Thinking About Internet

Thank Internet, because it's through it only that I could reach you dear reader! I use it very often, in fact it is the only resource available to me at present to use my time productively!! For past few years I have used it to help many young students to educate themselves, through the Vimarsh eforum, scribd, and wikipedia. In the process I have myself learned a lot, for example, to think!!! So, in this article today, I want to register my present thoughts about Internet. We all know that it is a global system of interconnected personal computers that are connected to one another through networks of server computers. Its history can be traced back to 1958, when USSR's launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA or DARPA) to regain a technological lead. It has indeed come a long way, because today it can help people almost anywhere in the world to receive e-mail messages, search for and read articles about almost any topic; access music, video or software made available from diverse sources, in short get any sort of information. It is now even being used to replace telephone people can use it to chat, promote and upgrade their network of friends and so on. I am thinking about its impact on education. Not very long ago, Education was synonymous with information. Most of the education concentrated on transfer of information from the teacher to the student. Today, I can indeed ask is that all education about? Several decades ago, when the channels for information were very limited, the lectures delivered by a teacher and the textbooks. But is that true today? Today, a student gets information through several media besides them, say the electronic media, which includes the Internet prominently! The role of education cannot just be getting/giving information, it must be analysing and filtering various information that one is exposed to - using information one can find otherwise. Education is not just to collect information, rather it is the ability to analyse information intelligently. But somehow the dominant educationists in our country appears to be of the view that it is enough if students assimilate information, that is included in a course curriculum, passed on to them through the teachers and books, and then evaluating them on this count mainly! Here I would like to quote a paragraph or two from an article written by Roger C Schank. In the articled entitled WHAT TO KNOW, HOW TO LEARN IT, he wrote: We know that a computer, for instance, can be programmed to have encyclopedic knowledge about random facts, but I don't believe that this would mean it is "intelligent", any more than I would consider a person who merely has the ability to spout random facts to be intelligent. But despite what we know about how people learn and the very make up of intelligence, schools remain firmly grounded in the learning model that emphasizes facts and downplays doing. This separation of learning from doing is very detrimental to all. It has become fashionable recently to define intelligence by using various "literacy lists." The bookstores are full of lists of different kinds of facts--scientific, cultural, even religious facts--all purporting to explain exactly what it is that a person must know to be "literate." The idea here is that being educated means knowing stuff. Implicit in all this is that we have, as a society, agreed on what stuff everyone should know, and decided that information delivery is the role of education. Do not believe it. There is no set of stuff that everyone should know. What? No George Washington? No Gettysburg Address? It doesn't hurt to know these things, of course. But it does

hurt to adopt the position that since one should know these things, teaching them to students is what learning is all about. This makes school a fairly boring, stressful, and irrelevant place, as you may have already discovered. Facts are not the currency of learning, nor does mastery of them indicate anything about an educated person. Facts play a big role in the education system because they are so easy to test. And, it is tests (usually highly irrelevant tests) that have helped shape your learning since you were six. Curiously, most important things that people know they cannot explicitly recall or state as facts. What is the right way to get the person of your dreams interested in you? How does one pursue a successful career? Was the United States wrong to believe in "Manifest Destiny"? Is the situation in Bosnia really all that similar to Nazi Germany, or is it more like Vietnam? An educated person might have answers for these questions. But they are not simple questions and there are no simple answers for them. Being educated means being able to understand the questions and knowing enough relevant history to be able to make reasoned arguments. Making reasoned arguments, not citing history, is the key issue here. Learning to think and express what one has thought in a persuasive way is the real stuff of education. What is the currency of learning? It is a preparedness to be wrong, a willingness to fail, and the ability to focus on one's confusion in hope of being able to create or being able to understand an explanation that will make things clearer. ..............more I think that the Internet can indeed facilitate a student to learn all this. Because, it is only through internet that a person can access the same information presented in different manners; widely different opinions, which if a student is able to digest, are abundantly useful for such education. I do not think that any author can indeed present information, knowledge, opinion in a way that is universally appealing. Just as, every young man will not fall in love with a particular lady, howsoever beautiful, not every student comprehends a subject as easily through any particular pesentation, whether in the form of lecture or a book. Every person has one's own limitations. To use the Internet in such a useful manner, one has to learn the art of searching; to look through the very brief description that a search engine yields, to use one's time and patience in a fruitful manner, just sitting comfortably in a room, to spread out the effort required to one's own schedule rather then being constrained by any sort of time-table!!! It can help teachers to become educators (if they can indeed be induced to do so!!), as bill allin has written in a beautiful piece that is available here on scribd itself: My now-deceased first wife was a far better teacher than I was. I was an educator. What's the difference? A teacher teaches a prescribed curriculum, a manageable collection of facts and skills, testable and widely accepted as part of the general education of a child. An educator grows children. I joined the profession because I admired her skill as a teacher. I learned later that her teaching skill was greatly helped by her knowledge, which she gained as a voracious reader. I was a nonreader at the time, in fact in today's terms I would be known as functionally illiterate. ..... Another mode in which the internet can be used to enhance learning is called e-learning. Early e-learning systems, based on Computer-Based Learning/Training often attempted to replicate autocratic teaching styles whereby the role of the e-learning system was assumed to be for transferring knowledge, which encouraged the shared development of knowledge. As early as 1993, William D. Graziadei described an online computer-delivered lecture, tutorial and assessment project using electronic Mail, two VAX Notes conferences and Gopher/Lynx together with several software programs that allowed students and instructor to create a Virtual

Instructional Classroom Environment. In 1997 Graziadei, W.D., et al., published an article entitled "Building Asynchronous and Synchronous Teaching-Learning Environments: Exploring a Course/Classroom Management System Solution". They described a process of evaluating products and developing an overall strategy for technology-based course development and management in teaching-learning. Today many technologies can be, and are, used in e-learning, from blogs to collaborative software, ePortfolios, and virtual classrooms. .........more In fact, I tried my hand at e-learning while I was the coordinator/site administrator of Vimarsh eforum initiated by the Centre for Science Education and Communication, University of Delhi. I think that such e-forums can indeed help non curricular education, provided there is a dedicated and motivated team of teachers having enough skills of finding information on the Internet and presenting it in an acceptable manner to the student. Rakesh Mohan Hallen