This essay is the full version of a book chapter written in 1995 and published in The Internet for Teachers & School Library Media Specialists: Today's Applications, Tomorrow's Prospects , Edward J.Valauskas and Monica Ertel, eds, ISBN: 1-55570-239-2, NY: Neal-Schuman Publishers, http://argus-inc.com/neals/nsmain.html, Fax toll free: 1-800-584-2414, or order electronically, contact Neal-Schuman@lcm.com.
Because I am frequently asked for to provide a reprint, I decided to make it available here, with all the missing bits and links restored. Please email me your comments.
The Internet is not just mainframe relays; it is not just high-speed band-width; it is not just multimedia-ready personal computers. The Internet is people. It starts with people and ends with people. And an increasing number of Internet users are children. They are the real backbone and the real future. In order to make it possible to internalize a sense of the Internet as it is and as it might be, I shall tell three stories about children, real and imagined, and the role that the Internet might play in their lives.
We all know these children; they have come to us over the years, in the classroom, across the library desk. They are our friends, our relatives, our students, ourselves. Their stories are not new. We have done our best to help them and frequently succeeded. Now we have a new tool to help them with, a tool that has the potential to help those who were not helped in the past, a tool that itself is still undeveloped and unfocused. This is the dream of the Internet: Internet past (which was no Internet at all), Internet present (which does not know itself yet), and Internet future (which is unabashedly my dream and my hope), an Internet which will not begin to change the world until it can change the life of one child.
SCENARIO ONE: GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Georgie's family was happy and well-balanced; everyone said so. The parents were both educated professionals; they were devoted to their children. The mother had delayed her career to stay home with the children while they were young. The family did things together and all three children had active school and social lives. They were enrolled in the best elementary schools, even if it meant the family had to move to another town to get them in. Their free time was divided between chess, cheerleading, football and scouting. Everything was normal; the children were planned and ideally spaced; their parents had college money put away that would guarantee education through graduate school in any career they chose.
But as Georgie approached adolescence, something began to go wrong. His active imagination, so charming in a young child, blossomed into a mania for fantasy: he devoured sword and sorcery books and comics and would regale even casual visitors with elaborate stories that he made up as he went endlessly along. It was hard to tell if he believed that the stories actually happened or not. He especially loved fantasy games on the computer. His father had brought an older model home so that all the children could learn word processing and turn out better homework. But Georgie dominated its usage, pushing his siblings away psychically and sometimes physically. At times the scene around the computer resembled a bunch of baby birds, too big and too many for the nest, arguing over who gets the worm. One way or another, Georgie always got the biggest piece.
One day he came home, not with a kitten or a puppy trailing behind , but with a modem and a rudimentary telecommunications program. The battles escalated, since he was now frequently head-to-head with his parents over who controlled the phone. He would rise early in order to be alone with the computer, run home after school and rush through his homework and dinner in order to squeeze an extra twenty minutes online.
He dialed up local bulletin boards on any and every topic. He spent almost his entire allowance on games and computer books. He discontinued his former extracurricular activities and friendships and began to develop email relationships with others who had similar interests. They taught him how to do neat things with his computer: how to download software and pictures and how to write simple programs. They taught him how to dial into computers with poor security systems. Soon he was accessing his school's computer and messing around with its files and records. He also took to hanging around the local library's computer lab, trying out software programs borrowed from his friends . His experimentation crashed the network several times and he was banished.
His parents didn't know most of what he was doing, but they were bewildered, and frequently angry, about the behavior they knew about. "If only he would be more normal," they complained, "and play outside once in a while or have a friend over. If only he would read real books and have regular childhood interests like his brothers and sisters. We were never like this when we were children." They considered forcing him to spend an hour outdoors for every hour he spent online; they considered getting rid of the computer; they considered taking him to a psychiatrist.
In the end they did none of these things. Georgie continued on, barely getting by in school, becoming more and more estranged from his family and most of his teachers and schoolmates. The only way in which he grew intellectually was by acquiring a fine ability to make computers run, both by hardware and software configuration and by programming. As an older teenager, he began picking up odd programming jobs. He began to see a way to earn a living by doing what he enjoyed. His battles with his parents became fierce. As soon as he finished high school, he left home to live with one of his hacker buddies. Now, in his late twenties, he makes a decent living and gets to work on sophisticated systems. But, late at night, while he is running a long backup program, he occasionally pores over community college catalogs and dreams of another life.
