You've heard it before, but this time it's true: online technology can reform our schools.
It should not have surprised science teacher Linda Maston and her eighth-grade students at E.M. Pease Middle School in San Antonio, Texas to learn that their school's air was unhealthy - after all, the school was built without windows, and teachers had been complaining for years that they suffered headaches, sneezing, and coughing whenever they entered the building. Nevertheless, it wasn't until Maston enrolled her class in an online science project called "Your Classroom Environment" that she and her students discovered the source of the problem.
Using rudimentary equipment, including a $10 veterinarian's syringe that functioned as an air pump, Maston's students discovered that the carbon dioxide content of air inside the school reached levels of 2,200 parts per million, far surpassing the 1,000-ppm safety standard set by the World Health Organization. Even so, it wasn't until the students posted their data on the network and compared it to the far lower findings at other schools that they realized the carbon dioxide level in their classrooms was almost certainly unhealthy. The students' findings were then corroborated by district officials using more sophisticated instruments. Soon afterwards, workers repaired the school's ventilation system, promptly causing the air's carbon dioxide content to drop to normal levels. Though the school year ended soon afterward, some teachers said the severity of their ailments had already decreased.
The project is one of many online science classes offered by Global Lab, a science network for junior and senior high school students, run by a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based educational research and development center called TERC. Classes participating in the Global Lab program study topics such as acid rain, ionizing radiation, or the ozone layer. They then gather data on local conditions, post the information on the Global Lab network, and analyze it after comparing it with findings of other classes around the world. Part of Global Lab's strategy is to engage students in a way that makes them feel compelled to perform genuine scientific tasks that are plainly relevant to their lives. In this way, TERC planners believe, the students will learn much more science than by studying a textbook or carrying out predictable laboratory experiments.
For a school in which four of five students come from low-income families, in a city with the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the country, these were exciting developments, demonstrating not just the relevance of science but the power of collaboration. "These are kids who are not used to success," Maston says. "The idea that adults took their work seriously and that they actually had some control over their environment made a difference. They were amazed that they'd caused this change when individually they hadn't done a heck of a lot of work. It was wonderful."
Maston's enthusiasm for educational networks is widely shared. At a time when American schools are receiving less and less money to cope with growing social upheaval, telecomputing seems to offer a glimmer of hope, enlivening both teachers and students even as it compels a striking realignment of relationships within the classroom. Richard R. Ruopp, former president of the innovative Bank Street College of Education in New York City, calls computer telecommunication "a profoundly important new technology for education. Unlike telephone communication, which is evanescent, or the mails, which lack immediacy, telecommunication is particularly suited to the schooling process. It is fast - but leaves the user choices of the timing of response. It is self-recording - so that the material can be reviewed and easily shared. And unlike many other new technologies, it is relatively inexpensive."
Excitement over the potential of educational networks is a major reason school educators are clamoring to ensure that their schools are linked to the "information superhighway" that the Clinton Administration proposes to build. Even now, many states provide schools with low-cost computer links that foster participation on educational nets. Teachers equipped with a computer, modem, and phone line can already choose from hundreds of online projects that enable students to produce a newspaper with stories submitted from a range of locales, or analyze jump-rope jingles around the world, or correspond electronically with prison inmates, or participate in an international track meet without leaving their schools, or calculate the earth's circumference by comparing the length of shadows cast by a one-meter stick at different latitudes at high noon - almost any educational endeavor that is enriched by geographical diversity can be carried out on a network.
The oldest of such networks, the grassroots Free Educational Electronic Mail Network (FrEdMail), is, as its name suggests, free of charge; it began in 1984, and has grown to include 10,000 classrooms a year, or roughly 300,000 students. The more structured National Geographic Kids Network, which costs schools up to $472.50 per course, has expanded to an enrollment of 8,000 classrooms (about 240,000 students) in only five years. Other educational networks are designed for teachers only, enabling them to overcome the isolation that many feel by promoting an exchange of ideas with distant colleagues. Thus, the only physics teacher in a rural high school might not be able to discuss professional issues with anyone else in her community, but by joining LabNet, a TERC-designed network for high school science teachers, she'd be in electronic contact with hundreds of other high school physics teachers.
