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Education: Log On and Learn
No more teachers? No more books? For today’s kids, the Internet has all the answers

Newsweek International
By Martha Brant
8/25/03

(Click here to move directly to writing about SMARTHINKING)

Aug. 25-Sept. 1 issue — When Becky, an 18-year-old Londoner, wanted to learn about sex, she did what any red-blooded teenager would do: she went on the Internet. She logged onto www.supershagland.com, a Web site designed to teach kids about safe sex by way of a computer game. If Becky, who didn’t want to give her last name, picked up enough condoms and stayed "off the drink" she could find her sex-starved prince, who was "gagging for it."

"IT WAS REALLY good," says Becky of her virtual shag, adding coyly, "I found a few things I didn’t know before." Indeed, the "F—- Me!!" link gives explicit advice on a variety of topics—counseling teens not to brush their teeth before engaging in oral sex, for instance, to avoid small cuts in the gums that might facilitate the spread of disease. "This [Web site] allows you to have straight language," says Joan Worsley, creative project manager for K-Generation, the British nonprofit group that runs the controversial site. "It has the potential to address issues teens don’t want to hear elsewhere."

What some parents might call soft porn, today’s "screenagers" call sex education. Increasingly, the Internet is a cyberteacher outside, as well as inside, the classroom. In the United States, for example, more than 78 percent of kids 12 to 17 go online, according to a 2002 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. A lot of them are just surfing the Web and instant-messaging their friends. But 94 percent of those online said they also used it for schoolwork.

Some of what they find surely expands their minds, whether they’re images from the Hubble telescope or headlines from Le Monde. But there is also tremendous misinformation out there—and at times, remarkably little guidance from teachers. "Computers and the Internet by themselves hold little educational value," says John Bailey, director of educational technology at the U.S. Department of Education. But when used well, technology lets kids tap into a vast store of knowledge that was once almost inaccessible. It can break down social cliques in the classroom and even bridge continental divides through virtual study groups and international e-mail pals. With online tutoring and virtual schools, technology is even allowing students to customize their education. "This is a generation that is used to designing its own Barbies and picking its own superstar on American Idol," says Bailey. "Now they are starting to do that with education."

Many high-school students are growing up not just with computers but with nonstop connectivity. They can download music onto MP3 players, send instant messages online and text messages by cell phone—all at the same time. So it’s no surprise that they think well beyond text. In some schools, PowerPoint presentations full of graphics and digital photos are far more common than standard research papers. Students are just as likely to read a screen as a book. "In the long run, if I were a textbook publisher I’d be very worried," says Doug Levin, senior analyst at American Institutes for Research, who directed the Pew study.

Perhaps more than anything else, the Internet search engine Google has profoundly altered homework habits across the globe. When Naoko Koyasu, a high-school senior in Tokyo, recently got a biology assignment to write a report on the brain, she just plugged words like "cerebrum" and "medulla" into Google. In the old days, before her mother got a computer, she had to slog to the school library and cull a stack of textbooks. "I have been able to access stuff, written by experts, which I would have never encountered if not for the Internet," Koyasu says. But like many students, Koyasu received no guidance on how to weed through Web sources to determine the credible ones. "The Internet is so big, so undocumented and so amorphous, it’s like getting a really fast car and no map. You just get lost faster," says Robert Schrag, a professor of communication at North Carolina State University who studies the Web. He teaches his own students to scrutinize Web sources and limits them to four out of the 14 sources he requires for research papers.

Indeed, some Web sources can be useless at best—and downright harmful at worst. Seun, a 17-year-old in London suffering from arachnophobia, didn’t know where to turn for information except the Web. "The Internet is my solution," she says. "Even my family won’t help." But the Web site she consulted counseled her to put cups of lemon juice around her room to ward off spiders. "It’s not working," she says anxiously. "They’re still there."

For better and for worse, technology is transforming some of the most basic adolescent rites of passage. Forget screeching around the school parking lot with a driver’s ed instructor hanging on for dear life. Students at Paris’s Jussieu Auto-Ecole, for example, slip into a transportation simulator and take the wheel. The 3-D program allows the student to drive at night, in fog and through town—with no risk to anyone. It can even simulate what it’s like to drive drunk. "Books are about imagining," says driving student Pierre Ajail, 19. "With the simulator, learning is immediate." Faros, the French company that makes the simulator, has sold some 20,000 devices to U.S. school districts. They are also selling well in Northern Europe, where dark, snowy roads aren’t just virtual.