In many ways Georgie's obsession with computers could be described as a dysfunctional addiction which kept him from normal relationships with his friends and his family. But if he had displayed the same intense interest in football or chess, his parents would have been more understanding. The school might have provided him with a coach; he might have made the team and competed with other schools, won championships and trophies, and, most of all, continued to fit into the normal pattern of life expected of him.
Computers and the Internet, like other communication media, provide both opportunities for creative expression and, when misused, attractive traps that isolate people and retard intellectual and social growth. More than anything else, Georgie's parents and teachers needed to spend time with him while he was online. They needed to find out what made computers so attractive to him and use that carrot to guide him and challenge him to more well-rounded activities. For example, his interest in fantasy could have led him to program his own fantasy games or write stories that could have been published online. He needed the adults in his life to understand and value what he could do. This would have led to more self-esteem and perhaps to a greater ability and desire to try things outside of his computer world.
Students like Georgie should be actively recruited by school and community computer labs, but instead of just letting them hang out and fool around, they should be allowed to become integral parts of the program: helping newcomers, documenting applications and even teaching classes. Schools, especially, should integrate computers into every discipline, to broaden the base of their attractiveness and usefulness.
One would not provide gifted young tennis players with wooden racquets these days because it would handicap the development of proper skills and lessen their ability to compete. In the same way, every student should have the opportunity to work with the latest hardware and software. Being stuck with seriously outdated systems means that students cannot keep abreast of new ideas and trends. Because of the cost of keeping up with new technology, this should be a school and community responsibility, not just a parental one.
Students should be able to improve their computer skills as long as they have the desire to. K-12 schools should form partnerships with two-and four-year colleges to insure that advanced students can pursue their interests in formal ways without having to rely on the underground hacker world alone.
There are many places already on the Internet that support the contributions of young people. Global Show-n-Tell is a virtual exhibition that lets children show off their favorite projects, possessions, accomplishments and collections to kids (and adults) around the world. The exhibition consists of children's artwork in the form of multimedia pages.
In the future, the Internet will provide even more new ways of learning. Entire courses will be offered for credit with ability being the only prerequisite, so that students of all ages can find their own level of learning in each subject. Teachers and librarians will become counselors and facilitators as well as instructors. Adults will be expected to continue to learn throughout their life, both to keep up in their changing professions and to keep themselves mentally alive. In this scenario, Georgie and his parents will never drift apart, but continue to grow and develop in new ways and to communicate their shared passion for finding things out.
In a not-so-distant future on Earth, population growth is rigidly controlled. Yet, after genetic evaluation and close individual monitoring, the Wiggin family was allowed, even encouraged, to have a rare third child, Ender, who would eventually become the long-awaited one who would save the Earth from its dreaded alien enemy. Ender's two siblings, had many of the qualities the government was looking for in a potential military leader: intelligence, strength and fast reflexes, empathy and aggression, but they were "rejected from the program" because they had these qualities in the wrong proportions. Peter, the oldest, was so aggressive that he had the potential to be a pathological killer. Seeing this, the government ordered the next child to be a girl,"hoping that Valentine would be Peter, but milder. She was too mild."
Ender was the perfect balance the government had sought. After he was taken away to Battle School at the age of six, the two remaining siblings turned to each other, Valentine because of her loneliness and Peter because his dysfunction was getting out of hand. The family moved to the country to see if a more natural environment might help Peter. Outwardly, there seemed to be some improvement, but in reality Peter managed to stop bullying other children only by concentrating on torturing animals. His active mind and strong personality had found no other outlet. He was a good student,
but the teachers hadn't taught him anything, ever. He did his learning through his [computer] at home, tapping into libraries and databases, studying and thinking, and above all, talking to Valentine.
One day he came to her with a bold idea. He had decided to channel his energy into the network so that he could get an early start on his dream of becoming a powerful part of world government.
