User:Jgay/Thoughts/ImmersionInEducation

Teaching the Web/Internet Through Immersion

Many people have discussions with me about the place and functionality the Internet should have in education systems.Over the past few years this discussion has usually been focused on Wikipedia, and, in a very negative light. They expel how students wrongly treat Wikipedia as a primary source, how they plagiarize incessantly, and how they are no longer learning how to do proper research. I sympathize with their frustrations, and it is pretty easy to get wound up in long discussion about the positive/negative, responsible/irresponsible, good/bad effects such Web sites have on our education system. However, I have grown bored of such discussions as they rarely arrive at some positive and constructive conclusion. Now, I try to focus the conversation on how I think the Internet and World Wide Web should be taught to students. Let me began by commending teachers that have had their students do things like edit a Wikipedia article or produce a piece of free software for a class. But, such an assignment reminds me of how a French teacher may have students break off into groups and to act out a Parisian cafe scene. This is a sensible activity when you are not in a French speaking country. However, the Web and the Internet are not like physical locations, we can bring it, and its communities and cultures right, into the classroom. Students can become "native" to a specific online culture rather quickly and easily if the information infrastructure is already there.

Some may argue that doing this formally in a school is a waste of time, because students are already immersing themselves in online communities and are usually very Internet savvy. They are right, in so much as a large percentage of children in developed countries have access to the Internet and a large percentage of them have immersed themselves various activities, communities, and cultures. However, to claim that presenting it formally in school is a waste of time is a rather misguided statement. That would be similar to saying that just because students read a lot at home and on their own, that we shouldn't include reading as part of our education system. What I think would be an effective use of the Internet and the Web in our schools would be to build curricula that goes beyond just using it as a source for materials, information, and references. Teachers and students stand a lot to gain by engaging it in a way where software and information on the Web is seen as something that they can understand, use, comment-on, edit, adapt, or improve, and to explore in a serious way the many communities, practices, mores, cultures, and people that exist and that create the Web and the Internet, and for the education system to be directly part of this.