TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY OF EDUCATION THROUGH THE WORLD WIDE WEB by Robert N. Barger, Ph.D. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 USA e-mail: rbarger@nd.edu and Josephine C. Barger, M.A. Indiana University South Bend, Indiana 46699 USA e-mail: jbarger@iusb.edu A paper presented at the 20th Annual Meeting of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education held at the University of Louvain, Kortrijk, Belgium, 15-18 August, 1998, under the gracious protection of His Majesty Albert II, King of Belgium Copyright (C) 1998 by Josephine C. and Robert N. Barger 1. INTRODUCTION This paper will consider possibilities for teaching and learning through the use of the World Wide Web. It will begin with a history of the Web. It will then consider methodologies for teaching and learning through the Web, including two examples drawn from the field of History of Education. Next, it will consider some problems posed by teaching and learning through the Web. In conclusion, it will offer some reflections on the future use of the Web in teaching and learning. 2. THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB The Internet is a world-wide network of computer networks. It was planned by military and educational institutions in the United States during the 1960s and actively developed in the 1970s. The World Wide Web is a further development of the Internet. The Web began in the early 1990s. It uses special transmission protocols to deliver text, graphics, and audio materials over the Internet. These materials are linked to other materials by "hyper-text links." The direction taken in exploring the information available over the Web through the use of these links is completely in the hands of the computer user. Thus, the World Wide Web is a highly powerful mechanism for the exchange of information. It should be noted that while the Internet originated in the United States, the Web was a European invention. It was developed at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) as a way for physicists to collaborate with one another. Tim Berners-Lee, originally on the CERN staff, was the inventor of the Web. (1) It is interesting to note that, although it was originally developed as a collaborative tool for physicists, in 1998 alone two billion dollars will have been spent on advertising on the Web according to the firm of Solomon Smith Barney. (2) 3. POSSIBILITIES FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING THROUGH THE WEB The Web is already recognized as a great resource for teaching and learning activities. An article in the March, 1997, issue of Educational Researcher by Ronald D. Owston is fairly affirmative of this position, despite its somewhat guarded title. (3) One of the things the Web does best is providing access to information. One way it does this is in the form of distance education courses. For instance, the Open University in Great Britain currently provides a course entitled "Computing: An Object-Oriented Approach" to 5,107 students in the European Union, Gibraltar, Slovenia, and Switzerland. (4) The Web is a resource for on-campus classes also. It can make lectures available for review by students at their leisure. Instead of having to write furiously during class, students can listen to the lecturer knowing that they can study the lecture in detail later on the Web. Books and printed articles can also be made available on the Web. Potential copyright problems can be avoided by limiting access to these materials only to students enrolled in a particular class or located on a particular campus. This sort of access management is only one type of automated task that the Web can perform. For instance, it is possible to attach a "counter" to a Web page in order to record the number of visitors to a Web site and the home location (country) from which the visitation was made (e.g., this information can be viewed for the ISCHE Web site by clicking on the icon at the bottom left of the ISCHE homepage). (5) Tests can be given on the Web through the use of HTML forms embedded in Web pages. These tests can be subjective as well as objective. Course and instructor evaluations can also be done by students through the Web. The Web can also be used to explore databases. The ability to search large blocks of data is one of the Web's strong points. See, for instance, the database entitled "Historical, Social, Economic and Demographic Data from U.S. Censuses from 1790 - 1860." (6) Here one can search for decennial census data by year, topic, state, and county with an easy-to-use menu selection, and do it in seconds. Not only can data be searched on the Web, it can also be collected there. This can be easily done through the use of HTML forms embedded in Web pages. Remote access to libraries and databases can be gained over the Web with protocols such as telnet and gopher. Files can be retrieved from these sites with the ftp (file transfer) protocol. The Web can be used for collaborative learning activities between teachers and students or students and other students. Much of the power of the Web is in its support for distributed work that can be shared through the medium of the Internet. (7) E-mail and listservs are powerful tools for information exchange. E-mail can be done on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis over the Web using the mailto: protocol. In the case of listservs, postings can be made over the Web with the mailto: protocol and archives can be read over the Web through the use of hypermail. Listservs and Web pages may be used to make available tables of contents, abstracts, and entire articles of electronic journals. An example of an electronic journal is Gene Glass' Educational Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA). An abstract of newly published EPAA articles is sent by American Educational Research Association (AERA) listservs to the listserv subscribers with the full articles being available on the EPAA web page. (8) To illustrate the interactivity involved in this e-journal, the choices available on its web page are as follows: enter the archives, browse the abstracts, visit the editors, visit the editorial board, submit an article, submit commentary (on a previously published article), subscribe to EPAA, and search in EPAA. Another powerful