The Global Classroom by Cathy Buckingham

Background on the Internet and Implications for the Classroom

     How do schools prepare students for the future when "Ninety percent of the technology we will use in the next decade has not been invented or we have no access to it yet?" (Bailey, A20). Not only is technological advancement difficult to guage but students in schools are also being exposed to an information explosion -- more information in their first twelve years of school than previous generations acquired in an entire lifetime. This explosion is being created, in part, by the Internet. In fact, Thirty-five million people used the Internet in the last three months, and this number will double in the next year or so ("About the Net," 2 of 4). By 1998 Internet information had already exploded to over 320,000,000 pages from sources like national governments and NASA scientists, encompassing an exponentially expanding gamut of topics, to teachers and their students (Crehan,22).

     Such Internet pages are commonly referred to as hypertext, "an information medium that links verbal and non verbal information" (Landow, 3). Because this medium has electronic links to external works like commentary on the text, parallel text, and even contrasting text, "new rules and new experience apply" (Landow, 3). Hypertext is experienced in a multi sequential way meaning one person may choose a sequence of links totally different from that of another person. Consequently, this medium challenges conventional assumptions about schools by changing students' and teachers' roles. "The implications for schools are profound" (Rogers, 5 of 10).  Conventionally, teachers have been more active in directing learning while students were more passive -- especially in terms of what to read and especially from what text to learn. By contrast, using the Internet, students become decision makers about where to click and what to focus on in a clearly freer format than that provided by a text book. Thus teachers become guides who shape students into effective decision makers.

     To demonstrate the Internet's profound implications, imagine a classroom on-line when, in August of 1991, Borris Yeltsin made his shocking decree. A coup d' etat had paralyzed Russia's executive power and forced Yeltsin to take control of the government, to dismiss all coup leaders, and and prosecute them under Russian law. This uncensored message, sent to everyone in the world with a phone line and a personal computer connected to the Internet, demonstrates how the Internet can electrify the classroom with the immediacy of incredable, breaking news reports.  Another example to further demonstrate the profound effects of the Internet on classrooms begins with the April 20th Columbine High School shootings in Colorado. Within days of this tragedy, a Denver teen contacted our class by email to request our prayers, our names (added to a list of over thirty others), and our sending of that email to other Illinois schools to show caring and support for fellow students. As a result, we became members of a global classroom -- a classroom connected to so many others by access to iformation and by interactive communication that all spreads over computer lines to potentially affect many other people in many ways. Until recently Marshall McLuhan's '60's term "global village" may not have been perceived as important to education. However, today's global Internet offers millions of us "direct access to information in ways the world has never before seen" -- an infinite variety of information flowing freely crossing national borders and circumventing the globe (Rogers, 1 of 10). The result is "School in the Global Village" (1 of 10).

     When schools are connected to the Internet, strategies for teaching and learning change because the "world becomes an indispensable curriculum resource" (Rogers, 5 of 10). Clearly students can access websites that offer the most current information about the status of the Russian government or even the latest news on the Columbine shooting investigation. These strategies incorporate the actuality that school subjects become more current, more relevant, and more integrated from a multi-disciplinary as well as a global perspective. Prompted by such information, students can participate in discussions about capitalism and democract, or about gun control and parental responsibility. A letter, essay, report, or speech might logically follow such a discussion. In addition, students learn about culture -- their own similarities and differences from that of foreign cultures -- directly from children around the world. This educational approach is more real, more meaningful, and much more exciting than learning culture from a text book. Moreover, students who learn from the Internet's global curriculum are better able to "consider issues that are of global concern" (5 of 10).

     As more and more schools incorporate the Internet into their curriculum, students will grow to acquire a new perspective on "their place in the world and how to relate to it" (Rogers, 10 of 10). As adults these students of the global classroom "will have advantages in their experience and mindset over those who were isolated to their own classrooms and communities" (10 of 10).