This article examines the use of the Internet in education, and how it's use can revolutionize the way children learn, the way they communicate their ideas and the role of the teacher in the classroom. The Internet has some of the greatest potential in the field of education and particularly intercultural education - due to the nature of the medium, cultural, national, gender, racial and national barriers between students fall away and communication with any part of the world is immediate, frequent and informal.

There are many challenges for educators using this new medium in the classroom - there is a great lack of training in IT, the schools themselves need to be connected and there must be a fundamental change in the philosophy of teaching. In addition, there is a grave need for online educational content. This article examines three educational websites for young people and presents an example of a group exercize for student publishing.

The arrival of the Internet into our lives has dramatically changed many areas of work and communication; but the field of education will see the most exciting changes of all in the coming years. In the United States, 8 out of 10 public schools had access to the Internet in 1998, double what it was in 1994 (The National Center for Education Statistics, 1997). During a recent telecommunications conference in Washington, DC, Vice President Al Gore outlined his goal to connect all schools in the United States to the Internet by the year 2000. In the United Kingdom, 8,000 out of 24,000 schools presently have Internet access, up 2,000 from 1997 (Internet Magazine, 1998). The Council of Europe recently urged European governments to establish access to the Internet as well as intra-school links for all it's schools as part of its "Language Learning for a New Europe" project for 2001 (Council of Europe, 1997 b). In fact, the Council of Europe has shown it's committment to educational Internet development by creating two commitees whose sole task it is to bring the New Media into the classroom: the Culture Committee and the Steering Committee on the Mass Media (Council of Europe, 1997 e). It is not only Western students who are hooking up to the Net; according to the JOINT Center in Budapest (an educational NGO), all secondary schools in Hungary have been, or soon will be, connected to the Internet.

At present, the Internet is made up of more than 30 million users who communicate in 151 different languages worldwide, and this number is constantly growing (Euro-Marketing, 1998). According to the Economist, the Internet has doubled in size every year since 1988 - and the number of individual websites doubles every 53 days (Council of Europe, 1997 e).

Clearly the Internet has outgrown its earlier status as a purely technical tool for the savvy few; and it is highly unlikely that the Internet will be a passing trend in the coming years. In the business community, it has revolutionized communication, performance and productivity in the short years of it's existence. In fact, Al Gore mentioned in his speech that by the year 2000, 60% of all jobs will require skills in Information Technology- while at present only 20% of the workforce have those skills. Internationally, the most practical skills that educators can teach the next generation is in the field of Information Technology.

However, the greatest advantages for the Internet lie in it's potential effectiveness in the classroom- which at the moment is largely untapped. At present, 76% of American young people use the Internet to learn, and 82% use it as a research tool to assist them with papers, stories or other projects - although those numbers are lower in Europe, they are growing very rapidly (US Department of Education, 1997). The Internet currently resembles a massive, disorganized library, with immense resources of up-to-the-minute information from first-hand sources. As a resarch tool, it has enormous potential: students can download documents directly from the US Congress or the Council of Europe, the complete works of Shakespeare, or the most current news stories from an immense variety of international newspapers. There are glossaries, dictionaries, encyclopedias and thesauri online, in many languages. But it is in the area of intercultural education where the true power of this medium lies.

International Connections

First of all, the Internet has the capacity to break down geographical, class, time, language, gender and race barriers- there is an immediate global awareness for Internet users which is unprecedented in traditional education. Connected students in a village in Africa have the chance to see and download the most current material in the West - students in culturally isolated countries, or even those with repressive regimes, have equal and far-reaching access to everything anyone else in the West might have. For instance, Serbian students opposing the Milosevics regime found themselves shut off from factual information, and relied on the Internet to provide the only source of unbiased editorial. When a student is surfing, writing e-mails or responding to a bulletin board, all of these national borders fall away.

Secondly, for the first time there exists the possibility of direct communication with other students around the world; either in the form of e-mail pen-pal relationships or as forums, bulletin boards or chat rooms. Although English is clearly the most pervasive language, it is by no means the only one used on the Internet: English sites make up 58% of the content online (Euro-Marketing, 1998). It is as important for children in the United States, Britain and Canada to become aware of these other languages as it is for non-English speaking students to have more exposure and eventually feel comfortable in what is now the most widespread international language.