utility of the Web is the search engine. This utility uses keywords to search the Web and find material which contains those words. Most engines can also use Boolean operators to define the search further. There are many search engines currently available on the Web (e.g., AltaVista, Infoseek, and Excite), but one of the more promising is a parallel search engine called SavvySearch. It runs a search using multiple engines simultaneously. It currently employs twenty-four search engines and is considering the addition of five more. (9) Streaming audio and video are available over the Web. A new standard for Web streaming has recently been introduced (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, or SMIL for short). This means that sound, animated graphics, and text can be simultaneously viewed without wasting time in huge downloads. Last, but not least, there are facilities on the Web for interactive communication. One of these is the "chat" session whereby a person may syncronously communicate with one or more persons by typing a message on the keyboard and immediately viewing a response on the monitor from one or more of the others. Still another facility is interactive audio and visual communication, where the user can not only hear but also see the person with whom she/he is communicating. An example of this type of facility is CUSeeMe. Two particular illustrations of using the Web in the field of History of Education are: 3.1 The History of Education Site, and 3.2 The History of American Education Web Project. 3.1 The History of Education Site The History of Education Site (10) was created and is maintained by Dr. Henk van Setten of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. This site deals with the history of education and childhood. Its scope is already prodigious and links are constantly being added to it. As of 12 May 1998 there were 786 unique (i.e., non-duplicated) links. The extent of its resources may be gauged by its divisional headings (as they appeared on 12 May 1998): educators, general; educators, pre-1750; educators, 1750-1900; educators, post-1900; parenthood & family; childhood & play; child abuse, etc.; perceptions of children; school, general; school, countries A-G; school, countries H-S; school, countries T-Z; higher education; adult, vocational. etc.; special education; youth activities; meta things; archives, etc.; online journals; discussion lists; research organizations; conferences; curiosities; new [links], last month; new [links], this month. In the six months since 1 January 1998 this site was visited by 15,159 different hosts (counting each connecting host once, not subsequent visits by users on that host). In the six months since 1 January 1998 the site had received 21,822 visits from users all over the world. The site has won a number of meaningful awards, such as the highest possible rating from the Argus Clearinghouse team, a review as "Recommended Site" from the History Channel, inclusion in the "Cool Sites" selection at Exploratorium, a positive mention in the Chronicle of Higher Education (13 March 1998), and selection as "Resource of the Week" at the Internet Public Library. In his own words, here is how Dr. van Setten describes the site: The History of Education Site offers an international collection of links to online information about the history of education and childhood: from simple short overviews to academic papers. This includes online bibliographies, online education classics and source texts, homepages of research organizations and specialized archives, sites or pages dedicated to important educators from the past, various sites about the history of primary, higher and special education, sites about the daily life of children in the past, etc. The links collection is international: at present the majority of online hist-of-ed resources is in English, but we try to list relevant websites in other languages (like German, French, Spanish) as well. We bookmark both sites with rather basic information for a general public, and sites with more specific things for History of Education professionals. Because history of education is still so insufficiently represented on [the] Internet, both kinds of entries may in their own way be equally useful. For many of the linked sites, we roughly indicate their content value. Often, the most informative sites are also the ones that are meant for a more specialist public: but this is not necessarily always the case. Of course this links collection does involve an implicit definition of what actually belongs to education & childhood history, and what does not. I will not explicitly formulate such a tricky definition now. Instead, let's say we try to conform to common sense. In the meantime, we do by necessity have a few selection criteria. (11) 3.2 The History of American Education Web Project. This History of American Education Web Project (12) was originally undertaken as a class assignment by members of an Indiana University South Bend Class, H340 "Education and American Culture." Most members of this class took it as juniors or seniors to fulfill a requirement for teacher certification. History of American Education was only one component of the course and most class members had no previous exposure to it. The class members each chose two topics in American Educational History, researched those topics, and e-mailed brief reports on them to their class instructor. The instructor then edited the student reports, created and formatted Web pages, and linked the reports to them. Pictures to accompany the reports were compressed into jpeg files and were also linked to these web pages. To alleviate downloading problems for these pictures, "thumb-nail" (miniature) pictures were also used. That is, a picture approximately an inch square is originally presented to the user when the page loads. If the user wants to see a larger version of the picture, she or he need only click on the thumb-nail picture and a much larger version of it will appear. It should be noted that, during the editing process, the instructor did not change the content of any of the reports. Many of the sources which the students used contained a "triumphalist" view of American Educational History and the students' reports tended to reflect that view. Although the instructor considered adding some