This site and the Senior Project it contains are nearing completion but still under construction. Some of what you find here will be in rough shape. (sw - 09.20.2000)

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Preface

This is the Senior Project of Steven W., an adult student enrolled through the External Degree Program (EXD) of the College of Continuing Studies at University of Alabama. The project's purpose is to investigate the history and current status of integrating the Internet into the K-12 classroom.

The original idea for the project arose out of the author's twenty years of experience in applied computer technologies for the small business. In search of a thesis, and thinking of how my own children are not fully engaged in their schoolwork and do not appear to be integrating computers into their learning, per chance I wondered, Why, after a full 20 years, have personal computers not made more of an impact in the classroom? As one who was admittedly an unenthusiastic pre-college and only slightly more proactive college student, but who is also now fully engaged in lifelong learning (that is extremely integrated with, in fact, inseparable from computer technologies and the Internet,) I asked:

• Where do we really stand in our nation's effort to integrate the Internet and computer technologies into the classroom?
• Based on my (long) experience as a businessman applying computer technologies to business, what could I suggest to educators for integrating this technology into the classroom?

My pre-investigation answers to these questions are:
We as a nation have obviously been slow to integrate the Internet and technology into the classroom, though perhaps not without just cause.

My pre-investigation advice to educators would be not to rely on the business community to provide either comprehensive education portals nor classroom focused sites. The educational community should take the lead in creating exciting websites for classroom use, websites with current knowledge content, and an educational universe of web portals specifically designed for educators and students to safely navigate and appropriately use the Internet. Further, the educational community, particularly in the universities, have the resources to design and maintain such a universe of websites within their student body and faculty ("Publish to the Internet, or perish.")

These are "answers" that I expect to change or validate as I conduct my research.

Hopefully, this project will demonstrate the use of the Internet and computer technologies for educational purposes, and the importance of educators publishing to the WWW. The entire project will be developed using computer technologies (if it were left up to the likes of me, handwriting would be a lost art,) and it will be researched and constructed almost entirely online.

Your comments and participation are requested and welcome.