"Why do I get the feeling that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?" "For both of us, Val." "Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and treat us like mice." "But we don't think like other children, do we, Val? We don't talk like other children. And, above all, we don't write like other children....I've been studying history. I've been learning things about patterns in human behavior. There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world....Val, we can say the words that everyone else will be saying two weeks later....We don't have to wait until we're grown up and safely put away in some career." "Peter, you're twelve." "Not on the nets I'm not."
They started slowly by getting on their father's "citizen's access" net. They used throwaway names with early efforts; tried out various personas and studied the responses; they learned what part of what they wrote was childish and ineffective, and they improved their ability to sway others. They began to develop primary identities, carefully chosen to be opposite of their real ones. Valentine was Demosthenes, a xenophobic reactionary. Peter became Locke, "the only truly open mind in America." Their debates became famous. After seven months had gone by Valentine's persona was invited to do a weekly column for a prestigious newsnet. "I can't do a weekly column," she said, "I don't even have a monthly period yet."
The cost of their computer use became fully supported by income generated by their writing. Eventually, they discovered that "it was impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be." Peter grew to be as rational as his persona and eventually became
Hegemon, ruler of all humanity for sixty years...[After Ender had destroyed the aliens, Peter] was the one who united all the quarrelsome communities of man for the vast effort that flung starships out to every world.
Valentine became a great historian and joined her younger brother for new adventures among the stars.
While few, if any, children will become world leaders while they are still teenagers, Valentine and Peter's story illustrates the potential of the Internet to harness the creative energies of youngsters and provide the means by which they can be contributors to the worldwide information pool, not merely consumers. With more and more schools hosting their own servers, the cost of a child's publishing on the net is becoming minimal. The latest version of word processing programs are coming out with HTML output as a standard option, thus making it even easier for amateurs to create Web pages with a very small learning curve. Teachers need to create opportunities for the best of their students' work to be shared. Perhaps the local poetry magazine becomes a regional electronic publication. The debating club or chess club could schedule some of its matches online. The extra time that it would take to do this could be reduced, if students did most of their work on computers to begin with and if all were routinely trained in Web publishing skills, just as grammar and composition is routinely taught today.
Perhaps the first step is to get teachers excited about the possibilities. The Exploratorium Center for Teaching and Learning has been holding summer institutes for K-12 teachers for over a decade. An important part of the curriculum is to have librarians experienced in electronic research work with teachers on their individual projects. It doesn't matter if the project is connected to classroom content or not because the real agenda is to get teachers excited about the project-based and inquiry-based learning and to let them experience a first-rate research service. The hope is that they will go back to their schools and demand these resources for their students.
This year, during an introductory workshop on the Internet, one of the teachers had a conceptual breakthrough. He had been politely attending to the lecture and the hands-on exercises until he discovered the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, an ongoing project by David Dodd to footnote and analyze the song lyrics of the Grateful Dead. His excitement knew no bounds. He lovingly went through all the text, pictures and sounds and came to the lyrics section. There he noticed that a few of the lyrics were annotated, but not the lyrics to his favorite songs. His first reaction was the same as if he had come upon a book that did not contain what it advertised. "Why aren't they all annotated?" he complained to the instructor. She told him that the pages were probably created by volunteer fans and that probably no one had yet had the time to do his favorites. "Why don't you contact them and see if you can sign up to do them?" she suggested. He was flabbergasted and awestruck. It had never occurred to him that he could be a contributor. If it never occurs to the teacher it is less likely that the student will get the idea.
An effort funded by the National Science Foundation is encouraging high school students to form project teams with students from other schools, teachers, and other adults. Through the use of advanced technologies, the Learning Through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis) Project at Northwestern University is attempting to transform science learning to better resemble the authentic practice of science. Traditionally, K-12 science education has consisted of the teaching of well-established facts, with the teacher taking on the role of the expert. This approach bears little or no resemblance to the question-centered, collaborative practice of real scientists.
