The particular conference I've used as an information resource is called EDUCATOR and the conference participants are educators, administrators, school board members, and others interested in education. The EDUCATOR conference is freely available to anyone who has a computer or terminal with the capability to connect with other computer systems over the public telephone network. The conference is comprised of messages, which vary in length from one line to six single spaced typewritten pages, that have been written by participants, or articles that have been scanned in from newspapers and magazines.
The new educational phenomenon I've been referring to above is the virtual school concept. This is a school with no walls, no halls, no janitors, and no security guards. This school is open to anyone, without regards to age, sex, race, or handicap. The virtual school is an electronic school that is made possible by the use of personal computer communications.
One of the earliest instances of this concept is Ken Blystone's VS-BBS (virtual school bulletin board system.) Ken has been providing educational computer communication technology to the Ysleta Independent School District and the El Paso, Texas area since 1985, and he reports that the VS-BBS that was setup to facilitate student/teacher interaction has received 150,000 calls in the last three years. Ken's original single line system has evolved into an eight line system with 1,500 regular users that make 10,000 calls to the VS-BBS each month. The advances in computer and modem technology, and the decrease in prices of these items, allows students and teachers from all over America and round the world to communicate with each other on a twentyfour hour a day basis. By going online with one of the school's computers, a school can become a member of a world wide school of computers, changing the traditional method of the delivery of instruction.
One of the benefits of the virtual school is that all participants can receive direct, individualized instruction and attention while still able to interact with thousands of others. Ken writes, "Students can use our system to get online help with their homework, exchange electronic mail, search databases for information, and get counseling if necessary." The students also interact more often in the virtual school, many of whom will exchange over fifty pieces of e-mail each week. How many traditional teachers would consider fifty written assignments each week to be excessive?
This brings up another advantage to the virtual school idea. Much of the current education bashing concerns the lack of literacy--or the basic ability to read and write on a functional level--in our high school graduates. Using the virtual school, students spend every minute while online reading, writing, and thinking. The technology strengthens these skills, because the technology requires it. Also in defiance of an alarming trend by some educators and administrators to shorten class periods to forty minutes, with the excuse that student's attention spans are no longer than that, the virtual school has shown the ability to hold a students interest for hours at a time. Ken says 463 minutes is the longest time so far for one continuous call by a student. An interesting side note here is that the Nintendo electronic game has also been shown to hold a child's interest for up to three hours.
The students are excited about their ability to cultivate friendships with other students from around the world. Librarians are reporting lines forming before the doors open with students anxious to get to a computer and check their e-mail, and students are getting modems installed in their parents home computers, redefining the concept of homework. One parent wrote to Ken saying, "You have cultivated our 14 year old couch potato. She doesn't sit staring at the TV. Now she uses the keyboard to interact with other kids. Through your network we're actually getting some good use out of our home computer. Thank you."
Other educators report similar observations. Barry Taylor, an elementary teacher who runs a BBS in a school computer lab in Townsville, Australia, writing about how well liked the system is said, "We have had one or two quite delightful incidents with kids wagging school logging on the BBS only to be greeted by their teacher or classmates eagerly inquiring about their state of health!"
While some may worry that too much time is being spent on electronic socializing, and not enough on actual educational time, research done by Steven Ross at Memphis State University on low scholastic achievers in the Memphis city schools, showed that just less than half, 48%, of the messages were of a social nature. Another interesting finding was that girls used the system more often than boys, which holds good tidings for the equity issue, since girls and computers are often seen as not going together.
