Part One The Promise: An Educator's History of the Internet
1986 1993 1994 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 Summary
By the year two thousand, the promise of technology and the Internet in the classroom are under discussion in a wide variety of venues. The nation continues to make steady progress installing the technological infrastructure, and there is a stronger focus on professional development. Teacher competence and educational standards become significant political issues, and critics call for measurable results from educational technologies. However, we appear to be only just beginning to discuss quality educational content.
In New Roles for Educators Johnson continues Trotter's thoughts on educators creating content for the web.
"Technology is also empowering teachers as instructional designers, authors, and presenters. The ease of publishing on the web has provided a new outlet for those teachers who have always enjoyed creating original instructional materials and for those dissatisfied with predigested pre-synthesized textbooks. That these materials are now accessible to a vast audience beyond the classroom and that they can provide one-click links to relevant supporting research and documentation has proven to be a powerful lure for the authors among us."
The costs of creating and maintaining sophisticated websites, either as portals or with actual educational content, is the focus of Cathy de Moll's article The Battle of the Portals.
"The original idea of portals was to cluster services so that consumers would use a certain Web site as a launching pad. The more visitors, the more advertising revenue. When the revenue proved insufficient, portals began to describe themselves as a destination - keep folks on the site, running through as many pages as possible. But although services and content began to accumulate on the portal site, advertising revenues continued to shrink. Particularly in the education market, ad revenues dropped just at the point when portals were spending more money to attract a loyal audience. Add to that, the April flip in the dot com stocks, and you see some serious scrambling to redefine and redirect business models.
"All of a sudden, each 'portals plus' describe themselves as what it really is, a service - not a Web site - and they have introduced charges for those services. At NECC we got the preview of the new advertising-free sites and a glimpse at the sticker price - $2500 per school in most cases, rising to $3,000 in the very near future. That's for all the bells and whistles (some lead-in features will remain free)."
"The unanswered question now is how the new "portal plus" companies (including LightSpan) will filter their Web recommendations from here on out. If a portal truly seeks out and categorizes the best on the Web, then this is an important part of the package. But beware of the portal that only recommends its partners and advertisers..."
"...original content/online curriculum may eventually be the determinate of who survives and who disappears. Right now when pressed, many of the above-named portals admit that they mostly point to existing independent Web content. That's nice, but that won't satisfy for long. Yes, real online curriculum is hard to find on the Web right now at a portal or elsewhere..."
"What's giving me whiplash, I must admit, is that so suddenly we have shifted in the dark of the night from the firm protestations and promises that Internet content can and should be free to the teacher, to the assumption that 'you get what you pay for.' How did it happen so suddenly and so quietly? The same people who assured me a year ago that their sites would always be free now act as if a subscription service is the nature of the universe."
"...we must prepare ourselves to pay for the organization and management of information and for the creation of good online teaching material."
Measuring the impact of educational technologies on student learning comes under discussion in Modern Assessment: A Natural, Organic Process by McGinn.
"Today’s cutting edge teaching practices demand more. Methodologies employing the emerging technologies require current assessment tools that are not stand-alone occurrences. Educators need to evaluate and reward students for in-depth achievements based upon perspectives reflecting the employment of the multiple intelligences, collaborative learning interactions, cognitive process, and demonstrated competence. Educators must employ assessment approaches that evaluate the on-going nature of the engagement of intelligence, individualized process development, curricular goals, and planned product.
"True learning assessment is a natural, organic process..."
"Therefore, the best assessment tools will be natural outgrowths of the creative process and its necessary stages of revision."
That student assessment and educational standards have become a significant national issue is confirmed by O'Neil in Integrating Curriculum and Technology Standards.
"The standards movement that has swept the United States has resulted in the adoption of standards in nearly every subject area and discipline in the school curriculum. In addition, leaders in the field of education technology have prescribed new standards for the knowledge and skills that students should be able to demonstrate with regard to technology"
There are also numerous examples of standards development:
NCATE Standards (Requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader)
ISTE's National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers
ISTE's National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Students
(Unfortunately, these are not inspiring documents. I find both of the above teacher standards dry and un-motivating, almost unusable documents that at best are a catalog of acceptable\unacceptable characteristics. I cannot help but wonder what real-world use these documents can or will be put to, in other words, Who actually opens these documents and finds direction or meaningful insight? In no way do they form a clear vision of how teacher-students can utilize technology in the classroom. If they are meant to serve as a checklist for quality control, they probably even do that poorly. They exactly represent the kind of bureaucratic prose that inspires ridicule. Show me someone who actually pores over these documents and rigorously tries to apply them in a systematic fashion and I'll show you someone who'll bring progress to a screeching halt. However, I did find the NETS for Student standards a useful outline of curriculum.)