by Brad Cox; August 22, 1994.
My name is Brad Cox. I'm a George
Mason University professor with interests in social
and organizational learning, software development
technologies, and telecommunications. Since
I'm not a K12 teacher, I'm not qualified to judge the practical utility of computer
technology within your world. I do know that it has been highly practical in my classes
at George Mason, such as a cable television course called Taming
the Electronic Frontier.
I won't try to convince you that computers are the best thing for the classroom since McDuffy's Reader. Rather, I'll share my enthusiasm for how computer networks might influence society for the better and my concerns for how they might not. I'll demonstrate the tools by using them to tour the vast ocean of information called the World Wide Web (WWW or W3). And I'll point out the potholes that fast-changing technologies often leave for users to run into.
You'll find that the electronic world is literally an Electronic Frontier, as
wild and wooly as the Wild West in its own way. You'll find that much of the information
on the Web is not signal but noise -- flamboyantly irrelevant to your interests.
But you'll also find gems, such as the picture shown here, that can make clicking
that mouse seem worthwhile.
You'll see that you can find anything on the network that human nature might dream up. The insanely great, the merely so-so (lots of that), and the truly disgusting are equally accessible on the Web. Everything can be reached from these links if you follow them long enough, even information that is clearly inappropriate in the classroom. How to censor information we feel is offensive, and whether censorship leaves us worse off than the alternative, are two of many examples of the aforementioned potholes, and one of the reasons we call it the Electronic Frontier.
I've organized a collection of links to help you integrate the Web into a practical classroom context. But since I'm not emersed in the reality of your world, I'm unlikely to get this organization right by myself. So I've called upon my neighbor, Jan Ruehle, a science teacher at Seneca Ridge Middle School in Loudon County, who kindly agreed to help me to organize this material in a way that we hope will be useful to you.
Its time for a pop quiz. Now that you've reached the end of this page, what should you click to proceed? [Answer: Click the left arrow at the top of this page to "go back where you came from". You'll find additional links to explore there].
The Mandelbrot fractal graphic was produced by Mandelzot, a freeware Mandelbrot set explorer program for Macs by Dave Platt of Snulbug Software (dplatt@snulbug.ntview.ca.us)