The WWW has made relatively little penetration into education. A large part of the problem, apart from the training and infrastructure problems mentioned previously, is the fact that most educators are adherents to the didactic method of teaching, and so they seek to employ the tenets of this philosophy in their use of the WWW. This tends to constrain applications to become electronic extensions of lecture and assessment material; material provided by the teacher for consumption by the student.
By far the greatest deployment of the WWW in education as a whole is in solving the pragmatic problems of information dissemination, particularly wide-area information dissemination. Higher education institutions such as universities appear to have embraced this as a means of delivering course content to a largely nomadic student population. An exemplar of this is the Educational Infrastructure project WWW server at Virginia Tech which hosts online course materials for many classes offered at Virginia Tech. The bulk of the material comprises static class lecture materials, online tests and assignments, news and course changes, and software and demos.
This mode of WWW usage seems to follow the well-established videotext model which became more popular in Europe, with TeleText and Minitel, than in the USA. Videotext offers a carousel of information pages that may be called up via its page number using a TV remote control or similar. TeleText uses spare lines of each frame in broadcast TV channels to deliver its content. A suitably-equipped TV can decode and display this information on the TV screen, even overlaying it on the broadcast picture, allowing for subtitling of programmes, for example.
A common use of the WWW is in delivering lecture material and handouts in electronic form, thereby creating "paperless classes" where everything is available for reading online. In practice, however, these "paperless classes" appear to generate more paper than their regular counterparts, as students tend to print out all the online materials to take to class. The poor presentational capabilities of HTML usually means less effective use of the printed page when material is delivered through the WWW, creating a higher page count when the material is printed.
Another major contribution to students printing out material from "paperless classes" is due to the poor annotation capabilities of the WWW as currently implemented via HTML and HTTP. A much better system is one in which hyperlinks and documents are stored separately from one another. This enables users to create their own links between documents; to create their own "webs" instead of only being able to navigate those created by others. Such an approach is used in the Iris Hypermedia System (Haan et al, 1992) pioneered at Brown University, which was used successfully as a resource by students in an english literature course taught there. Hyper-G (Kappe et al, 1993) also follows this general model of keeping links and documents separate, greatly improving both annotation capabilities and document maintenance.
Although wide-area dissemination addresses pragmatic concerns, it often ignores the educational dimension of the problem. For example, there is little educational difference between software (demos and applications) distributed on disc or on the WWW. The problem being solved is not an educational but a pragmatic one. For example, a student running a simulation implemented using Java on a remote server is little different to running the same simulation as native code on a PC. In fact, the latter is less prone to problems of access caused by network and server failures. The main convenience provided by the Java simulation is in not having to distribute the software physically via disc or CD-ROM. This increases availability and decreases costs. However, this solves an economic and pragmatic problem, not an educational one.
Similarly, WWW-based applications providing distributed collaboration or test-taking are often artificial and cumbersome attempts at providing high-tech solutions to problems more easily solved face-to-face in the classroom. Collaboration between students within the same class is best performed in real-life, rather than by artificial online means. By the same token, online testing is a high-tech facsimile of what many educators consider to be a poor assessment technique anyway. When proctoring problems are factored in, it is probably easier to administer a multiple-choice exam in class using opscans graded by optical mark recognition (as is done for multiple-choice exams at Virginia Tech), where time constraints and proctoring can be properly monitored, than by offering it online via the WWW. Largely, such online applications are solving artificial problems, and are not meeting the needs of educators. In many cases, they create more work than they solve. For example, authoring computer-based testing is often far more laborious for the K-12 educator than simply delivering the same thing on paper, especially when taking into account the learning curve.
A central theme of this wide-area dissemination approach is that it seeks to emulate, electronically, current practice in the real world. However, such practice is usually derived from the didactic approach, and so the electronic counterpart inherits the inappropriate baggage of that approach, limiting its ultimate success. (Campoy, 1992)
Many of the K-12 schools that are on the WWW use the medium for essentially administrative and public relations functions. Most online K-12 schools have pages that describe where the school is; delineate its policies, vision statement, and activities; list its staff; and, usually, include some school history. In many cases, links are provided to various grades or departments within the school, with those pages usually providing more detailed information about staff and facilities.
Here in Montgomery County, home of Virginia Tech, a concerted effort was made to bring all the county's public schools online on the WWW. However, within each school, the school's WWW presence is not integrated into the classroom. It usually falls to one or two lone volunteers in each school to maintain the pages. As a result, student-produced class material is usually sparse on the class pages. The school pages, out of necessity, retrict themselves mainly to relatively static information, such as that arising out of administrative or public relations material. A random sampling of other schools on the WWW tells a similar story. It is only the pioneers of the medium who are beginning to see the relevance of the WWW to their classroom activities, and these people are both consuming and producing more WWW material as part of their regular class work.
Another use of the WWW is as a bridge between the school and the community. WWW pages are an excellent vehicle for PTA and volunteer efforts to promote their activities and solicit help. Again, though, this is just another manifestation of the administrative and public relations function related above.
More are becoming aware of the collaborative knowledge possibilities of the Internet and the WWW. Not only is it a fertile storehouse of information on every conceivable topic, but it is also a rich publishing outlet for locally-produced information and resources. Increasingly, people are beginning to organise these disparate strands of useful information into topically-organised pages.
As well as teachers sharing "bookmarked" sites of interest, there are some good starting points where educators can find links to useful classroom resources and information. Yahoo has a large education section, well-organised with a good user-interface, and even has an entire service targetted towards youngsters: its Yahooligans service. These are good starting points for educators wishing to get in contact with other educators and materials on the WWW. Web66 also contains much practical advice on the mechanics of getting a school online on the WWW.
Although this is very much a step in the right direction, such online resources are essentially passive repositories of classroom information, albeit useful. Effective use of the WWW in the classroom needs to go beyond that, however, and integrate the WWW as part of the curriculum, both as a source of up-to-date information (both recorded and cultural) and real-world audiences for student-produced material. The information potential of the Internet needs to be harnessed in the classroom.
Copyright © 1996 Paul Mather, All Rights Reserved
Paul Mather
<paul@cs.vt.edu>
Last modified: Sun Nov 24 23:19:53 1996