I asked Doran if there were any test scores for the children to document the Internet’s benefits to the children at Park View. He said that scores by themselves would mislead since he had improved as a teacher in other ways. And yet he believed the Net had helped; since he couldn’t supervise the class constantly, he had learned to foster curiosity among the students as they explored the Net on their own. He and some other teachers in the experiment understood that they and the children would be learning from each other, that the old authority models were gone. The same trend was gradually happening in industry in Canada and the world at large. So if Doran wasn’t turning out Ph.D.s, he at least was creating better workers.
Other reasons existed for his success. The videotape reinforced the Net experiences. The Park View students looked forward to seeing their counterparts. Much more importantly, Doran let children use the Internet in ways that meant the most to them. The Net was like the videotape. Doran had expected his students to shoot pictures of quaint homes, of beaches, of the usual, touristy sites, when they were showing off the Bridgewater area. Instead the students photographed the places where they worked and shopped. And that told all. The e-mail was the same way; students would most benefit from the technology if it was on their own terms. At Park View, some virtual romances even developed between the students and those elsewhere. One boy wrote to a Florida school asking to be put in touch with a cheerleader.
Yet another explanation for Doran’s success was that students could spend hour after hour on their computer. So they had plenty of time for school compositions and for writing letters to friends in Vancouver and elsewhere. (That wasn’t true of all the students in latter years. Although Doran felt they did well, they might have done still better with more time.)
Perhaps most important of all, the machines didn’t put down the general students the way so many humans did. “It’s been my experience that the technology benefits the struggling student much more than it does any other student—in literacy growth, self-esteem, tech skills,” said Lorri Neilsen, the education professor at Mount Saint Vincent University who had started the Learning Connections project at Park View and elsewhere.
The positives aside, the Bridgewater experiment was not a complete triumph. “It’s very important to know the spirit of this project was carried by a handful of teachers,” Neilsen said. In fact, just eight of forty teachers in the school participated in the project. Skeptics were worried about it taking time away from the usual curriculum. Yet another problem was the authority question; some teachers had to know everything and were nervous about students learning behind their backs. A third complication was gender: Many female teachers were uncomfortable around technology.
Answers and solutions existed to all those challenges. In the case of academic students, I could appreciate the need to cover a vast range of subjects that colleges demanded. But with a TeleRead-style arrangement, just about all the major resources would be online anyway. Old material over a period of time could be scanned into the national database—a highly economical way to distribute it, and even better by archival criteria alone since unread paper material might well disintegrate anyway without anyone caring about it.
Even with the Net as it existed then, students of all kinds learned many shortcuts that enabled them to turn out better papers. The knowledge on the Net was far, far shallower on the whole than at, say, the Library of Congress in the States. But it may well have exceeded what the students could find in some small-town libraries. If nothing else, by logging onto the Net, they could learn how to stay up with the most current knowledge—no small edge in an era when new products replaced old ones in months rather than in years, and when academic journals proliferated.
What about the authority question? That could diminish in time if schools of education shifted gears and encouraged teachers to foster curiosity rather than have students focus just on textbooks and teacher-certified facts. Would it happen in the United States without a concerted, TeleRead-style effort? Maybe. But I doubted this.
If nothing else, public schools needed to give their teachers more time to master the hardware and the Internet so they would not feel so lost when their students roamed the Net; the equipment alone wasn’t enough. “Basic technology training is one of the most neglected aspects of educational reform,” said Andy Carvin, the Net-oriented educational expert at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “More often than not, when a school or a school district implements a major technology overhaul, teachers are introduced to the Internet and all of its tools in a day or two of ‘training.’” Carvin told me, and he was right, that teachers should enjoy regular use of the technology at home and at school so the knowledge wouldn’t fade away. Too, they needed to know how to “combine that knowledge with traditional teaching and curricula....It’s like learning to use a telephone—you can be taught to pick up the receiver and press a few numbers, but if you don’t have anyone else’s number or don’t know how to give out your own number it’s useless.”
I asked Lorri Neilsen about Canada, and she said that schools of education up there were making good progress toward correcting deficiencies. They had better. In the new era of giant databases there should be more emphasis on finding and evaluating information from many sources, and less on parroting textbooks. Teachers should encourage children to look for malarkey in all media, but especially on the Net, given all the self-publishing there. Perhaps with more women growing up with computers, female teachers in the future wouldn’t suffer so much from the old bugaboos about networks and smart, curious, uppity students.