Home PublicationsL&LIssuesVolume 23 (1995-1996) November (No. 3)

What Is the Internet?

Answering the Teacher’s Question

By Daniel T. Lake

When I first learned about the Internet, I was told it was a superhighway, a “network of networks”; The analogy made sense to me, but it did not explain the term in its functional sense. A highway going where? A highway for what purpose? Was it a highway to connect post offices in an electronic world? Who built it? What can travel upon it? These were questions that immediately came to mind. Frankly, the definition left too much unsaid.

Now, after years of trying to define the term for myself, I have finally found an effective response to the teacher’s question, “What is the Internet?”; The most effective way to understand the term Internet from a classroom perspective is to understand its functionality within an educational setting. The Internet is really three things to a teacher or student:

1. A place to talk.
2. A place to get organized information.
3. A place to organize and put information.

Understanding these three components of the Internet world can help teachers and students understand how to use the Information Superhighway.

A Place to Talk

The first component of the Internet as a place to talk might, in a more pedantic way, be called the Discourse component. It is here that teachers and students engage in the exchange of intellectual ideas. Although in using the Internet we are moving to discourse that involves visual and auditory exchanges using common tools ( CU-SeeMe, for example), we are still primarily in the mode of text exchange. Thus, to explain the discourse component of the Internet model for the classroom, one must look at text-based information exchangethat is, the writing process. Most teachers and students are presently engaged in a process that involves, across all curricula, a staged series of activities. These activities may begin with brainstorming and idea generation, move to producing rough copy and editing, and end in preparing final copy and making a presentation. Throughout this process, a sense of audience and motivation are prerequisites to the task. The teacher’s role involves being the audience and creating the motivation.

This sense of audience becomes real when the audience is not the teacher, but instead is an individual or group of individuals outside the student’s own classroom. This audience may even be in a different country or culture. This audience, by being real, is a motivating factor that engages all but the most reluctant students and adds to the nature of teaching writing as a real communications process for life, not for an artificial classroom.

Of course, those using computers over the past 10 years know of the computer’s power to allow users to edit and compose with word processing tools. The software, thesaurus, and dictionary are all available electronically. The more advanced computer users are now using computers with peripheral devices, modems to extend the writing tasks to exchange ideas with distant audiences. By using electronic mail, bulletin board systems, listservs, newsgroups, and tools that enable ideas to be exchanged between many people in an instant, teachers and students can engage in worldwide discourse, receiving rapid responses to the ideas put forth.

The literature on educational technology is rife with examples of projects that use electronic mail and other discourse-enabling tools to provide a forum for students to write to varied and distant audiences. To extend the writing process, many teachers are shifting from using word processing tools, which have been the mainstay of most school computer programs, to using electronic mail systems.

How does this Discourse component relate to the Internet model? Many teachers today are first introduced to the Internet via a simple modem and electronic mail software. By using almost any system, public or private, teachers can engage in discourse for personal and professional en hancement. Because teachers are being supplied with classroom-based computers and local-area network access to wide-area networks, many are seeking to add telecommunications skills to their repertoire of tools. The ability to supply real audiences to students who are engaged in the writing process is usually the first component of the Internet model that teachers understand. It is an easy model to justify and demonstrate, one that can yield almost immediate results.

Getting Information

The second component—the Internet as a place to get information— can be termed the Resource Location component. Teachers and students can meet librarians and archivists on the Internet. Our collected heritage, our very culture, is becoming available digitally, through the work of people who gather, organize, and teach others how to use and interpret information. All teachers have a stake in showing students how to locate and process information in all modalities, how to use it for moral and ethical purposes, and how to transform it into knowledge and wisdom. Indeed, our librarians are now becoming information specialists.

Many of our schools are bound by constraints to accessing information. Distance, time, money, community standards, and physical structures can all limit what information can be placed in the hands of students. With new tools and the cooperation of the institutions housing the artifacts of our heritage, these boundaries are being tran scended. Information is readily available to anyone, anywhere, and in such abundance that the task of processing it has changed dramatically. As more and more computers are placed in classrooms, labs, libraries, and homes, the task has changed from finding enough information to sorting out the right kind of information.

New tools, such as Gopher or World Wide Web/Mosaic client/server structures, have begun to make the location of the right kind of resources a more palatable process. Veronica servers, Archie servers, World Wide Web Worms, and other tools are being developed to aid in the resource loca tion tasks of an intellectual world traveler.

It is obvious to educators that the Resource Location component is closely related to the Internet model: We can use new tools on many public and private systems to go “out” to the Internet and easily obtain information without great cost or effort. Locating and capturing information is now pos sible at many online sites and is not bounded by the walls of a library. And librarians, the gatekeepers who formerly guarded our treasures and allowed us access to information, are now challenged to redefine their roles in a number of ways. Assisting all learners in using the tools for resource loca tion is just one of their important roles for the future.

Posting Information

The third component the Internet as a place to put information can be termed the Resource Creation component. This component, which has only recently been applied to the Internet, presents the Internet as a constructible resource instead of simply a superhighway.

