Computers have caused a revolution in education, but the
tremendous changes seen in the last decade may be surpassed in the next
as those computers are connected in a global education network.
Teachers
and high school students sample the water in Lake Baikal in Siberia
while at other lakes around the world, other teachers and students take
similar samples from local lakes and subject them to the same simple
water-quality tests. Via their school computers, they exchange their
results and their observations about how water pollution problems are
the same around the world. They are part of a "global laboratory"
project that includes scientists specializing in water pollution.
A
similar computer network pins citizen activists, joined with students,
teachers and scientists, in "sister watershed" groups throughout the
world.
Amateur birdwatchers and biologists pool their rare bird
sightings in a North American computer network that is linked with bird
researchers in Central America and South America.
The differences
between classroom and community education are blurred on the global
computer networks. Voluntary organizations, government agencies,
students and teachers are all involved in a real that has become, for
many, a virtual classroom, without walls, and increasingly without
borders.
Already, pilot projects have high school students sharing
the methods and results from field studies of environmental quality,
using computer telecommunication to leap national boundaries. Elementary
school children share their life experiences end visions of the future
the same way. Their messages to one another, passed with tremendous
speed and shared simultaneously among many classrooms, provide strong,
personal lessons in science, geography and human relations.
Environmental
education curriculum development, pursued independently and often in
isolation by teachers, school districts and universities over the past
two decades, is now linked in a global forum that can respond
immediately to the ever more complex and urgent environmental problems
the world faces. Teachers the world over are connecting with their
counterparts to discuss how they can do their jobs better. Co-ordination
of international education projects is less burdened by the constraints
of time and travel budgets as computer networks provide forums for
collaboration.
The technology for this exchange takes advantage of
the personal computer's ability to communicate over standard phone
lines using a modem. The simplest networks connect personal computers in
a "store-and-forward" system that echoes messages from one to the next,
until all have copies. These least-cost networks are linked to larger,
faster computers that act as central information storage banks and relay
stations. They in turn exchange information with one another and tap
the power and data in computer systems at major research and educational
institutions.
In many ways this vast new sea of information
presents its own challenges, often akin to "drinking water from a fire
hose." The enormous glut of fact and opinion is impossible to take in,
and has forced those who would taste its power to devise new ways for
organizing and sampling the information flow.
Electronic mail
services and computer "conferencing" let students and teachers
communicate with each other privately, or publicly as members of large
discussion groups. Computer conferences are organized much like those
where people meet face-to-face, except that the meeting rooms are inside
each participant's computer. Computer conferences transcend time zones,
since participants review and comment on each others' written postings
as their time and interest allows. Everyone gets to read and think about
questions or statements posed in a conference, and everyone has a
co-equal opportunity to reply.
Computer networking is making
classroom walls disappear. Real environmental problems are entering the
classroom with immediacy via computer nets, and students are jointly
seeking understanding and solutions with scientists, citizen activists,
journalists, government officials and community leaders of all kinds.
While access to computer networks is still remote for most people on the
planet, it is becoming more and more available to the gatekeepers and
opinion-leaders who help shape common understanding of the global
situation. The increasing abundance of the multiple information sources
available via computer networks, if viewed as a well-stocked
marketplace, may also stimulate demand for more and better goods by the
world's information consumers.
Citizen participation in the 1992
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), for
example, has been ccoordinated via computer networks on seven
continents, giving NGOs access to complete text of the preparatory
committee documents, and providing public forums for news and issue
discussion. This availability of information has a dramatic effect on
how an event such as UNCED permeates the mass media everywhere.
Underlying
the often chaotic view presented by the mass media, structures are
developing to channel the new rivers of information to empower this and
coming generations to deal with the issues it describes. A variety of
efforts at computer networking for environmental education provide some
great models. At the root, these efforts are all based on the same
notion: that environmental problems must be viewed with a global
perspective, but responded to by individuals acting locally, in their
own communities or homes.
All of this new technology is not
without cost, and the developed countries are clearly ahead in providing
computer access for education. But even in the United States, where
computer telecommunication is becoming commonplace, profit rather than
educational reform is a dominant force in determining who gets access.
The
harsh reality has motivated citizen computer networks to band together
in the international Association for Progressive Communications (APC) to
make computer network access broadly available. The APC hosts several
promising educational efforts on its partner computer networks that now
extend to more than 90 countries around the globe. These services may be
tapped by anyone with a personal computer and modem, often via a local
call, at costs roughly equivalent to a newspaper subscription or monthly
telephone bill.
The education projects offered on the APC
networks are examples of how low-budget computer communication can fit
into community programs and classrooms.
