Introduction: The Craft of Teaching and the World Wide Web
Like many others, I believe that particular educational practices with the web as a medium have tremendous potential to shape how students and teachers engage in the processes of learning. At the same time, we often describe the web with metaphors of the "sea," or as a vast outer "space," and many teachers who set out to search and work on the web describe their experiences in terms of being adrift or disoriented. Other educators, through initial experiences with the web, separate "real work" from the relatively purposeless wandering or "surfing" that the web appears to encourage. It is my hope that this site will help narrow the distance between the educator who is a novice web-user and the loosely-structured, ever-becoming nature of the web--that it can be a mediating tool to scaffold and inspire further discovery. At a minimum, perhaps some of my own wanderings in constructing this site--during which I was sometimes lost and other times shouting "Voilˆ!"--will help to save you some time in your explorations.
What are my goals in this website?
Teaching is a type of craftwork, in which one has a particular vision, a set of dispositions and goals, and a range of tools and contexts within which to work. In the first three parts of this website, which offer perspectives from the classroom, large-scale projects, and student work, I offer visions of this craftwork-in-action. From this angle, and in light of the other resources it offers, this site can be viewed as a reference: a home base for educators who are seeking to explore the relationships between teaching and the web. Yet, in any process of selection, and even more so in review, a particular vision and set of values becomes evident, a critical purpose comes into play. I hope in these reviews to move beyond rating web sites by four stars or three mice, the genre of review that is currently popularized by search engines that award websites points for vague categories such as "presentation" and "content." Toward this purpose, I discuss websites as exemplars of particular pedagogical practices and ideologies, and in so doing, I foreground my own pedagogical values. Thus, this site can also be imagined as a "distributed essay" through exemplars, a descriptive argument of practices and potentials that are enhanced or made possible through the World Wide Web. Through this process of selecting and valuing, my hope is that this reference-essay will promote dialogue on pedagogy, and will also respond to the need for more self-reflexivity about the web embedded within its own context.
Through Classrooms Using the Web, Large-Scale Educational Projects, and Student Work on the Web, I have attempted to create a pastiche of various perspectives on pedagogical work with the web. Reading the reviews and examining the sites in this section is intended to encourage and motivate particular practices, and also may help prompt reflection upon the relationships between the agendas and viewpoints of teachers, institutions, and students. These sites serve as models, and together suggest a vision of possibilities for pedagogy integrated with the web. In the sections Discipline-Specific Sites, Digital Libraries and Museums, and Journals and Magazines, my purpose is to select and discuss a range of resources for educators constructing their own visions and plans. As with the sections noted above, these parts of the overall project also often serve as models of pedagogical practices and goals. Finally, this entire web site may be considered as a medium of professional development, but I have also developed a section that selects and reviews Professional Development oriented sites and includes pointers to Professional Organizations. To assist in such development particular to web-related issues, I have also included sections on Tools and Strategies for Searching the Web and Technical Help for Web Projects.
In developing an organization for this project, I have been guided by the principle that thoughtful selection, especially for the novice user, is just as important as abundance and variety. Of course there are many ways in which such a site could be constructed, and the categories represented here do not pretend to present a taxonomy of representative resources and practices. At the same time, they have been developed through discussions and surveying of secondary and college educators, and I hope that you will find them valuable. In selecting and constructing the exemplars for each section, I have attempted to cross among diverse disciplines--biology, English composition, ancient history and physics among others--and to represent both college and secondary school levels. However, as I have attempted to keep this site “lean,” it is likely that many educators will not find a precise match with their particular field and student level. Yet I hope that you will find that the exemplars provide both specific ideas and broader visions that transcend age-level and disciplinary boundaries.
As a final note on structure, I have not attempted to maintain the same genre of writing in my work within the different sections of the project. Rather, I have tried to fit the type of writing to the purpose of the section: while longer discussions and descriptions characterize the "Images" sections, brief annotations appeared to be more fitting for links to technical help. In all cases, I have avoided simply presenting long lists of links, although in some instances I have pointed to their locations elsewhere.
One of the most significant outcomes of using any technology has little to do with technology per se. Rather, it is the potential of such technologies to create an interruption between ourselves and our practices: such tools and media construct occasions for us to reflect upon and articulate what it is we value within our pedagogies. Reflective engagement must be encouraged and developed, but such moments also find us, when computers and networks crash, when demos dissolve--in general when we are urged by our tools to reconsider why we picked them up in the first place. The reflective use of such tools can provide a mirror to our larger practices and beliefs, making more pronounced, more deliberate, and sometimes more troublesome our purposes and ideologies and the histories to which they belong.
In perusing the web, it becomes rapidly clear that there is not A World of Education represented therein, despite the Education subject grouping necessary for search engines, but many such worlds, with radically different conceptions of teaching and learning, sometimes even based upon similar resources. In producing this site, I have become more aware of the lenses through which I am selecting and reviewing. Below is an explicit list of some of the values that are implicit in my reviews. A full self-disclosure or history, or a story of the incredibly stable identity is not my purpose here, but rather to reread and encapsulate my positions. Were the entire site read as a distributed essay, these statements may be taken as a cluster of my main arguments about teaching and the web, the values I have attempted to exemplify here:
- a purposeful use of the web to do some things we cannot do otherwise, or not nearly as well without it
- student and teacher inquiry and constructivist practices
- student participation, dialogue, and publication through diverse media
- communication and interaction with communities outside of schools and universities for both students and teachers
- the use of multi-media to assist different types of learners, better represent experience with the world, and promote interest
- a belief that virtual communities, resources, and activities can and should enhance their offline counterparts, and develop interesting and complex relations with them
- a vision of the web not as a stable "tool" or resource to be "mined," but as a medium for which a new range of tools and practices can and should be developed
- a sense that in education, and in developing resources for it, that careful selection is as important as access
I hope that you enjoy The Craft of Teaching and the World Wide Web, and that it assists you in reflecting upon, imagining, and planning for your own craftwork.
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