balance to these triumphalist views, for a number of reasons no substantive revisions were ever made in the students' work. 4. PROBLEMS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING THROUGH THE WEB Any new technology which shows promise for supporting teaching and learning has historically been met with enthusiastic supporters. But there have also been critics. The views of those who find fault with the Web as a medium for supporting teaching and learning can be represented by Professor Alfred Bork of the University of California at Irvine. Professor Bork is a Professor of Physics who has taken a long-term interest in the interactive use of computers in education. In 1979 he gave a speech in which he predicted: "By the year 2000 the major way of learning at all levels, and in almost all subject areas will be through the interactive use of computers." (13) One of the authors of this paper recently asked Professor Bork to comment on this prediction. His reply was: "I was too optimistic. What I said was easily possible, but mouses, etc., dragged us in the wrong direction. I don't think the web is a satisfactory way of doing things. Most of current efforts there are useless." (14) Professor Bork's reasons for his disappointment with the Web can be found in an article entitled "The Web Is Not Yet Suitable for Learning." (15) In this article he and co-author David Britton, Jr., explain that Web sites may be providing information, but they are not truly promoting learning. He believes that learning demands a large amount of interaction and he does not believe that current Web protocols provide for this. He also sees problems in the slowness of network connection speeds and in the small amount of computer hardware available in most schools. Finally, he believes that learning requires retaining information about each student and he does not believe that the Web does this very well. 5. THE FUTURE OF THE WEB With regard to the problems reviewed in the last section, we feel that the Web is still in its infancy. Many of the possibilities for interaction through the Web mentioned in Section 3 above are not as highly interactive as they might be. However, Web languages such as JavaScript and Java are already interactive and they hold promise of becoming even more interactive. With regard to the speed of the Internet and the availability of hardware, these situations are also improving at an exponential pace. Fast broadband networks, like Internet2, are on the horizon and these should help not only with the problems of interactivity and speed but also with retaining and retrieving information about the student. We asked S. Spenser Aden, Technical Director of NewOrder Media, Inc. (http://www.neworder.com) for his analysis of the future of the Web. His reply follows: I think that the World-Wide Web, or more specifically using a browser to navigate the Internet via the HTTP protocol, has entrenched itself well enough in the world to be the primary navigation tool for the Internet for at least the next 5 years. The key items to my making this conclusion are: (a) the interface is simple, (b) the protocol (HTTP) is hidden from the user, (c) the technology is extensible, and (d) it was the first "all-encompassing" Internet tool that was "really cool" (i.e., would work with http, ftp, gopher, etc.). I think that (d) is the most compelling reason, though without (a) through (c), (d) wouldn't be possible. With current bandwidth restrictions and the current state of computer machinery, the World Wide Web as a technology is up-to-speed with the capabilities of the vast computing majority. Indicators to watch, as regards a shift in preferred Internet technology are: increased bandwidth availability; the "television" paradigm and digital television, and their possible entry into the market; and increased technological capabilities of personal computers. Additionally, a keen eye toward the Internet2 effort will show the way of the future for the education community. It may take longer for the future to be determined for the business community. (16) Sixteen years ago we wrote an article entitled "Why Educational Computers are Here to Stay." (17) At that time, the assertion in the title of that article was open to question. Subsequent history seems to have settled it in the affirmative. Now the question is about the future of the Web in education. The Web seems to us to hold promise for teaching and learning. Is it here to stay? Maybe we will know the answer in another sixteen years. 6. REFERENCES (1) History of the Internet at CERN, http://wwwcn.cern.ch/pdp/ns/ben/TCPHIST.html (2) The Wall Street Journal, 30 November 1998, page 1. (3) Owston, R. "The World Wide Web: A Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning?" Educational Researcher, 28,2 (March, 1997), 27-33. (4) The Open University, http://mcs.open.ac.uk/computing/ (5) NedStat Statistieken voor ISCHE XX homepage, http://be.nedstat.net/cgi-bin/viewstat?name=ischetel (6) Historical, Social, Economic and Demographic Data from U.S. Censuses from 1790 - 1860, http://icg.harvard.edu/census/ (7) Teamwork Theoretical Rationale, http://commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/letsnet/noframes/bigideas/ B2/B2Theor.html (8) Educational Policy Analysis Archives, http://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa/ (9) SavvySearch Parallel Search Engine, http://rampal.cs.colostate.edu:2000/ (10) The History of Education Site, http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc/ (11) The History of Education Site - Criteria page, http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc/criteria.html#lnk (12) The History of American Education Web Project, http://oit.iusb.edu/eduweb01 (13) Bork, A. Interactive Learning. In Taylor, R., (Ed.). The Computer in the School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee (p. 57). New York: Teachers College Press, 1980. (14) Bork, A. to Barger, R. "Re: Your Year 2000 prediction." Personal e-mail (7 May 1998). (15) Bork, A. & Britton, D., Jr. "The Web is Not Yet Suitable for Learning," IEEE Computer, 31, 6 (June 1998), 115-116. (16) Aden, S. to Barger, R. "Re: The Future of the Web?" Personal e-mail (15 May 1998). (17) Barger, R. & Barger, J. "Why Educational Computers are Here to Stay." Eastern Education Journal, XV,2 (Spring, 1982), 11-14.