Online pen-pals are known as 'ePALS'. It is very easy for a school to become linked to a variety of international schools for fun or as part of a cross-cultural international project. For instance, St. Olaf college in the United States has recently introduced a free service to link classrooms around the world. They have developed a large database of thousands of schools around the world who are looking for partners. A school can leave their information online and see who responds or actively seek out several sister schools (Morgan, 1998). A sociology class studying Eskimo culture can nurture an e-mail relationship with students in the far north; French language students can chat at length in French with students in Paris. Current events classes can speak directly to students in the areas they read about in the newspapers - students in Kosovo, Tibet or South Africa. Information is exchanged immediately, more often and in a less formal medium than the traditional penpals had with the post office.

Live discussion forums take many forms, including chat rooms, bulletin boards and graffiti walls. Students from around the world can 'talk' to each other in real time when each has a live connection to the Internet and are all logged on to the same place in the Internet. In a graphic chat area, up to six students can hold an online conversation and receive instant answers to their questions and have a geniune intercultural experience all for the price of a local phone call. By contrast, a bulletin board is an off-line exchange; a given site posts a question or discussion theme which rotates regularly. Students from around the world can write in and have their responses published for the worldwide audience, much like a high-speed 'letters to the editor' section of a newspaper.

"Recent research now suggests what many educators have claimed for years- some students just aren't comfortable with talking in class. On-line discussions, on the other hand, are easier for some, since the form of communication changes from one that is interpersonal (live and in class) to one that is cyberpersonal (over e-mail, Web forms, etc.)." (Carvin, no date)

Reticent students can build their confidence slowly with this medium, beginning with contact via e-mails and forms and continuing with discussion forums and finally live chat rooms. A graffiti wall does much the same thing, only with student artwork which is scanned in and submitted. What a teacher can never forget is through this the students are all having so much fun that they don't even realise how much they are learning.

Learning Online

The Internet dramatically changes the way students can learn. Due to the interactive nature of the medium, they take control of the pace, direction and depth of their own learning. The best learning, as the bulk of educators have discovered long ago, is achieved through doing- just as adults learn best on the job, young people learn most efficiently by being actively involved in their own learning process. But perhaps the most exciting goal that Internet learning can achieve is empowerment. Through the Internet, students can not only access the information, they can also publish. Student sites are rapidly gaining momentum internationally- a website produced in a small town in Siberia, by and for young people, can be accessed by the connected global community worldwide as easily as anyone can download Yahoo (perhaps the world's largest worldwide search engine). The earlier-mentioned statistics show that students are already using the Internet in large numbers and are largely prepared to use the tool in the classrooms.

Are teachers ready?

However, one of the most pressing questions is: are the teachers ready to bring the Internet into their classrooms? Recently, 92% of teachers questioned in the United States said that use of the Internet in schools is critical for preparing students for the future, while 91% said they favored using the Internet to teach core subjects (Trotter and Zehr, 1998). These numbers seem promising, but in order for the Internet to be used in schools, teachers must become familiar with the medium themselves. There are so many sad stories circulating about computers in classrooms, which have full capabilities and Internet access, collecting dust in the corners because the teachers do not know how to turn them on. This is not news to governments and funders; they have recognized that teacher training in the Internet is vital to the future of education and are already funding teacher-training seminars in the subject worldwide. For instance this year the British government pledged œ230 million to train teachers to make best use of the Internet after finding an apalling lack of Internet knowledge in this profession (Internet Magazine, 1998).

But it is not enough to merely train teachers to use Internet Browsers. Nor is it sufficient to wire all the schools in the world with the latest computers and provide Internet access. Bringing Internet learning into the classroom requires a complete shift in the very basic philosophy of teaching in which educators have been trained from the beginning. The role of the teacher and the use of the classroom itself must undergo a fundamental change in order to make the best use of the medium.