In the classroom, technology has made extra help much more accessible. Some educational software is based on cognitive research like Carnegie Learning’s math tutoring program, which uses sophisticated graphics and instant feedback. But there is also a lot of "edutainment" on the market. "Content must grow apace with [technology]," says Stacey Boyd, one of the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders for Tomorrow and CEO of Project Achieve, a Web-based software firm that tracks student accomplishments.

For instructors in overcrowded schools who have to "teach to the middle," online tutoring can help those outside the pack. Smarthinking.com, based in Washington, D.C., provides 24/7 tutoring to students needing help with math, English, chemistry and Span-ish. They even have "e-structors" who tutor math in Spanish. Students can chat online in real time with a tutor or send a report to the "essay center" for overnight review. School districts subscribe to the company’s service—particularly when they have too many students who have failed standardized tests.

Several schools have gone so far as to put the whole curriculum online. At the Florida Virtual School—the oldest and biggest in the United States—they even offer virtual PE, where physical-education students have to keep an exercise log, record their heart rates and keep track of their diets. Several countries, including China, Switzerland and Venezuela, have adopted the school’s curriculum. After seeing how much "dead time" her daughter, Heather, endured in a Denver public school, Nancy Romberg enrolled her in one of about a dozen "virtual high schools" that have opened in the United States in the last five years. Heather, now 20, began working from home via computer, choosing when she did what. Romberg thinks her daughter got more attention interacting with instructors online. "Virtual schools provide a classroom of one," says Barbara Dreyer, CEO of Connections Academy, which runs the school.

Critics say that virtually schooled kids will be socially disadvantaged because they won’t develop the skills to relate to their peers. But Barbara Frey, the principal of Denver’s cyber K-12 school, argues that her students interact online with a much broader range of people than they would otherwise. That’s especially true for kids in remote, rural —areas. Connections Academy data show that while traditional public-school demographics reflect the surrounding area, virtual-school demographics reflect the entire state. "We have white kids talking to black kids, poor kids talking to rich kids," Frey says. In the United States, at least, the digital divide between racial groups is slowly closing. A recent study by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting showed that the biggest increase in Internet use was among African-American children. Globally, of course, the gap will take longer to close.

Just as California led the world in the technology boom, the state is also at the forefront of educational innovation. Two public schools—High Tech High in San Diego and New Tech High in Napa—are using technology to completely revamp schooling. Partially funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they merge cutting-edge technology with traditional learning. A typical assignment at New Tech High, for example, is a project like "The President’s Dilemma," a simulation of the 1970s U.S. oil crisis. Students pretend to be the president’s economic advisers and collaborate on what action to take. They meet in online chat rooms for virtual study groups. Everything students need for the course is kept in a project briefcase online. Students are free to contact the two teachers by e-mail at any time. "This school is changing the fundamental way that teachers and students interact," says Paul Curtis, director of curriculum for New Tech High, which now has six campuses.

This model of education may soon go international. Next year, Australia and Britain each plan to open a school based on High Tech High. That may prove a bit of a cultural challenge since schooling there is more hierarchical than in the United States. "The learning dynamic today is much more adversarial," says Peter Estacio, director of information technology at High Tech High. "There is less of an assumption of teacher authority because students can jump on the Internet and find out you’re wrong."

Thanks in part to technology, students today feel free to challenge everything—even ideas about art. Ker Thao, who just graduated from High Tech High, has a very Net Gen approach to her work. For one assignment she found an image she liked online, played around with it in Photoshop, projected it on a wall, traced it and then painted it. "I could draw it, but I was trying to express myself through the colors," she explains. For Thao, technology is just a means to an artistic end. And the key to a first-rate education.

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With Dalia Martinez in London, Benjamin Sutherland in Paris, Kay Itoi in Tokyo, Peter Bailey in New York and Pat Wingert in Washington

(Copyright 2003 Newsweek, Inc.)