Practice," a report to the Web-based Education Commission, former Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Nebraska) as chairman and Representative Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia) as vice chairman, wrote:

"The Internet is a promising tool. Working together, we can realize the full potential of this tool for learning. With the will and the means, we have the power to expand the learning horizons of students of all ages."

Using the Internet as an educational tool marks a shift in the way children are educated. The typical classroom setting with one teacher "did not originate with Adam and Eve," according to Robert A. Dierker in "The Future of Electronic Education," as published in The Electronic Classroom: A Handbook for Education in the Electronic Environment. "Most likely it evolved as a way to manage (maximize) human and physical resources, primarily consisting of teachers and the various forms of the printed word."

But technological developments "have combined to result in an opportunity to change the basic nature of the educational experience," he writes.

Dierker suggests rethinking the process of education from start to finish, "not because of the alleged failures of the past … but because of major consequential opportunities that now exist but that were only fantasy a few years ago, let alone when our present educational model was initiated."

Like others who contributed to The Electronic Classroom, Dierker advocates embracing the newest digital technologies, incorporating them into today's learning experiences and emerging with a new model for education.

However, David D. Thornburg, noted speaker and founder of the Thornburg Center, acknowledges that this can be frightening for traditional educators. He compares the magnitude of change inspired by the new digital age to Guttenberg's introduction of the printing press in the Middle Ages.

Instantaneous access to information via the World Wide Web makes the content delivery-based education model obsolete, he writes. When children have access to 50 channels or more of cable television, the Internet and e-mail with students of all ages at home, how satisfied will they be in a classroom environment led by a teacher who controls their access to information obtained from outdated textbooks?

While this new learning seems inevitable, not everyone shares the view that this will be an improvement.

Clifford Stoll, author of High Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian, says there is no shortcut to education and that adding computers actually can slow up the learning process.

Stoll compares a teacher asking students to take out their pencil and paper to a classroom where students must take out their laptops, boot up their computers and access the files they previously created.

"What ought to take 30 seconds now swallows five minutes, if everything goes well. One morning, a student couldn't get Windows to run because his computer had picked up a virus. That distraction cost the class another 10 minutes, as the teacher struggled to get the machine to work," Stoll writes.

"As much as I love computers, I can't imagine getting an excellent education from any multi -media system. Rather than augmenting the teacher, these machines steal limited class time and direct attention away from scholarship and toward pretty graphics."

Teachers will always play a role in education. However, as with the change brought about by Guttenberg's printing press, change is inevitable as computers are integrated into the learning process. Only time will tell what the full potential and promise of computers as learning tools will be.