"What telecommunications does is to remarkably expand the quantity and quality of information resources that can be in a classroom," says Linda Roberts, a senior associate in the Science, Education, and Transportation program at the US Congress's Office of Technology Assessment. "And by 'information resources,' I'm not just talking about what's written down or what's stored in a digital world - I'm talking about the ability to work with other classrooms, to expand the community of learners, and to have real access to people who know something, whether that means scientists in research laboratories or people in the business community or politicians who are grappling with decisions."
Often the people who "know something" are students who live near the site of some cataclysmic event. The AT&T Learning Network, which is registering classes at a rate of 1,200 per semester in only its third year, routinely distributes the comments of such student observers to all classrooms on the network. Says Margaret Riel, a consultant to the network, "When the earthquake happened in San Francisco, we read about tidal waves in kids' swimming pools, movements in soccer fields, and kids being thrown down stairways - kids' perceptions of what it was like to be in an earthquake. When the Berlin Wall came down, we had classes in Berlin that were giving us day-by-day reports on what it was like to be there. When the Gulf War was going on, kids in Saudi Arabia's schools talked about the crocheted gas mask backpacks that their mothers made. Anytime there is something happening in the world, there is usually a classroom nearby."
A broad range of studies seems to confirm the educational value of telecomputing networks. The most remarkable of them may be an evaluation by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory of Oak Brook, Illinois, that focused on fourth through sixth grade classes in Iowa enrolled on the National Geographic Kids Network during the 1990-91 school year. When the program was over, teachers were asked whether they would use the network again and whether they'd recommend it to colleagues; 46 of 49 teachers answered "yes" to both questions, two said "maybe."
In an intriguing 1989 study, two researchers at the University of California, San Diego compared the quality of writing in two sets of compositions written by seventh graders: One set was addressed to their teachers for a semester grade, and the other set was addressed to peers in other countries linked by network. The intended destination and name of the author of the compositions was concealed from the classroom teachers, who graded both sets. The teachers were confident that the compositions written for grades would be superior because students would take more care with them, but this was not the case: The compositions written to communicate with peers scored "significantly higher ratings." One of the study's authors concluded, "The difference in the quality of essays indicated that students were better able to demonstrate their skills in writing when communication, rather than evaluation, was their goal."
The role that collaboration plays in educational networks was underlined in a 1988 study of the InterCultural Learning Network, a precursor of the AT&T Learning Network. The analysis, conducted by four University of California, San Diego researchers, focused on a project involving water shortages and conservation methods in different countries. At the end of the project, twenty students from an eighth-grade class in San Diego collaborated to write and send a summary message. That message contained 71 percent of all the ideas posted on the network throughout the project. Moreover, of the ideas mentioned by the San Diego students, 66 percent were contributed by sites other than San Diego.
This type of collaboration is one reason many educators say the emergence of educational telecomputing presages "a paradigm shift from a teaching to a learning environment" within the classroom. The relationship among students changes as they find that instead of competing, they must cooperate to carry out the various tasks their network assignments require.
The teacher's relationship to the students shifts from one of all-knowing authority to facilitator; Jason Ohler, director of the University of Alaska's educational technology program, puts it succinctly: "The teacher goes from 'the sage on the stage' to 'the guide on the side.'" Even the teacher's relationship to her colleagues changes, for where she was once isolated within her classroom, she now has access to thousands of other teachers via computer networks.
The shift makes sense for all sorts of reasons. One consequence of the information explosion is that teachers can't know everything of value to their students, but with the aid of telecommunications, they often can guide students to the information they seek. Furthermore, demands on the 21st-century work force are likely to include not just familiarity with computing but a capacity for cooperative learning, both of which are fostered by educational networks.
The networks also blur social distinctions: Race, gender, disabilities, physical appearance, even social status lose their significance in cyberspace, where all that matters is one's capacity for expression. As Ohler explains, "You have a computer conference in which a 12-year-old and a university professor have an essentially peer-to-peer conversation, because neither has the social and cultural cues that would prevent it from happening."
Telecomputing thus can become an agent of educational reform, a kind of Trojan horse that quietly but thoroughly rearranges classrooms. Says Monica Bradsher, managing editor for software in the educational media division of the National Geographic Society and a key developer of the NGS Kids Network, "I didn't realize when I got into this the degree to which we were taking on school reform." Considering that, it's striking that educational telecomputing has attracted almost no vocal opposition. Instead, what impedes its growth is a shortage of funds, teachers' and administrators' unfamiliarity with telecommunications, lack of time in the school schedule, and the lack of a national telecommunications infrastructure, including an almost universal absence of telephone lines to classrooms.
