[550] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: unkind remarks about K-12
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Schlitt)
Fri Apr 5 09:26:57 1991
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 91 09:25:16 -0500
From: Dan Schlitt <dan@sci.ccny.cuny.edu>
To: bukys@cs.rochester.edu, com-priv@psi.com
This discussion seems to be developing into another one of those
"blind men and the elephant" discussions. Everyone seems to see only
those problems of K-12 education that are a) worst and b) closest to
them.
The problems of K-12 education in this country are quite diverse.
That is one reason why our "education President"'s "national goals"
are not very useful. Local control of education has its drawbacks but
its one real strength is that local schools can deal with local
problems. Roy's community school board can center its attention on
AIDS, condoms, dope, etc. if that is their priority while other schools
can deal with their own problems.
With that said, consider that there may be some serious problems for
which networked computers may be able to make a significant
contribution to solution.
Just consider it. The whole thing has to be looked at as an
experiment just like the initial ARPAnet was. These experiments in
education have been going on for quite a while and we know much more
about what doesn't work than we know about what does work. If we
supply network access to schools we don't know what uses will
develope. On the other hand, if schools don't have access we can be
pretty sure that nothing will develop. Remember that the Internet is
what it is today because of access and not central planning.
Now let me give you an example of a serious problem for which the new
network technology might be a real help. It is an example from out in
the sticks.
There are areas of this country where secondary schools are small. So
small that they can not afford (in terms of cost vs. demand for
service) to have a high school physics teacher. It is not untypical
that if they offer a course in physics at all that it is taught by
some first of second year out of college teacher who was hired to
teach general science or biology and hasn't had a physics course since
their own high school physics course.
The state university, to which most high school graduates in the state
go, raises its science entrance requirement. How are these small
rural schools to provide for this new requirement?
Back a number of years ago when I was a member of a planning group
that was dealing with just this problem one solution that we
considered was PLATO. PLATO modules on high school physics could be
used to teach a dispersed group of students at these rural schools.
But it couldn't be justified. The communication costs at that time
made running PLATO from a central site completely unworkable. There
were versions which ran on stand-alone computers but the equipment and
coordination costs were still too high. I think that it actually was
tried out. Bill Norris and CDC donated enough equipment to make a
test possible. I left before that was done so I don't know how it
worked.
I think that the current internet technology provides a much more cost
effective base for teaching in this mode. We won't know if we don't
give it a serious try. Giving it a serious try means, among other
things, providing a sufficiently large user base. It just won't go
anywhere if the test is restricted to a couple of kind of strange
people out in Wyoming.
What is required is some well defined project (or two) that can be
used to justify a significant level of connectivity of the K-12
schools to the Internet. This will provide poeple with the freedom to
explore the real possibilities.
There is no way that an Internet connection can be justified for the
kind of small project that a biology teacher has suggested to me. But
it is just the compounding of little projects like his that make me
excited about the potenialities of this connectivity.
His class measures the pH and chemical properties of rain water that
they collect locally. What he would like to do is find a set of
schools up wind who would do the same thing. Now they could do the
exchange of data by mail at a leasurely pace. But he thinks that the
thing that would draw and keep the interest of the students in his
class is to be able to have a direct exchange of information between
the classes where they could watch the weather pattern and know the
properties of the rain at the upwind sites before the rain was
collected locally.
This may be a bad example, but the ease of exchange of information
that this technology makes possible can have exciting consequences.
Consider as an example (also probably bad) this mainig list.
/dan
