Essay About Last Year And Problems Of The Internet

Essay Preview: Life
Report this essay
The paper demonstrates how the Internet can be used to enable people to become aware of, and
develop their learning potential.It also examines some of the problems of the Internet and shows
how as it becomes more commercial it can also exclude,as well as include, thoses who seek to learn.
Introduction
This article examines the current and potential role of the Internet in lifelong learning.
Taking the UK as an example of Western societies, approximately 3% of the
population have access to the Internet either at home or at work.As Banbury
points out, this does not compare particularly favourably with the availability of other
household appliances such as the telephone (85%) or television and radio (nearly
100%). The provision of on-line services, however, is currently growing at the rate of
about 100% a year, reaching into the 22% of UK homes that possess computers, and
connecting into institutions of higher education, further and continuing education and
into schools. British Interactive Broadcasting will soon launch digital satellite services
which, apart from providing 200 television channels, will bring the Internet and email
within the reach of 22 million UK households. Similar ventures will introduce home
digital technology across the globe. The central issues, however, revolve not simply
around the extent to which computers are networked together, but are concerned with
how the technology can be used in ways that invigorate and empower the learner in
formal, informal and non-formal educational settings.
Clearly, in part because of the phenomenon known as technophobia, it is also
recognized that not all learners appreciate studying through the medium of information
technology. Some may experience distinct feelings of alienation, that is, feelings of
powerlessness, and of being controlled by the technology, rather than using it for their
own means. This article, then, will examine some features of the empowerment,
alienation and dichotomy that seem nested in electronic communication interaction.
What is the Internet ?
The Internet is simply a network of hundreds of thousands of computers all over the
world, connected in a way that lets other computers access information on them. So if
a computer is connected to the Internet, in principle, it can be connected to any other
computer on the network. Today, the Internet comprises more than 45000 regional,
David Gray is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Surrey. He is
currently engaged in developing work-based learning national and internationalnetworks,which connect more than 30 million people in over
200 countries. This includes organizations, schools, universities, companies, governments,
groups and individuals.
The fastest growing and most versatile part of the Internet is the World Wide Web
(Web) which oДҐ ers learners enormous opportunities for learning, including accessing
information on formal educational courses, and collecting an unheard of wealth of data
and information on a seemingly endless range of subjects.
Other growing, and potentially educationally powerful, parts of the Internet are
computer and video conferencing. Computer conferencing may be synchronous (all
participants being on-line at the same time) or asynchronous, whereby the system
archives all email messages and displays them to all participants, if and when they log
onto the system. Video conferencing allows learners from across the globe to see each
other while they communicate, potentially, at least, a more invigorating experience
than email communication.
The Internet in learning: the supreme tool of self-direction?
If the basis of lifelong learning is self-directed learning (Brockett and Hiemstra, 1991:
24б 33), then the Internet could probably be classiЮ ed as one of the most powerful and
important self-directed learning tools in existence. Let us take a hypothetical scenario.
A manual worker who left school at the age of 16 with negligible formal qualiЮ cations
has developed a lifelong passion for the game of chess. Last year his teenage son
persuaded him to buy a computer. Since then, further money has been spent going ` online’
through the purchase of a modem and a subscription to an Internet service
provider. At Ю rst, our worker resented spending the money, but now Ю nds that the
Internet can help him in his passion for chess. Firstly, he uses one of the Web search
engines to look up the word ` chess ’ (a search engine is a software tool that allows the user
to input keywords, which the engine looks up in its index and displays all global Web
pages containing those words). Using the WebCrawler search engine, for example, he