ELPS 303 THEMATIC ARTICLES
Why the Internet is a poor learning environment by Roberto Verzola
I first used the Internet more than five years ago, and thus have used it longer than most local users. I've also been working with computers since 1979, again longer than most Filipinos have. I belabor these points so the reader may appreciate that my opinions about computers and the Internet are based on a long period of intimate association and study, and not due to ignorance of the technology or fear of the unknown.
I presume, on the other hand, that many of our education and school officials have only recently become--or are not even yet--computer-literate. I would imagine that quite a number entertain persistent doubts about the educational value of the Internet, but they keep these doubts to themselves for fear of ridicule. School administrators today increasingly feel compelled to install an Internet connection--however expensive--for their schools to draw in new enrollees. Thus, they go along with all kinds of incredibly expensive proposals for Internet connections and Web browsing, most of which will only make money for computer vendors and Internet service providers (ISPs). Is the expense justified? Does the Internet's educational value truly justify the expense? Would giving our children and our youth access to the Internet, as the marketing hype claims, give them an edge in learning as well as a headstart later in life?
The government seems to think so. One of its oft-stated goals, for example, and one that is blindly echoed by officials who think they are computer-savvy, is to provide every school with access to the Internet. Parents are as much a victim of the Internet hype. In their desire to give their children the best learning opportunities and the best education, they buy the most powerful computer on the market, with the largest memory and harddisk they can afford, and the fastest modem available. Plus, of course, a subscription to an ISP.
I submit that the Internet is, in reality, a very poor educational environment.
Building a good learning environment... What, in the first place, is a good educational environment?
Let us start with the University of the Philippines, arguably one of the best universities in the country. Let us imagine ourselves in charge of improving the university's educational environment. Here's what we're going to do:
- On the Sunken Garden, let's build a huge mall.
- In front of the School of Economics, we'll set up a year-round fair.
- Behind the College of Engineering, we'll put a row of moviehouses.
- Behind the College of Law, we'll open several nightclubs.
- By the way, we'll change the rules and allow teachers to sell things to their students.
- We'll enrich the library collection with subscriptions to Playboy, Hustler and similar magazines.
- Beside the chapel, we'll put a whorehouse.
You get the idea...
With these changes, are we nearer an ideal educational environment? Given these "improvements", would you want to send your children to U.P.? . or destroying it?
You wouldn't, obviously. We have, in fact, destroyed the learning environment.
The Internet today is such a mixed environment. There are hundreds of thousands of educational and learning sites, that's true. But there are probably even more sites with all manner of attractions, distractions and temptations for students--all within a few keypresses or mouse clicks. Because of the Internet's increasingly advertising-driven culture, these sites are in fact easier to find than the educational ones; their numbers are also rising faster.
Used carefully, the Internet can be helpful for doing a number of things, I'd acknowledge. But it is definitely a very poor environment for education and learning because it destroys the carefully-designed school learning process. Worse, it also exerts a powerful grip on the students' psyche--in the same way that addictive drugs can. Today, some psychologists are already warning against the emergence of a psychological problem which is best described as Internet addiction--when a user begins to take the virtual world so seriously and he begins to lose touch with--or stay away from--the real world. Five senses or abstract symbols? Effective education and learning needs a controlled environment, one that is designed by instructors, professors and education experts for maximum transfer of knowledge. If you want exposure to the real world, you go on a field trip. Even such field trips must be carefully planned, to optimize the learning process. Education also means learning to work with high-level symbols. It means going beyond the level that is directly appreciated by our five senses, the sensory level, and thinking in more abstract terms. The Internet, however, is moving in the opposite direction. Increasingly advertising-driven, it is moving away from abstract symbols, towards the purely sensory level, the level that demands the least from its users. From pure text, it has gradually moved towards graphics, full-color, audio-visual, and, today, live video. They are now talking of three-dimensional video and, beyond that, of virtual reality using tactile suits. Television had initially promised to become a revolutionary educational tool that would abolish mass ignorance and raise the cultural level of the masses. Today, we call it an "idiotbox". The Internet is today rapidly becoming the interactive television of the 21st century. An interactive idiotbox: is that any better?
Some suggestions: If the government wants to improve the learning environment for students, as well as the entire population, it should consider the following options:
* Expand school and public libraries. Build more of them. Let us have a public library in every village. Adopt an aggressive program to stock up these libraries by reprinting the best educational books and translating them into local languages.
* Implement a continuing skills-upgrading program for teachers. A good, highly-motivated, well-paid teacher supported with a carefully-designed curriculum and good books will beat the Internet hands down as far as real learning is concerned.
* Use the government-owned Channel 4, which is freely accessible to anybody with a TV set within its range, primarily for educational purposes. This channel has no business airing basketball games, soap operas, sitcoms and other inanities. Forget about cable TV, which needs a monthly subscription and which the majority could not afford.
* Acquire all kinds of documentary videos through compulsory licensing, including the Discovery Channel series, and air them on Channel 4. Allow other channels to rebroadcast these materials.
* Form an experimental educational internet among schools which already have necessary networking facilities. This educational internet will only contain material that fit a well-thought out set of criteria for educational materials. Such an internet will will be completely separate from the commercial, worldwide Internet.
We have today so little resources that it is absolutely necessary to use them as wisely as possible. Surely, we do not want to squander our precious resources on extremely expensive Internet technologies that must be replaced every three to five years.
Worse, the Internet will draw our students away from real learning.
Member: Association for International Business
11/10/1999 2:00:36 PM PST <gkd@phoenix.edc.org>
From slums to cyberspace? This may seem an impossibly large gap to bridge. But Indian educationists have undertaken an experiment which showed up amazing findings about the potential of even unlettered children to take to computers.
Slum children in New Delhi taught themselves basic computer skills, and even managed to do some surfing on the Internet, after they were given access to a computer without any instructions or even a teacher.
This experiment using a "minimally invasive" approach to education brought in "both strange and wonderful" results. Its findings were recently reported in a technical journal by two educationists of the Cognitive Engineering Research Centre of a prominent Indian computer-education firm, NIIT.
The term "minimally-invasive" is incidentally borrowed from surgery! Under this experiment, a computer was kept next to a Delhi slum colony. It was housed in an outdoor kiosk, constructed in a way that it could be accessed both from the NIIT office as well as from the adjoining slum colony.
Like in any Indian slum, this one too contained a large number of children of all ages, from 0-18. Most do not go to school. None of them are particularly familiar with the English language.
Inspite of this, the slum kids took to the computer like a fish to water. They began experimenting with various applications, and switching from one website to another. Children invented their own vocabulary to describe some aspects of the working of the computer. They also formed impromptu classes to teach one another.
Surprised researchers reported back: "Children (who are mostly unlettered) learnt basic operations of the computer for browsing and drawing within a few days...."
They also said that within a month of interaction, children were able to discover and use features such as new-folder creation, cutting and pasting, shortcuts, moving/resizing windows and using MS Word to create short messages even without a keyboard."
Initially, the slumdwellers did not have a clue as to what was the purpose of the computer-kiosk, built into the wall of the NIIT. "I don't think they quite understood what we wanted to do. As long as it did not take up their space, they did not really care," commented the researchers, Sugata Mitra and Vivek Rana.
There was quite a lot of enthusiasm. They wanted to know what it was,why it was being put up there. "Most of the kids thought it was a video game being put up for free," reported the researchers. Some questions they asked included: "Is it a video game? What is a computer? How will we be benefited? But we don't know how to operate the computer!!!"
Elders wanted to know who would take care of the computer.
None of the questions were answered with any instructional sentence. "We gave general answers such as, 'It is a fun machine,'" reported the researchers.
Initially, the computer, which had access to the Internet through a dedicated 2 Mbps connection, was linked to the Altavista (www.altavista.com) site on the internet. At the start, keyboard access was not given. No instructions were given either; the only exception being the final testing of the system with the 'touch pad', or the pointing device provided. This instruction too was not given deliberately.
Early users were the little boys from the slum colony, in the 6- 12 age group. They just fiddled around with the touch pad, and found it interesting.
Next, they perhaps accidentally learnt how to click from the touch pad itself. After that, they found they could relate to the concept of 'channels'. From a video camera spying down on the experiment from a nearby tree, it was found that they children were prompting one another: "Go to channels... there must be TV".
In a few hours, they learnt to manipulate and click the mouse.
Enthusiasm stayed high, and in the next two or three days, the kids were trying to open the 'Start Menu', opening new windows, opening the 'My Computer' from the desktop, opening other applications. From a distance, through the video camera, the educationists kept a close watch on what the children were doing. This project was launched in earlier this year.
Barely a week after launching the experiment in end-January 1999, the slum kids found a teacher of their own! Sanjay Chowdhary is a second year Bachelor of Arts student, who has done a basic course in computer from India's open university, IGNOU.
Reported the researchers: "Since he is the only one who knows computers in the colony, all kids give him great respect. He has been found teaching them how to operate the touch pad (the pointing device). It must be realised that the 'intervention' here is situational. The children found the best resource they could."
Within ten days, the mostly-unlettered kids learnt to shut down the computer. In a fortnight's time, the researchers found themselves removing hundreds of 'shortcuts' from the desktop. "This shows that someone is really finding it interesting to create these shortcuts," said Mitra and Rana, reporting their findings in the journal of the Computer Society of India, a professional body.
The kids started shifting to sites like disneyblast.com and MTVonline. They tried out applications like the calculator, paint and even chat. They could not do much with chat though, since they had not beenprovided the keyboard.
When the researchers asked the people for their comments on the new addition in the form of the computer, the women were skeptical. "Yeh daal-roti dega kya? (Will this give us food?)" they asked. Attempts to persuade the women to use the computer came up against a wall.
Within a fortnight, the researchers found clock.exe (the clock) running on the desktop. Many new folders were found created on the desktop. "This could be the handywork of a school student, or a group of them,who have learned to create a new folder, and are enjoying it," commented the researchers.
Someone changed the start-up screen for the WinNT computer. In under a month of playing around with the computer, someone actually learnt maximising and minimising windows. They soon figured out how to change the wallpaper sitting, and that one can change the wallpaper to any Internet picture.
One site of a North Indian Hindi newspaper, www.naidunia.com, evoked some interest as the 10-12 year old children wanted to see their horoscope for the day. But some others were more keen on using the Paint application.
Lessons learnt from this experiment are interesting. It shows that it is not just middle-class children from urban areas of the Third World who are able to self-instruct and obtain help from the environment when required. So, it might be incorrect for just urban Indian parents to marvel at the speed with which their children are able to master the computer, once given access.
"Once available, the computer-kiosk was used immediately by children, aged about 5 to 16 years old. These children had a very limited understanding of the English alphabet and could not speak the language," noted Mitra and Rana.
These children also 'invented' their own vocabulary to define terms on the computer. For example, they used terms like 'sui' (needle) for the cursor, 'channels' for websites and 'kaam kar raha hai (it's working) for the hourglass or busy symbol.
Soon, the slum kids were strongly opposed to the idea of removing the kiosk. Parents felt that while they could not learn the operation of the kiosk, or did not see its need, they felt it was very good for the children.
"It is imperative to repeat such experiments in other locations before one can generalise from these observations or come to any conclusion regarding the educational benefits of such a non- invasive method," the researchers cautioned.
Steps would be needed to also design PC kiosks that can operate outdoors in tropical countries. Wireless connectivity to the Internet would need to be devised for kiosks in areas not physically close to organisations with Internet access.
But they used this experiment to suggest that it might be possible to question the apprehensions from academicians and others "that the ability to access and the quality of training provided will hinder the use of the Internet in the (Indian) subcontinent".
"We have found people (on the subcontinent) questioning the utility of the schemes that rely on the Internet. (On the grounds that) there are too few people in the region who have access," they point out. In their view, this may not be a good argument.
To stress their point, the researchers point to the widespread impact of films, in a region where most people don't have sufficient resources for their daily meals. Yet they patronise cinema in a big way. India
produces the largest number of films in the world.
Mitra and Rana point out that the cost of acquiring a personal computer and an Internet connection at home is around Rs 70,000 (US$ 1600). Recurring yearly phone bills would come to Rs 10,000 (US$235) a year. "In a country where the average annual income is about Rs 6000, these amounts are not small," they point out.
Other experiments in South Asia have also been reported on. One experiment was carried out in unsupervised learning of computers.
In the village of Udang of West Bengal, Mamar Mukhopadhyay and his team placed a few computers in a rural school. Children were allowed to use them after minimal instructions. Word processing, spreadsheets and database management systems were readily learnt by both teachers and students, who then went on to create a rural resources and healthcare database.
They conceded that several more experiments would be needed in different areas to "investigate whether self-learning will occur uniformly among disadvantaged children" before wider conclusions can be reached. But, they said, it was shown to be possible to design PC-kiosks that can operate outdoors in tropical climates. Such kiosks would need to be protected against heat, temperature, dust, humidity and possible vandalism, of course.