Participating students study atmospheric and environmental sciences through inquiry-based activities. Using state of the art scientific visualization software, students have access to the same research tools and data used by leading-edge scientists in the field. Students and teachers in many different schools use the Internet to work together on projects. They are assisted by scientists from universities and museums who mentor their projects and provide contextual information.
Part of Plugged In's ambitious mission is to creatively use computers and communications technologies to support community-building efforts, especially in the East Palo Alto, California, a city which has been described as "an island of poverty in a sea of middle- to-high-income suburbia." Teenagers and their families are exposed to different cultural, artistic and intellectual practices. Emphasis is placed on developing models to interact across disciplines and cultures. Projects created by...students are published on the Internet...Students have spoken at several leading industry and community events....Such programs meet a vital need as we move toward an information-based society, where the ability to communicate and collaborate in new ways will be a major factor in professional and social mobility.
In the future, children's access to the Internet will be as automatic as their access to television is today, but it will be a two-way street where they will be able to interact with whatever is going on. They will be able to participate in decisions governing their own lives. The art of writing will no longer always be just focused on the ideas of a single individual, but also be able to reflect a group consensus when that is appropriate. This is already happening outside of the Internet. When Russell Banks wrote Rule of the Bone about an alienated 14-year-old who goes on a Huckleberry Finn-like journey, he believed that he had accurately captured the essence and language of modern youth. However, mixed reviews and his own reflection led him to include in his national publicity tour visits to classrooms to discuss the book with young people and get their feedback about his characters.
"For me, this has been a chance to find out if the book has any plausibility," Mr. Banks said...."I wanted to know if it corroborates their experience."
Ann M. Martin, author of the incredibly popular book series, The Baby-Sitters' Club, has gone a step further. She pays attention to all the mail her readers send her, accepting the validation and criticism of her audience and acting on it. When a devotee suggested that she write a book about the death of a classmate, Ms. Martin did so. Her publisher, Scholastic, has now created a home page for the book series and its fans.
This kind of give and take between an author and other creative artists and the audience is tailor- made for the Internet. In time the traditional separation between the two parts of the creative process will become blurred, with the nominal author sometimes becoming the recorder of the group spirit. Barriers of age, race, class and ethnicity will fade; contributions will be judged on their own merits. On the Internet, no one will know you are a child.
SCENARIO THREE: THE DREAM DEFERRED
It was a weekday afternoon in the late 1950s in a small-town suburb of New York City. Anna, a not-so-little girl, was reading the story of Pecos Bill to the school garden club. The club had been forced to stay indoors that day because of the rain. Everyone was having a good time; the rest of the club liked her and looked up to her, not the least because she was a fourth-grader and they were only in the first and second grades. If she felt uncomfortable fraternizing with what her peers would call "babies," and trying to grow a garden in a mostly concrete environment, she gave no sign of it; she was used to being different. She was tall and shy and everyone, including herself, considered her a little bit odd. She didn't jump rope or play dress-up and her Barbie doll was still in its box.
Because her family moved a lot, this was her fifth elementary school, her first in a non-rural setting. Out of a strong instinct for survival, she had evolved successful ways of coping with new situations. First and foremost, she was a noticer. She used her quiet energy to pay attention to everything that was around her. She was also a wanderer, who spent many happy hours outdoors with her dog, discovering new neighborhoods, talking to trees and flowers in other people's gardens, collecting her "treasures," bits of broken toys, pretty rocks and discarded items she would find in vacant lots. She was not gregarious, but chose people she could trust, places she felt safe in, activities that were interesting, but not too challenging. If she had ever stayed in one place long enough, she probably would have become more daring, because she had an adventurous spirit.
She was also an avid reader. In the past, the small libraries that rural schools had were not enough to satisfy her craving for books. This new school and this new almost-city had two things she had not experienced before: a large school library and a very fine public library. She took to them both immediately, hanging out in the school library until it closed for the afternoon, and then staying in the children's room of the public library until she had to go home.