The term “superhighway” suggests a structure that is separate from the many communities it connects. The Resource Creation component suggests that the superhighway connects us to an intellectual world in which we construct our communities and their collective heritage. This idea is based on a social constructivist model in which we create a sense of our community’s “self” by choosing what to digitize and how to place it on the Internet.

This component is excellent for the classroom because it requires higher order thinking and decision making that parallels what happens in the workplace. Collectively creating materials and organizing them to mean something is a motivating and exciting task, one that can have meaningful and distinct results. The process is driven by the need to create a product.

This component requires tools that extend beyond the idea of the Internet. The tools must assist us in capturing meaningful information and placing it in a universally accessible format. Digitizing equipment, standardized file types, and new tools for dissemination are now avail able. (Again, Gopher and World Wide Web/Mosaic client/servers are ex amples.) Changing our students’ frame of reference from being users to becoming creators of Gopher servers and World Wide Web servers is al ready beginning. Teaching students to use scanners and digital cameras now begins when students are very young.

Our schools are places where young people learn but are not yet part of the work force. In training for the future, students need to learn to use the tools for creating products. If the Internet is viewed as a place to create and we have a cadre of students learning to digitally create material, it is logical to suggest that we not separate the learning from the doing. By combining digitizing tools, training programs, and online access to a major system, students can construct materials that represent our com munities’ most unique features.

Placing our cultural and historical heritage in the hands of teachers and students (with the guidance of professional librarians and archivists) with the purpose of creating a sense of community provides a view of the Internet as a very rich intellectual environment in a state of constant construction.

A Personal Experience

When a technology planning group questioned me about how to plan for the future use of telecommunications in their K–12 school, I gave the following answer:

What in your community is unique enough to share with the world? Find it. Digitize it. Organize it. Create your community’s “self”. And use the kids to do it, because they are the ones who need to learn to use the tools and develop the skills in order to benefit from your community’s existence in the electronic world they will work within. They also have the time and energy to invest if you can motivate them.

The community members I was advising lived in a small rural community that had a major agricultural research facility and some fine natu ral forest resources. It was known for farming and recreation, so the tech nology group decided to focus upon those specific features. They then incorporated this information into a hypermedia-based report and sub mitted their plan to their local school board.

Summing Up

The Resource Creation component relates to the Internet model in a most fundamental way. It suggests that the Internet is more than an in formation delivery systemit is also an intellectual environment within which we are beginning to create “places.” In other words, it is a place that is not yet here, but is quickly becoming a world of places.

The three components of the Internet model are conceptual. Thinking in these terms may be artificial. After all, in the real world a good discussion can be archived, made searchable by keywords, and become a resource. A good resource can become a topic for discussion. However, the separation of the Internet model into its three components enables teachers to under stand the Internet as it applies to their classrooms and their homes.

Thus, we arrive at an effective response to a teacher’s question, “What is the Internet?” We can answer by asking three questions:

• Do you (or your students) wish to exchange written ideas?
• Do you (or your students) wish to get information?
• Do you (or your students) wish to disseminate something you (or they) have created?

 The answers direct and inform the teacherand you as the teacher trainer or colleague. This approach shifts the focus from studying the Internet itself to having the teacher consider why one would use the Internet in the first place.

These three components of the Internet model can help introduce teachers to the Internet and show them how they can introduce their stu dents to this wonderful resource. The question “What is the Internet?” is a perfect opening for a teacher to discuss the ways technology can benefit us. Let’s not pass it up!

Daniel T. Lake, Central NY Regional Information Center, Onondaga/Cortland/Madison Board of Cooperative Educational Ser vices, 6820 Thompson Road, Box 4774, Syracuse, NY 13221-4774; Dlake@ocmvm.cnyric.org

Two Projects Using the Resource Creation Component

The Erie Canal Project

Using 500 images supplied by the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, New York, 15 teachers were trained at the OCM BOCES to use PhotoShop and digitizing scanners to archive all the images for the creation of a CD-ROM and a World Wide Web server. All this work supports the teaching of New York state history in grades 4–8. Not only will the archived material be organized to support the curriculum, but it will also be organized so that it can be restructured by the museum in support of its goals. By plac ing this one segment of Syracuse’s cultural history on the Internet, a model will be created for additional communities along the Canal to build their “places” so that Syracuse can link to them. In the process, Syracuse-area teachers and students will use an educational multimedia lab that serves as a point of reference for the Internet structure and demonstrates a model for use of in-school digital resources. It is available online through a World Wide Web server at www.cnyric.org.

The Erie Canal Museum, Syracuse, New York.

The Art Server Project

Using more than 300 images from an extensive collection of ceramic art at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, teachers and students from Fayetteville–Manlius High School are creating an interdisciplinary World Wide Web server that primarily supports the art curriculum but can also be used to study all aspects of ceramic sculptures, ranging from con ducting chemical analyses of glazes in chemistry classes to writing the biographies of famous ceramicists in English classes. The resources cre ated will themselves become the contents of student-created hypermedia reports. These reports will in turn become models placed back on the art server. The project then becomes not only a resource but also a reflection of the community that both creates and uses the resource. This resource is available on a World Wide Web server at www.fmhs.cnyric.org.

Student work sample from the Art Server Project.

Copyright © 1995, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved.