Web profile
Knowledge Quest; Chicago; May/Jun 2000; Michael L Hall;

Volume:	28
Issue:	5
Start Page:	34
ISSN:	10949046
Full Text:
Copyright American Library Association May/Jun 2000

"Web Profile" highlights a Web person, online resource, or practice that can enlarge our understanding of partnerships, learning and teaching, information access and delivery, or program administration. Michael Hall has used the development of his Web page to prompt his own learning on how to teach students.

Teaching with Electronic Technology

When I began collecting links for my Web site, Teaching with Electronic Technology; I wasn't entirely sure what I hoped to learn.l In some respects that uncertainty remains. Computers are transforming our existence in ways we scarcely have time to contemplate. The only lessons I have learned with any confidence are these: Teachers must master electronic technology or they will likely be mastered by it. And the best way to go about attaining mastery is to use those skills of curiosity, imagination, critical analysis, and judgment that have always been our primary resources. That's why I put this quotation from Galileo's Siderius Nuncius at the top of my Web site: ``Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness, unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight." Lest we forget: it's about knowledge, not the technology.

The Real Objective

In the best of classrooms, technology (electronic or otherwise) should support the curriculum, not determine it. This seems obvious, but the new technologies are seductive, and it's easy to be caught up in all the talk about "revolutions" without considering meaningful classroom objectives or purposes. Once all the classrooms are wired, then what? I remain a cautious optimist about teaching with electronic technology. But before switching those computers on and turning students loose, many issues need to be taken into account, from such technical and practical considerations as hardware, soft-,are, and technical support, to philosophical issues of content, standards, and evaluation.

"The Technology/Content Dilemma," a recent paper by Shelley Goldman, Karen Cole, and Christina Syer, confronts one of the most frustrating problems of using new classroom technologies: keeping content from being subordinated to excitement over new technologies.2 The authors point out how easily teachers can be caught up in all the gadgetry that accompanies classroom computing. The good news is that content can and does re-emerge enriched by the new technology, but it takes hard work, careful planning, and collaboration between teachers and students. In a somewhat earlier but still important essay, "Computer Skills for Information Problem-Solving: Learning and Teaching Technology in Context," Michael B. Eisenberg and Doug Johnson suggest ways for teachers and librarians to approach the integration of computers and content while keeping in mind that knowledge of computers is related to content.i They ask tough questions about the kinds of technical skills that schools should be imparting along with more traditional learning. And they emphasize the need for technical advisors, library media specialists, and classroom teachers to work together to develop lessons that teach computer skills, general information skills, and curricular content.

Personal Commitment, Professional Growth

Teachers who have success using computers in their teaching seem to be those willing to devote a lot of their own time to keeping up with all the new things that are happening in schools and libraries and online. Anyone can succeed in some way with the new technologies, but for truly imaginative classroom applications there is a price to be paid, and that price is time, often personal time. Good examples of creative innovation abound, but here are two of my favorites: Jessica Morton's Web site, Birds on the Net, describes a project undertaken by first and second graders at Mendocino (Calif.) Grammar School.4 Morton asked her first and second graders to gather information about birds using the Internet and e-mail. The results are impressive, and the idea is one that can be adapted to other subjects and projects. Jim Askew's The Internet Science Room is a Web site he maintains at Frontier High School in Red Rock, Oklahoma. Askew's site has grown remarkably since I first linked to it.5 His well-maintained site provides a valuable online resource for teachers and students at Frontier High School as well as for others interested in combining communications technology and science teaching.

Over the years, I have collected links to a wide variety of approaches that integrate teaching and computers at all levels of education. For example, The World lecture Hall offers a vast and growing collection of course Web sites in nearly every discipline.6 It's a good place to get ideas from other teachers and to share innovations.

A Democracy of Ideas

There are Web sites that teach by offering information and content. A notable example is The Encyclopedia Mythica, which collects articles on folklore, legends, and mythologies from all over the world.7 MegaMath, maintained by Los Alamos National Laboratory, is devoted to making both simple and advanced mathematical concepts interesting to elementary school children.8 Jerry Woodfill's The Space Educator's Handbook delivers an impressive array of infor motion about NASA and space exploration, while The Tree of Life is an ambitious collaborative project that brings together on one Web site information about nearly all of the earth's flora and fauna.9 Many sites, as originally conceived, are primarily directed toward higher education or toward K-12 audiences. However, the Web is a democracy of ideas and information; sites lik( The Tree of Life that begin as higher education projects discover a wider audience among nonspecialists, including school teachers and students and interested members of the public.