For one thing, teachers must give up their traditional role of 'transmitters of knowledge' and become facilitators who guide the students through their learning process and learn with them. They would have more difficulty delivering fixed and finished truths and facts to listening students; since from the Internet, students can learn that truths exist largely in the form of point of view, which can differ widely across cultural boundaries. Since the students have the opportunity to access so many different points of view, the teacher would ideally be called upon to help them sift it all through and teach them how to become critical thinkers. Using Internet search engines as a research tool shows that learning is based on questions- not anwers- and subjective opinions that students must invariably assess for themselves. A classroom full of critical thinkers, backed up with facts from a variety of international sources is a great threat to the position of power of the teacher- whose word was traditionally always the final one.

In addition, learning would occur at different rates according to the strengths and interests of the individual student rather than at the speed of the slowest or fastest learner- or at the rate determined by the teacher. It is not easy for the teacher to break from the old pattern of standarized tests and rating for all regardless of the individual strengths of each student; the teacher loses that measure of control in the classroom. In short, teachers would no longer be the center of learning.

Indeed, once educators get beyond these fundamental psychological and technical hurdles they will find that the benefits for Internet curricula far outweigh the drawbacks. Lesson plans would no longer need to be fixed from year to year in the form of published texts but would be constantly updated online, and therefore always current; also because new texts or updates in the print media are often prohibitively expensive. Teachers would no longer be obligated to create standard curricula and can spend their time developing more creative interactive projects to accompany an online plan. They would not be hindered by the cost of these materials by having to buy hundreds of textbooks every year, but can download or even use online material live. Teachers and administrators would have their pick of international work from every point of view, and always the most current of the year.

The Online Content Crisis

But it is not enough to say to teachers: "just do it". For one thing, the content must be in place. Educational material online is one of the biggest gaps in Internet content today. Teachers need the guides, the lesson plans and the educational material online; all the hardware and teacher training and access in every classroom in the world is useless if there is no meaningful content to be found on the Internet. According an MCI poll, 60% of teachers in America are concerned about the lack of educational content online (Trotter and Zehr, 1998). It is more specifically the younger learners from 5-11 years that are in the most dire need of material: in 1994, 70% of American 4th graders used the Internet as an educational tool as opposed to 46% of 8th graders and 43% of 11th graders (US Department of Education, 1997). Younger students adapt to the new media more easily- they have an easier time internalizing Internet navigation and organization as intuition. It is logical that content needs to be created for them.

There are several reasons why this gap in Internet content exists: first of all, until now websites were largely created by technicians and programmers. In the past the only publishers of online material could be programmers who were fluent in the more complicated web authoring languages such as HTML and Java, which had to be handwritten and uploaded by Telnet. Websites, including editorial websites, were created by and for programmers - those technically in the know - and consisted largely of technical guides, "How to's" and tricks of the programming profession, without illustrations, design or animation. These sites were also created by and for males- female surfers were largely ignored. Furthermore these sites did not address the humanities in learning: the arts, writing, literature, stories, culture and basic communication were mostly left out. In the last few years, all this has changed: the latest generations of user-friendly Web-authoring tools, such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Front Page and Web Editor, allow non-programmers to create websites easily and intuitively, and the packages have become affordable and easy to learn.

The other extreme to a programmer's highly technical and user-unfriendly website is one which is created soley by people who have no knowledge of the technical capacities of the Internet. In this instance, the content is rich and written in a language the public can easily understand but the potential of the medium as a whole goes fully untapped. These sites began their lives as books in print; they were wholly converted into HTML and depositied online in a linear format with pages leading from start to finish. Illustrations are large and uncompressed, and therefore agonizingly slow to download. The entire benefit of the interactive nature of the medium is therefore ignored, as well as the other specialized programming features such as live chat rooms, forums, bulletin boards, direct mail, links or search engines.

Successful educational publishing for the Internet must integrate the creative with the technical in an almost perfect balance to be most effective- in no other field is it more critical that these disciplines work in harmony than in education. When examining educational sites online, one does not have to be a professional education expert to see which sites work and which do not. Most importantly the sites are conceptualized in their earliest phases in a non-linear format. In the beginning, a site is mapped much like a tree. One begins at the homepage- not necessarily the beginning, but rather the initial point of reference, like a table of contents. From there the site branches out, from the more broad to more detailed information, and the users go where they will at whim according to their own pace and interests. Navigation must be clear and consitent throughout the site. One of the greatest benefits of the Internet is that one can organize an enormous amount of material which can be accessed in a relatively lucid fashion. Within the material itself lateral links to other subjects show how topics are linked to each other in a way no book can present.

