Curriculum, Pedagogy and Learning Networks

The Internet is thirty years old. It has proved its worth to the academic and research community with its ability to collaborate, communicate, share, and exchange. Today, the Internet is becoming a ubiquitous computer network and it is truly transforming our economy and our culture. The ability to collaborate, communicate, share, and exchange are the exact tasks that most schools and most teachers are not equipped to accomplish. The education industry today requires teachers to deliver a prescribed body and sequence of information. So, as educators, we find ourselves in the best of times and the worst of times.
The convergence of computers, multimedia, telecommunications on the Internet and the World Wide Web bring us close to the promise of technology to reshape the culture of education -- our entire culture. We see evidence everyday that the Web is actually beginning to change our lives.
However, the schools are still stuck in an outdated paradigm more akin to the 19th
Century than to the 21st. Teachers who are good at answering questions are not so good
at asking, "What if?" Teachers who have a body of "expertise" or "knowledge" to deliver
are not good at helping students to discover new ideas and information and then
transforming this into knowledge.
Today, more than ever, we need teachers who are able and willing to become
side-by-side learners with their students. Teachers who are not afraid to acknowledge, "I
don't know," and then can turn around and say, "Let's find out together." These teachers
need to know how to use various technologies to shape and process and manage
information, to look for relationships, trends, anomalies, and details, which can not only
answer questions, but create questions as well. We need teachers who understand that
learning in today's world is not just a matter of mastering a static body of knowledge, but
also being able to discover the rapidly changing ideas about that knowledge itself.
In my fifteen years of teaching teachers "about" technology, I have found it far
more effective to show teachers how to teach writing using a word processor, rather than
teaching them how to use a word processor, how to use a spreadsheet or database to
collect and plot census data as part of a social science unit, rather than how to use the
tool; or how to use the World Wide Web to develop incredibly rich professional dialogs
between students as Web authors and their audiences around the World.
When teachers are given (or take) the freedom to change how they teach... to
move from "instructional deliverers" to "side-by-side learners," we see technology
employed in drastically different ways... more akin to the ways other segments of our
society are using them.
In the former paradigm, computers are just one more delivery system... no better
than traditional systems. However, in the new paradigm that is cropping up
spontaneously in Web-connected classrooms around the world, teachers
quickly discover that computers and related technology are imperative to
the process. (Rogers 1998)
Todays ubiquitous educational system works well for some and poorly for
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others. Its elitism and class bias is global, a structural feature of the educational system built over the past four centuries. Educators designed the traditional system for optimal use of a powerful information technology -- the printed book. Schools and classrooms have been places where teachers and students are isolated from the general culture and where information resources are relatively scarce -- textbooks are only a selection of what a field of knowledge offers.
I believethat information networks now make digital libraries possible, and hypertext removes the covers from books. These networks are reaching schools, into classrooms and on to students desks, ending isolation and substituting abundance for scarcity. Such change is not without risk. To cope we must recognize new rules. Curriculum and pedagogy must change from strategies for distributing scarce knowledge to ways that enable people to use unlimited access to the resources of our cultures.
I believethat information networks also deliver new media ... multimedia. This alters the opportunities for student participation and creation of knowledge. This is epistemologically interesting because multimedia is additive to the process of thinking. Increasing use of multimedia shows that the work of thinking can take many forms, verbal, visual, auditor, kinetic, and blends of all. Non-linguistic media are not new, but information networks combine with multimedia to make them widely available for creating knowledge. Publishing will no longer be the reward of a privileged few. Publishers no longer have to be multi-national conglomerates. Information access is no longer limited by the sequential nature of books. Students can use multimedia to acquire ideas and to express their thoughts in diverse ways. This means that educators will need to broaden the norms of academic excellence because it will be increasingly difficult to favor a pure linguistic mode.
I believethat information networks increase access to information and access to publishing. This has a multiplying effect. Resources created by one educator are also available for many others. Student portfolios are available to teacher, to their piers, their parents and just as importantly to themselves, at school, at home, (eventually) anywhere. Digital technologies also expand personal potentials. Computers performing complex calculations quickly and accurately. Access to databases for searching and retrieval allow students with good memory and bad to manage information sets that neither could handle on their own. Educators should

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