Digital Archives

In some respects the greatest value of the Internet is the incredible amount of primary materials now being made available free and online. While proprietary learning programs and CD-ROMs once dominated teaching technology, the advent of the Web has inspired a popular revolution. Nothing illustrates this better than American Memory, the Library of Congress' National Digital Library project.10 The riches of this growing collection include not only documents of the nation's founding and photographs of the Civil War, but original audio recordings of American folk music and examples of the early cinema of Thomas Edison. As impressive as the content is the powerful and flexible search engine built into the site. With a little experimenting, teachers will find a wealth of electronic resources to enhance their lessons and assignments, and additional suggestions for activities and lessons on the library's Learning Page.11 Nor does it end with the Web site. The Library of Congress also offers an American Memory Fellows Program, as well as conferences and workshops with opportunities for teachers to come and learn more about American Memory and its potential for the classroom.12 The library's emphasis on teacher training and collaboration sets American Memory apart from many electronic resources. The Library of Congress is not the only digital resource available to teachers who want to use online collections in their classrooms. Documents in the Classroom, a Web site developed by the Maryland State Archives, demonstrates what states can do with local resources.13 And History in the Raw, a discussion on the National Archives and Records Administration Web site, presents both a rationale for using electronic documents and examples of lessons and projects based on NARA collections.14

Discipline Gateways

Some of the links on my Web site are "gateway" collections. EdSitement, a Web site for K-12 teachers and students sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and MCI WorldCom, includes links to outstanding resources in the humanities as well as lesson plans and a powerful search engine.15 In fact, EdSitement is only one part of MarcoPolo, MCI WorldCom's gateway project for K-12 content in several core disciplines, including economics, geography, mathematics, and science. 16 These gateways collect exemplary sites chosen by panels of experts from scores nominated by scholars and teachers. Using a more inclusive approach, Academic Search Engines attempts to collect most (if not quite all) of the existing academic search engines on the Web, from specialized sites like Argos, a limited area search of ancient and medieval resources on the Internet, to sites like The Argus Clearinghouse, which is itself a "selective" collection of topical guides individually rated by professional librarians.17 And then there is ThinkQuest, a collection of award-winning, student Web sites and competitions that reveal an impressive range of student-- generated innovations in teaching and learning technology.18

Collaborative Journey

My own experiments with technology in the classroom have so far been modest. Neither I nor my colleague Peter Losin want to overwhelm content with technology or to introduce technology for its own sake. In both of our honors seminars we have come to rely on e-mail and a class "reflector" (mailing list) to stay in closer touch with our students. Naturally, we have replaced most handouts with information mounted on our course Web sites. Our Web resources for The Beat Begins: American Culture in the 1950s reflect the collaborative nature of teaching with electronic technology. 19 In addition to links to various online resources for 1950s American culture, including literature, music, movies, science, culture, and classes at other schools, we have our own bibliographies and course projects. While only some of our students have elected to create Web sites instead of writing traditional research papers, nearly all of our students now use the Web to some extent in their research. There is no question that the content of this particular course has been enriched by technology-not only the Internet, but also audio and video recordings, and the original photographic, audio, and video materials available to us and our students online and in the University of Maryland's libraries.

For The Beat Begins, we've had class projects on everything from popular music and early television to polio and politics, from women in the workplace to women of the beat generation.20 Often our own "expertise" and "authority" as teachers is stretched by our students' projects; neither Peter nor I pretend to be experts in every phase of 1950s culture. Instead, we work along with students to help them find and analyze resources, whether in the library or online. As a result, our own knowledge has deepened.

While we do not force the use of technology on our students, some notable class projects grew from a student's technological skills or interests: several creditable attempts to build Web sites, and even a rather professional radio interview program on 1950s baseball, which we may one day add to the course site as streaming audio. We offer technical advice when asked, and we encourage creative alternatives to the usual research paper, but we've resisted assigning Web sites. Our time is limited, and neither of us wants to turn the course away from the 1950s toward the study of Web design and fundamentals of HTML. Our technological mainstays, beyond audio and video recordings, remain the class e-mail list and the course Web site. That leaves us more time for face-to-face conversations and group discussions.

Assessment Is Key

Nonetheless, the limited amount of technology that we have introduced into our '50s course presents some common difficulties. One is that Web sites are not the same as more traditional research papers. How does one "evaluate" a Web site? Another is that students who opt for the Web site over the paper will need to use different kinds of resources. How does a teacher make sure that the Web site is as thoroughly researched as a comparable research paper? Peter and I encourage all of our students to take advantage of resources available online, but we also insist that they be critical and apply some of the same analytical criteria they should apply to printed resources. Who is the author? What are his or her sources of information? Where is the resource published? When was it published or created? How does it compare to other published or online resources? What do other authorities in the field say about it? Since one of the qualities we hope we are imparting to our students is judgment, we ask them to be judicious in their use of resources.

Some of these same issues are addressed in detail by Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators on her Web page devoted to critical evaluation at various levels of the K-12 curriculum.21 She also points to a wealth of other evaluation resources, all of which emphasize the importance, for teachers and students, of being able to evaluate the quality of information they encounter online. Schrock lists practical criteria-such as authority, bias, knowledge, date of creation-but also includes style, graphics, navigability James Rettig's "Beyond `Cool': Analog Models for Reviewing Digital Resources" also proposes strategies for teachers and librarians confronting the Web's infinite variety.22 Rettig stresses the importance of comparative analysis, recalling criteria used to evaluate print references when reviewing Web resources. Navigating the vastness of the Web presents a challenge to teachers and students alike, but it also introduces another means of teaching students to learn to use their judgment and skills of critical evaluation. And so it comes back to Galileo and "the excellence of the things themselves."