Something else that has sprung to life from conversations in the EDUCATOR conference is a grass-roots movement called K12Net. This is a group of systems that are members of FidoNet, and carry conferences that are dedicated to education. Janet Murray, a librarian with the Portland, Oregon, public schools, and one of the founders of K12Net, reports there are 37 conferences dedicated to curriculum such as math, science, business, and art (with the ability to send high quality digitized pictures,) special and talented and gifted education, and four foreign languages with the ability to converse with native speakers. According to Janet, one of the unique concepts with some of these conferences is due to an idea of Andy VanDuyn's, called "channels". These conferences are temporarily "assigned" for the use of special projects for classroom to classroom communications. Some of these have been "an elementary project to create a holiday cookbook to an upper elementary graphing of weekly "top ten" topics to the Physics Olympics, which offers challenging questions to high school students." Chris Rowan, a junior high teacher in Brownsville, Texas, in regards to an upcoming project wrote, "WOW! A fellow teacher a couple of thousand miles away from me is going to participate in something that the teacher across the hall from me would not." There are currently over 150 systems in K12Net, in North America, Europe, Australia, and Russia, with another sixty systems in Britain scheduled to come online this fall. Ken estimates there should be over 500 messages per day flowing through the K12Net systems when school starts back up in the fall of 1991.
As another example of how widespread the idea and acceptance of electronic, or distance learning is becoming, one of the EDUCATOR conference participants quoted an item from Alfred Glossbrenner's book The Complete Handbook of Personal Computer Communications which stated "there's more than 20 colleges with programs online through the EUN, or Electronic University Network," and gave EUN's 800 number and mailing address.
Other electronic learning and telecommunications projects include the National Geographic Kids Network, which provides science curriculum for grades four through six. Four year funding of $2.5 million each is coming from the National Science Foundation and National Geographic to provide for large-scale cooperative experiments and to allow students to share their results with other students round the world. 800 schools in the U.S., along with schools in Hong Kong and Moscow, are working on units developed by the Technological Educational Research Center (TERC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, covering subjects like acid rain, lead in drinking water, and meteorology. The units include background material, suggested experiments, and teachers guides. Each unit is led by a research scientist like John Miller, deputy director of the Air Resources Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, leader of the acid rain unit.
A program for middle and high school students is the Star Schools Program. Funded by a $4.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the program is directed to low income, minority and female students, but open to all. Part of the idea is to give the smaller schools who normally wouldn't have access to leading research scientists and other resources some equal footing with the larger schools. Currently the Star Schools Program reaches over 18,000 students in 600 participating schools. Additional funding from the MacArthur Foundation has allowed the program to go international, adding schools in Japan and Russia. Some of the projects being conducted via telecommunications include the design of solar homes, weather data collection, and exploring chaos theory. TERC is also involved in this program, and Cecilia Lenk, associate director of TERC's science center says, "We want kids to be scientists and mathematicians, to experience for themselves the excitement of discovery and to work collaboratively with other kids, teachers, and scientists around the globe."
One group of college computer science students that were working with some of the K12Net students were amazed to find out some of the students were deaf, physically handicapped, learning disabled, or gifted and talented. They discovered first hand that the virtual school is a wonderful equalizer. The local university in El Paso, Texas, has installed a modem on one of the computers in their lab to help future teachers become familiar with the virtual school.
All of these examples help to point to what is the coming revolution in education, and how computer communications can be used to enrich the teaching environment. Although there are some instances where the virtual school will not work, such as physical education, choir, and throwing erasers, as an adjunct method to classical teaching methodology, the virtual school shows great promise beyond the current possibilities. The interdependency of society is one of the things that makes the virtual school concept and the BBS network even more important, in allowing a greater cross section of the worlds people to communicate and share ideas. As more teachers learn that computers are good for more than making banners, the educational process will benefit. Anton Ninno, from Phoenix, New York, on the subject of the virtual school as an alternative to teaching in person, says it's, "a useful strategy for beating problems of time and distance when it's necessary or convenient to do so. I'm finishing my Master's degree and getting a teaching certificate for K-6 in New York. I can't tell you how much I've learned from people on BBSs, especially here and on the K12Net."
In closing, here's a quote from an article that was scanned into a message by Lowell Herr of the Catlin Gable School BBS in Portland, Oregon. The article is from the July 27, 1991 issue of the "Oregonian" newspaper, on a speech given by Terrel H. Bell, secretary of education under President Reagan. "Leaders can improve schools by promoting a cultural revolution that gives academics the status of athletics and by giving teachers the powerful help of computer technology that every other industry exploits."
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dave@reststop.net