Linking Students to the Infosphere.
1996; 1105 Media; Volume: 23; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0192-592X
Autores Tópico(s)Education and Technology Integration
ResumoA driving principle of the recent Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 is that and classrooms ... should have access to advanced telecommunications services.[1] In light of all the media attention focused on the Internet and school connectivity, this call sounds reasonable and worthwhile. But exactly what are advanced telecommunications services and how will they impact education? Over the last decade, the dominant mode of telecommunications in schools has been e-mail exchanges between classes.[2] Even though messages were limited to nongraphical ASCII text, the ability for one class to easily and cheaply communicate with either another or many throughout the world was so powerful that educators developed a number of successful learning projects around e-mail. Yet today, e-mail hardly qualifies as advanced telecommunications. At the core of advanced connectivity lies access to the Internet's sophisticated capabilities. Providing universal Internet access to schools in a way that benefits daily instruction demands a considerable investment in hardware and infrastructure. School administrators can no longer isolate computers in computer labs, but must make them accessible to all venues of learning on a school's premises, and these machines must be capable of handling both multimedia and large files. They must consider computer upgrades, Internet providers, ongoing technical support and even school-wide local area networks. Many schools need to be rewired, which often involves costly retro-fitting. Teachers must learn how to operate the hardware as well as how to integrate connectivity into their practices. Furthermore, educators should infuse networked worked learning into school culture. After all the wires have been laid, the computers connected and turned on, and the teachers trained, will the students be ready for Internet access? The Internet is unfamiliar terrain that can be challenging to traverse, and there are accepted standards of online behavior, as there are in daily life. just as students must know the rules of the road when they drive, so must they acquire information literacy and ethics in order to navigate the Internet usefully and responsibly. Clearly, advanced classroom connectivity requires a greater and more enduring commitment than many may have anticipated. No one, not even policy-makers, know for sure how many tens of billions of dollars this effort will cost or, for that matter, exactly At a time when education is already besieged by other needs, can we justify spending billions of dollars to link classrooms for advanced telecommunication services? When we've got leaky roofs, filling a room with technology seems stupid, asserted a lobbyist for the California School Board Association.[3] Should a school use its meager resources to fix its leaky roof or purchase new computers and connect them to the Internet? * The New Information Environment Physically, the Internet is a vast array of interconnected networks (about 60,000 as of July, 1995) that use the same TCP/IP protocol and evolved from ARPANET. The networks works themselves are comprised of many millions of computers interconnected via phone lines, satellite links, fiber-optic cable, etc. The Internet is a truly unique human creation, and it defies facile description. Consequently, despite the current publicity, the Internet is poorly understood by the public. In order to convey a sense of this vast digital grid, observers have relied on a number of metaphors. These metaphors, however, address only certain features of the online domain. We should ask whether or not these terms sufficiently communicate to policy-makers the sweeping potential that the Internet offers. A popular metaphor is cyberspace, which its creator, writer William Gibson, defined as a consensual hallucination of visually realized data achieved through plugging into a global computer network[4] (see also: ee. …
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