Topic 40: K-12 Education and the Internet By: Eric S. Theise (estheise) on Thu, Jul 29, '93 1 responses so far A report on the K-12/Internet session of the Ideas Festival. 1 response total. Topic 40: K-12 Education and the Internet # 1: Eric S. Theise (estheise) Thu, Jul 29, '93 (13:45) 136 lines Convened by: Ken Klingenstein Attended by: Steve Cisler, Ed Daranyi, Patty Fawcett, Patrick J. Finn, David Fodel, Madeline Gonzalez, Ken Hamel, Rick Hollinbeck, Michael Jenkins, Jenifer Landry, Jerry McCarthy, Drew Mirque, Dean Rolley, Notes by: Eric Theise Although this breakout session of the Telluride Ideas Festival was scheduled for the basement of the Sheridan Opera House, an improvement in the weather and the din of the Electronic Cafe sent the grateful session participants out onto the sunny, grassy area between the Opera House and City Hall. Ken Klingenstein, of the University of Colorado/Boulder's Computer and Network Services group, spoke at length about the Boulder Valley School District and its experience with Internet-based services for K-12 education. Some factoids: - there are 46 schools in the District - most grant monies go to teacher training, not connectivity - there are many rich resources on the Internet worth tapping into -- including lesson plans -- but they can be difficult to locate - students are highly motivated to use these resources and tools - teachers need to be given release time to learn about these resources and tools; they also need to have easy access from home - students also need access from home as 'keyboard contention' in the classroom is a problem; one school has their janitor switch the school's 96-line PBX to the modem pool after hours so the students can do everything from research to MUSEing - the availability of indecent materials in the Matrix is a big concern, and the District's current approach -- having parents and students sign a four page contract on responsible networking -- is unworkable - it's preferable to have one computer in lots of classrooms rather than lots of computers in one classroom or lab - of the $8K that typically goes into putting a District school online, $1500 goes directly towards connectivity with the remainder going towards hardware and software upgrades Ken closed with some final statistics for the Boulder Valley project. One year into the project, accounts have been given to several thousand students and roughly 300 teachers. Only 13% of new K-12 accounts have been terminated for non-use while, by comparison, the typical number at the university is about 40%. The system is growing faster and being used by more students and teachers than their most optimistic forecasts suggested. The Boulder Valley School District gopher is scheduled to go online in mid-August. I talked about Pacific Bell's Knowledge Network, a gopher-based service for California's K-12 and Community College systems. Opening after Labor Day, the new system will start the second year of a two year technology trial with six participating schools in the Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay, and Sacramento areas. The system is expected to add another 12 to 16 schools in early 1994. The Knowledge Network will serve as a one-stop shopping site for K-14 students and teachers, offering access to gophers, telnet sessions, and ftp sites, College and University information resources as well as information providers that have contracted with Pacific Bell. The system will have provisions for e-mail and newsgroups. I also talked about the dynamics of the Knowledge Network team, which includes a delightfully diverse range of interests, from bottom-line corporate/marketing to information-wants-to-be-free net hackers, with teachers, futurists, and human factors engineers making up the rest of the mix. Questions we're facing over the next few months include where we draw the lines between what's available to our subscribers and what's available to the general Internet community and what the breakdown will be between people connecting from schools with direct IP connectivity versus those coming in over dial-up connections. Jenifer Landry asked about the impact of the Internet on educating students to be information workers, specifically if it was moving towards a unified approach to information. I pointed out that, in its current state, the Internet provides a deceptively uniform interface to information that varies widely in quality and orientation. I suggested that this gave teachers a better opportunity to teach critical thinking skills, and mentioned that we are negotiating with groups like Kathleen Tyner's Strategies for Media Literacy to develop and circulate curricular materials to this end. Steve Cisler gave examples of incidents involving cracked versions of the Constitution or Supreme Court rulings. There was a brief discussion about how the US Department of Education is pitifully behind the times with regards to online education and how some people think the Department of Agriculture has filled the resulting gap.There were also some hopeful comments about the potential of online K-12 education to move into broader areas of home schooling, distance learning, disabled education, and K-100/lifetime learning. Access for lower income rural and inner cities schools was perceived to be a persistant problem, although projects such as the Telluride InfoZone, where outreach to rural areas is integrated into the overall vision, were viewed as steps in the right direction. Ken stressed the importance of district and community support for online education. In addition to making sure that teachers have home access and release time, he suggested that teachers should not have to support the technology and that they should get reaccreditation credit for learning to use and teach network technologies. He noted that community support can be developed by posting relevant information -- PTA meetings, extracurricular activities, lunch and dinner seminars -- on for parents to tap into. There was a short and fairly standard discussion of graphical front ends for the Internet. Fetch, Turbo Gopher, and Eudora were held out as examples of easy-to-use individual tools, and progress reports were given on The Guide and other attempts to provide a unified interface to the net. Steve Cisler mentioned that the Apple Library had been involved with supporting a licensable interface oriented towards K-6. I'll close with some items from various anecdote files: the Boulder Valley debate team rehearsed their strategies using newsgroups and went undefeated this year (nothing like a little heat treatment from USENET flamage)! Several people talked about collaborative net projects such as international pen pals, exercises where students compare prices and availability of fixed shopping lists or weather data; I mentioned the FrEdMail publication, *Telesensations*, as a source of exercises of this type. One touching story was told of an online friendship that developed between two students with prosthetic limbs. Others told stories about children complaining about textbooks that didn't have bold face, reverse video, or hypertext, and of children who sprinkle their face-to-face conversations with , ! The session broke up in time for the last formal session of the Festival, a rich one in which the townspeople of Telluride and the surrounding areas asked questions of the major players in the InfoZone project. The K-12 group closed on the hopeful note that, although there are many "insurmountable opportunities", the impact of the Internet on K-12 education is on its way to becoming more influential than at the university level. = = = = = = = = = = Gopher users can access the proceedings and other support materials for the Telluride Institute's Ideas Festival on Tele-Community in the Community/Telluride section of the WELLgopher (gopher.well.sf.ca.us). .