2. What is the Internet?
You will no doubt have heard or read something about the Internet over
the past year or so. Indeed, there has been a lot of hype and so there
are many questions to be answered. We wonder if the Internet is just another
fad or can it really make a difference to our lives and to the way we teach
our children? Not since the television has a new advance in technology
provided such an opportunity to bring together the global village in the
same way that the Internet can, and we all know what an impact the TV plays
in all our lives. The Internet as we know it today is in its infancy. As
educators, we must ask ourselves are we to take this tool and use it to
prepare our children for the information age?
So what IS the Internet? It's a collection of computers connected together
by phone lines which allows for the global sharing of information. The
Net is a network of over six million computers throughout the world. That
makes it a community of over thirty million people (figures from 1995).
It is by far the fastest growing area of communications technology. From
two hundred computers in 1981 to over six million in 1995, it has consistently
doubled in size every year and this growth rate shows no sign of slowing
down.
To get you started, we will briefly explain how the Internet can be
used in classroom learning and look at the two most widely used elements
of the Internet, E-mail and the World Wide Web.
Classroom learning
How will the Internet change education? Well, the experts tell us that
it will profoundly change the way we teach and the way our students learn.
We are living in an Information Age where knowledge and information are
constantly changing. In such a world, textbooks become obsolete much quicker
than they did in the past - for instance, take the political geography of Europe
which has changed quite a bit in the last five years alone. The Internet
can handle such changes and keep both teacher and student up to date.
To date, our schools have survived without technology but in the future
this will change. Our students will need to know how to use technology
in order to access information and then use it in a constructive way to
complete a task. In the past, schools relied heavily on textbooks, but
today information is changing so quickly that we need up-to-date resources
to complement the traditional texts. Seymour Papert, a renowned MIT professor,
tells the story of a mid-nineteenth-century surgeon magically transported
through time to a modern operating theatre. 'The doctor would not recognise
a thing, would not know what to do or how to help. Modern technology would
have totally transformed the practice of surgical medicine beyond his recognition.
If a mid-nineteenth-century schoolteacher were carried by the same machine
into a present-day classroom, except for minor subject details, that teacher
could pick up where his or her late-twentieth-century peer left off. Through
no fault of our own, our classrooms have changed little from those of a
hundred years ago but hopefully now this situation is about to change.
With the Internet, schools can access information anywhere in the world
and communicate with students and teachers in far distant lands. The classroom
of today and tomorrow needs to differ from the classroom of yesterday;
our students need to become constructors of information, engaged in real
problem-solving based on the real world. Emphasis should be placed on team
work, as well as on working individually to prepare students for the work
place. Many of the new curriculum guidelines are conscious of the fact
that students need to collaborate to solve problems. Technology and the
Internet in particular allow students to work together in solving problems
using real data in a safe environment where they can't lose or corrupt
the data.
The Internet contains such a wealth of information that students will
need to develop the skills of accessing and evaluating the material
available. Such an environment will transform teaching and learning from
being passive activities into interactive ones that take place within and
outside the walls of the classroom. Resources that are housed anywhere
in the world will now become accessible to Irish students anywhere in the
country. Students and teachers can go on virtual school trips to The Louvre,
The White House or even to outer space. This truly is a new and exciting
way to learn and extend the boundaries of the classroom.
Electronic mail, more commonly known as E-mail, is basically a letter
written on computer which can then be sent over a phone line to another
computer. E-mail is presently the most utilised Internet service. It allows
one to send messages to any part of the world in a matter of minutes and
all for the price of a local phone call. E-mail messages themselves are
text-based, but you can send files, pictures, sounds, etc., as an attachment
to your message.
In addition to sending and receiving messages, E-mail is the basis for
other Internet activities such as mailing lists, newsgroups, and Internet
relay chat.
A mailing lists allows a large group of people to exchange messages
on a topic of mutual interest. There are thousands of these discussion
groups which receive an E-mail message from one person and then automatically
send that message to everyone else on the list. If you want to receive
many E-mails, then this is a good way to start.
Newsgroups provide another way for people on the Internet to communicate
with each other. When you subscribe to a newsgroup, messages are not sent
directly to each person, but are posted on a bulletin board. These messages
can then be read or ignored as required.
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web or WWW is the most exciting and fastest growing part
of the Internet. The Web brings together text, pictures, graphics, sound,
and even video, in a simple easy-to-use format. The Web is made up of literally
millions of pages of information on every possible topic of interest. These
pages are linked to other pages and by simply clicking on a piece of highlighted
text or an image, you are transported instantly to another page which may
be stored on a computer thousands of miles away. Most people have by now
heard the phrase "surfing the Web". This refers to people casually
following links from one page to the next and so on. Like the surfer, you
do not always know where you are going to end up.
Viewing Web pages is made possible by a piece of software called a Web
browser. The most popular of these are Netscape, Internet Explorer, and
Mosaic. The browser interprets the "source code" of each Web
page and presents it on your computer screen in an attractive user-friendly
format.
It's virtually impossible to keep track of what's on the World Wide
Web. Web pages are constantly changing and new pages are being created
all the time. This means that the information is always more or less up
to date. As you can imagine, with so much information, a lot of it may
be useless, inappropriate, or simply misleading. The trick to conducting
a successful "surf" is knowing what you want and what you should
ignore.
Each individual page on the Web has its own address called a URL or
Uniform Resource Locator. This allows you to go directly to a particular
page if you already have the URL. You will find many URLs listed throughout
this guide.
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