All are substantial barriers. According to a Denver-based research firm called Quality Education Data, out of the 83,790 public schools in the US, only 22 percent possess even one modem, and only 14 percent used educational networks in even one classroom in the last school year. Use of the networks is piecemeal; Linda Maston's eighth graders, for example, will move on to a high school with no telecommunications link, and the excitement forged by their experience will become a memory. (In fact, Maston says one student asked, "Now that you've introduced us to all of this wonderful stuff and we know it's there, what's going to happen next year when we're back to the way we used to be?" Maston had no answer.)
Moreover, the teachers who, like Maston, have overcome bureaucratic resistance and the difficulty of learning telecommunications to link their classes to networks are often the most resourceful and motivated teachers in their schools. A June 1993 study of 550 teachers using telecomputing networks conducted by the New York City-based Center for Technology in Education concluded that these teachers are an elite group, typically "experienced and highly educated," nearly half of whom have used computers for more than nine years. They are self-taught in telecommunications and almost invariably have access to computers at home. More than half describe themselves as the principal catalyst for their schools' telecommunications activities; a quarter say they are the sole users of telecommunications in their schools. Margaret Honey, the study's director, estimates that teachers with this much initiative and experience probably comprise no more than 2 or 3 percent of the teaching population.
Could it be the skill and enthusiasm of these elite teachers and not the supposed virtues of educational telecomputing programs that account for the success of the networks? While teacher ability is unquestionably an important factor, a December, 1992 study by Henry Jay Becker, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine suggests that the factors fostering "exemplary computer-using teachers" chiefly involve the administrative support such teachers enjoy within their schools, and only secondarily stem from the teachers' inherent qualities. If that's true, then by adopting appropriate policies, school administrations ought to be able to develop many more similarly skilled teachers.
The question then becomes: How should schools promote telecommunications, in the process engaging those teachers who are less motivated and skilled in telecomputing than the pioneers who have already embraced the technology? If telecomputing is to avoid becoming the latest educational "quick fix" that fades after showing early promise, that's a crucial question. Something like that fate, after all, has befallen stand-alone computers, which were heralded a decade ago as the key to revolutionizing education but have enjoyed a modest and uneven impact.
Part of the explanation for that failure almost certainly lies in the widespread use of computers to facilitate "instructional learning systems," glorified drill programs that many educators consider deadening. Even when computers are deployed in educationally sound ways, the technology is often outdated, and the teachers overseeing its use frequently receive inadequate training and administrative support. "One of the lessons we've learned in the last decade in integrating computers into the classroom is that without training and support a lot of this stuff goes wasted," Honey says.
In the case of educational telecommunications, training and support is even more vital, since only a small percentage of teachers skilled in computer use know how to run telecommunications programs, and few school administrations know how to accommodate network projects. It is therefore unlikely that educational telecomputing will flourish unless it is facilitated in a variety of ways. To that end, Honey's survey makes several reasonable recommendations. Among them are that schools and districts must get involved in training teachers in telecommunications, devoting at least as many resources to that task as they have to training teachers in general computer use; that schools and districts must make plans for the use of telecommunications that take into account the ways in which it impels educational reform; that class schedules must be made more flexible, since the typical 40-minute period is inadequate for projects that successfully use telecommunications; that because schools are already underfinanced, corporations and foundations must join government in funding educational telecommunications projects; and that phone lines must become much more widely available in schools.
If it seems unlikely that all those recommendations will be carried out, consider the possibilities they open up. Schools, now among the most intellectually barren of our institutions, would become true learning centers, linked to information resources throughout the world. Teachers, the nation's only professionals who are routinely deprived of telephones at their workplaces, would be in close contact with both colleagues and vast amounts of data, enabling them to grow intellectually, and in doing so, model life-long learning for their students. And the students, now condemned to serving time in schools that all too often resemble prisons, would have access to a substantial portion of the world's potential mentors and potential friends. In the end, the machines themselves would recede from notice, taken for granted, while the links they forge deepen and multiply.