Good learning websites must also be fun. One must not underestimate the value that entertainment has in learning. When students are having fun, they are at their most focussed, attentive, and receptive to new information. They also commit items to memory without knowing it. The best learning websites make heavy use of games, graphics and animation. A children's website without either engaging graphics, animation, sound and illustration is equally absurd as a children's book for the 5-7 year age group without pictures. Some of the best online educational quizzes are presented in almost a game format- correct answers lead to the next page in the story, the next level of the adventure or simply a happy animated character congratulating the user on one's accomplishments. Students see instant results of their test scores; right answers are positively reinforced, which keeps them motivated.

Examples of Excellent Learning Websites

One of the best examples of a well-designed learning website was in fact created by three teenagers from three different countries. The site, called "Volcanoes Online" (http://library.advanced.org/17457/english.html), has as it's authors Jeroen Jansen from Holland, Galvin Sng from Singapore and Cameron Taggart from the United States. They created the entire site from where they live, communicating with each other and submitting matierial via the Internet. What resulted is a very cross-cultural and very exciting online educational product. "Volcanoes Online" presents all the information a 4th grade science class would need to know about volcanoes. The design is excellent - navigation is bright and colorful as well as consistent and useful. The site is interspersed with a mix of technical images (maps of the insides of volcanoes, the effects of continental drifts and cross-sections of the earth's crusts), general illustrations and fun cartoons, just as a well-designed textbook would have and more. The content, separated into various areas of interest, has constant text links throughout the pages of text- a technical term is underlined and links users back to a glossary of terms if they do not understand the terminology. There is an extensive teacher's guide, compiled by Miss Gwee Hana, a geography teacher in Singapore. The lesson plan is downloadable in several formats for printing or online use. In addition, lesson plans of other teachers are published, which shows more than one way to adapt the plan to the individual classroom. The quiz section incorporates basic Java programming into a simple yet effective game. The user must save a village from a volcano eruption, and can do so only by answering a series of questions correctly based on the material presented- correct answers save villagers and bring the students to the next levels of the game.

Another good learning website is the "Digital Education Network" (DEN) (http://www.actden.com). From the first page, it is slick professional-looking and inviting to young people, with original graphics comparable to any top-of-the-line corporate site. It is colorful and substantive, offering content in seven subjects including Math, Writing, News, Graphics, Astronomy, Testing and the Internet (including a guide for teachers on how to use Internet browsers). Users are also tested on the material offered in the form of multiple choice radio buttons, which can be submitted and corrected instantly and automatically- students get their results just moments after clicking on 'send'. There is a well-designed teacher's guide which includes suggestions for group projects, homework assignments and discussion topics. Unfortunately, the group project suggestions do not go as far as they could - they offer a very general list of what projects teachers could introduce to a very general news, writing or math class (such as creating a collaborative newspaper, writing a story together or solving a long equation as a group). They do not necessarily relate to the online content, nor can they be used as a direct extension of the website.

"The Big Myth" is the intercultural website project currently being developed by the author of this article. It is a 3-year project designed for it's initial launch for the year 2000. Basically, "The Big Myth" is a cross-cultural collection of world creation myths using Java and Flash( programming languages and original graphics and animation to tell the stories. It is designed to fit into the 7-11 year old school curriculum, to be used alongside social studies classes.

The myths themselves are the main focus of the site; students enter the map room where they can choose the region they would like to study. Each myth runs like a short movie, peppered throughout the narrative with multiple choice questions which a student must answer correctly in order to progress in the story. It aims to be the first educational story-telling site of it's kind, designed for international use in schools and at home. It is as entertaining as it is educational, containing all the material found in any textbook on world mythology, but presented in an interactive way which can only be delivered via the Internet. There are at present four identical copies of the site in English, German, French and Spanish. As usage increases, other languages can be added and published without much difficulty.

The site consists of six sections, including a teacher's guide, a page where students are assisted in writing their own creation myths, a live chat room and bulletin board (later to be joined by a graffitti wall for children's own illustrations), a section of links and bibliograhy for other websites pertaining to world mythology for further research. The aim is to create communities of schools through the site which can enable international discussion forums between both students and teachers.