Her parents, who were not educated, were puzzled and a little upset by her behavior. They wanted the best for her, and were happy that her grades were good; maybe, they told her, she would graduate from high school, something that was rare in the family, and even go on to college, a grand goal that they could hardly even imagine. "If you become a teacher or a nurse," her mother would say, speaking somewhat from experience, "then you will have something to fall back on if your husband leaves you with babies to raise." But this haunting of libraries, this always having her nose in a book, this not playing with the other children was frightening to her parents. Her mother saw her as a future Clara Barton, her father as the next Annette Funicello; she didn't particularly see herself as anything yet, although the school librarian was beginning to ask her to do small tasks and she found she enjoyed that work.
On another day in the public library, Anna for some reason strayed from her favorite section, the 398.2s, folk and fairy tales, and found herself in the 568s: dinosaurs. It wasn't a very big section, because in the fifties, dinosaurs were not yet the major media event they are today. There were only a few books on the shelf and she chose one: All About Strange Beasts From the Past, by Roy Chapman Andrews. Perhaps she thought it was a fairy tale collection. The first chapter was called "The Tragedy of the Tar Pits," the story of how a saber-tooth tiger got caught in La Brea. The next, "Reading the Fossil Record," told how the author explored the Gobi desert for dinosaur bones. The words and images had a riveting effect on her. Everything she had ever wanted to read about and imagine was there: monsters, adventure, mystery. Unlike teaching and nursing, which her parents wanted her to do, this was something that fed all of her dreams.
She soon finished the few books available to her in the children's room. The school library had nothing. There was no one she could share this new excitement with, but she tried. Her parents were baffled; her friends were amused. She told her teacher, who said she could do a book report on it, but only one. She was determined to learn more. She asked to be able to use the adult collection in the public library, but was refused.
Eventually, inevitably, the excitement ebbed. The books, read and reread and memorized, were returned to the library shelves. It never really occurred to her that the adventures she read about were real and that there was a career path open to her that would allow her to enter that world. She grew older, found other interests, finished college and graduate school, becoming, to no one's surprise, including her own, a happy, competent librarian.
Putting aside the current dinosaur craze, What could the Internet of today offer a similar 9-year- old?
1. Much more information about dinosaurs: Russ Jacobson, who works
with the Educational Extension program at the Illinois State
Geological Survey, has created
"Dino
Russ's Lair, The Earthnet Info Server" to share information on
dinosaurs and vertebrate paleontology. There you can connect to:
Anna could have discovered that the New York Museum of Natural History was only an hour's train ride away.
Anna could have subscribed to a Dinosaur listserv (listproc@lepomis.psych.upenn.edu, subscribe dinosaur FIRSTNAME LASTNAME). While it is clear to anyone lurking on the list that it is not a forum for beginners, Anna could have found many discussion threads of interest to her. For example, in recent one-week period the list talked about the link between dinosaurs and birds, the extinction of dinosaurs, a special exhibition in Hawaii and whether Noah should have taken dinosaur eggs on the Ark instead of full-grown beasts.
Anna would have found the toll-free number of the Dinosaur Society (1-800-DINODON) and phoned for a membership packet. The packet includes a sample issue of the Dino Times (all the news that's old), a newsletter expressly aimed at turning a "child's love of dinosaurs...[into] a vibrant interest in science that will last a lifetime." The June, 1995, issue included a guide to vacationing with dinosaurs.
The Internet of the future could provide Anna with opportunities to do online projects that would be published on the Net. Perhaps she would be able to hook up with the adult listserv and have them help her host her own list for beginners who are interested in the field. The Internet will surely be a place to locate volunteer activities for youth. Anna will be able to find universities with strong paleontology programs and learn what kinds of studies and abilities lead to success. This kind of focused dream early in a child's life can put the K-12 curriculum in a practical perspective, so the cry of "why should I take this course?" will no longer be heard in the land.
These stories are meant to give a place to start in imagining the
potential of the Internet to change the way we learn, and,
ultimately, the way we live. There are several important precepts to
remember in approaching a vision of the Internet to come:
Children and some adults already realize that the Internet has the potential to open the door to a variety of information as infinite as the universe itself. However, because of the disorganized nature of the medium, it is more important than ever to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to discover the diamond and know its value, and to communicate what one knows and what one wishes to find out. The most intriguing benefit of the Internet, however, is its ability to bring people together with common interests and create a community of learning.
3/23/97