The Internet Dilemma

The Internet raises major issues and challenges for education, not just in China but across the globe. Yet it simply cannot be ignored in terms of the opportunities and resources that it can offer.

We can divide the main issues facing education systems into three groups - access, quality and responsibility. Let us consider the Internet in relation to each of them.

First, access. Through the Internet, practically the whole world can be brought into your classroom. Using email makes it possible to have a class whose members are spread all over the world and who may never meet either the teacher or each other face to face. It can put students in one country in easy contact with students in another.

The information resources available are almost limitless. Through the Internet, students and teachers can access the wisdom, experience, skulls, and even guidance of others in a way that was only possible for a very privileged few.

Next, quality. The Internet does pose serious problems of quality for education systems. Obviously, there is a lot of material on the Internet that no one would want children or students to have uncontrolled access to, but there are other problems which are much harder to solve.

The first is how to handle the sheer quantity of information available, and how to make it manageable.

Since anyone can put information on the Internet, and there are no limits on quantity, it can be almost impossible to find exactly the information that one wants. Teachers and students cannot afford to waste time on fruitless searching.

How can we identify the information which will be most useful without overloading ourselves and our students with unnecessary information? How to we select the best information from all that is available?

This raises the issue of responsibility. There are few editors or quality controllers on the Internet. The ultimate responsibility for selection and judgment falls to the user, whether teacher or student. Teachers, and still less students, are not experts in every field; what we select may not be what we really want, perhaps is out-of-date, even wrong.

Any profession must take some collective responsibility in resolving these problems. Conscious and deliberate efforts have to be made to share information between teachers about useful sites and about the best way to use them. Those who have found something useful or of high quality should not keep the information to themselves, but share it as widely as possible.

There are many professional discussion groups active on the Internet which aim to do this. Access to them by teachers should be actively encouraged. This will require investment by institutions in giving easy access to the Internet and email to all teachers. Without this investment, educators - and ultimately students - will be deprived of a vital resource for the development of education in the future.