Challenging the Individualistic Nature of Computers

Certainly the single biggest challenge a teacher using the new media faces is how to keep a roomful of students busy and learning with just one computer. A lucky and well-funded school will most likely have no more than one computer terminal per classroom; the unfortunate nature of computers is that only one person can really use a computer at one time - that student has the power of control and therefore an elevated status above the rest of the students. Two or three students crowded around a single monitor watching one student clicking away quickly loses it's appeal - even if the mouse-user is rotated frequently. Various students become passive on-lookers instead of active learners for lengthy periods of time. The new media teacher must be very creative to overcome this hurdle.

There are various ways for teachers to keep an entire roomful of students busy with just one computer terminal. This particular brand of student website publishing seminar is for instance being developed by the author of this article; it is meant for a ratio of approximately twelve children to one computer. It is a week long course which is intended to train the students in website publishing and Internet use - by the end of the course, not only will the students have learned the basics of Web authoring and a variety of software packages (including Dreamweaver, Photoshop, GIF Animator and Word for Windows) but they will also have launched a website of their very own which will have to also be maintained by the group after the course is complete.

The website itself is made up of a variety of different components, which will require a variety of unique skills: graphics, programming, editorial content, composition and layout, sound, mapping and overall planning. The children are divided into teams, building on their individual strengths, and complete tasks which they contribute to the project as a whole. The goal is to expand each child's individual skills as well as to show them how their individual talents can be used in a group setting. In this case, the teacher is the facilitator as the children learn by doing.

Before any individual work is done, students work as a group to map and plan the overall site. Since websites are non-linear in format, great care must be given to the detailed spatial map of the overall site. Once this is clear, and each student has a good overview of the whole, they are divided into teams to gather the content. Three students are responsible for writing the editorial content; these participants are sent out as journalists and should return at the end of the day to deliver their pieces and discuss with the rest of the team how it can be used. Two more are responsible for the graphics- they gather images from their environment or create illustrations which would be scanned in and used for buttons, headlines, bullets or general illustrations. These children learn about every stage of graphics development, from the initial sketches to the scanning, digitalization, remapping, compression and finally reformatting for use on the Internet.

Two additional students are responsible for the layout and positioning of the graphics and text, and how they fit together. Initially, they map the individual pages out on paper to see which text blocks fit with which graphics. Two students are the sound byte gatherers - this part of the project requires the appropriate equipment on hand, such as a digital recorder and sound editor. Students can record their own voices, bits of music or any number of original sound effects which can be used as a visitor clicks on a button, turns the page or rolls over the navigation bar. In the event that there is no such equipment on hand, these students can become site photographs - they gather photos using a Poloroid camera to complement the journalists' editorial work. The remaining students are trained as programmers and are responsible for putting all of these pieces together and uploading it all online. They will also be responsible for the post-launch site maintainance. The final product is an extensive multi-media website and the teacher serves as the overall project facilitator.

The Future of Internet in the Classroom

We are witnessing perhaps the most exciting, widespread and swift revolutions in communication in a long time, comparable only to the Industrial Revolution of the previous century. The Internet has already brought about broad changes in every aspect of our lives in the less than two decades since it's introduction. What will be the future of education with respect to this unprecedented burst of technological developments? By now it has become very clear that the Internet is here to stay, and it's benefits for the educational - and most importatly intercultural educational - sector far outweigh the initial costs of the hardware, access and training.

It is vital that young people have access to the Internet in schools and at home; fluency in this medium will become more and more a pre-requisite for anyone entering the job market as we move into the next century. Students who are comfortable using this medium today will have a much easier time participating in the high-tech society of the future. Governments who do not make it a priority to train their teachers, fund content online and give their schools access will find themselves behind in the global developments of the next decades.

Among the IT professionals in the private sector, the often-repeated motto for companies grumbling about the new hardware they must constantly buy, software they must ceaselessly learn or new languages they must always be trained in to keep their place in the competitive market, is that: "there are only two kinds of people in IT - the quick and the dead". Certainly this applies to the field of education. Schools, and even entire countries can be left behind in the same way if their teaching methods are not open to the new technologies.

Fiona Passantino is an education and IT design consultant based in London.

Address for correspondence: fiona@distanttrain.com

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