Robert D. Carlitz
Department of Physics & Astronomy
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
(February 14, 1994)
ABSTRACT
The technology of wide area networks offers opportunities for the expression of a new democratic spirit. If these networks are implemented so as to include educational components at all levels, they will provide the framework for many new economic and social structures.
I. National Information Infrastructure
A. Background
B. Principles
C. Economics
D. Society
E. Education
F. Democracy
A. Background
The program of the Clinton/Gore administration to develop wide area computer networks in the service of business, government and education is known as the National Information Infrastructure (NII). This program represents an ambitious extension of a series of very successful networking efforts. The original such effort, initiated in 1979 (?), was sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and was known as the ARPANET. Its successor was launched by the National Science Foundation under the name NSFNET. A major extension of the NSFNET was proposed by Senator Al Gore in 1991 under the name of the National Research and Education Network. The present NII program seeks to develop networks which reach beyond the education and research community. Hence carries a broader name.
All of these networking programs have been marked by several common characteristics, which we will discuss in some detail below. Consciously or not, these programs have been structured to allow for broad participation, and have fostered a spirit which we would like to call Network Democracy. As computer networks expand nationally and internationally, we feel that Network Democracy will emerge as an important social force. While we hesitate to claim that the technology of wide area networking has a significance on a par with, say, the invention by Gutenburg of moveable type, networking technology does have major social implications. Democratic governments should recognize the democratizing potential of this new medium and should encourage its development so as to maximize this potential. The present paper seeks to highlight these issues and indicate, in particular, the importance of developing educational networks accessible to students and teachers across the country.
B. Principles
The networks that we are discussing in this paper are known collectively as the Internet. This term refers to a collection of networks which use a common protocol known as the Internet protocol. From a user's viewpoint these networks function as a single, seamless whole with a reach that extends around the world.
The Internet protocol is a publicly published protocol. This fact has enabled all hardware vendors to provide implementations of the protocol for their machines. Most have done so, with the result that the majority of currently manufactured computing equipment is interoperable across the Internet.
Interoperability provides convenience and economy for users of the Internet. Equipment purchased for special applications can be used along side of equipment purchased for other special applications. The Internet protocol provides a common denominator for all this equipment and allows users to transfer information easily from machine to machine.
The architecture of the Internet is a distributed one. The present Internet involves more than a million computers with a complex web of interconnections. There is no central computer governing the Internet's operation; indeed the Internet has no center. There is no single fixed route between any two computers on the Internet; rather traffic is routed dynamically from machine to machine.
The distributed architecture of the Internet provides a number of benefits. First of all, there are redundant paths from machine to machine, so that the failure of any single intermediate machine or network path is never catastrophic. Traffic can simply be routed around points of failure. This makes the Internet an extremely reliable communications medium. In the recent California earthquake, the highway system failed, and the telephone system was unable to handle outside traffic, but Internet connectivity remained in place, providing for many the first line of communication.
A distributed architecture is the key to the scalability of the Internet. This term implies that the network can gracefully accommodate the needs of a rapidly growing user population, both in terms of expanded numbers of user devices and expanded traffic from any given user device. One can contrast the distributed and scalable architecture of the Internet with that of centralized computer services, such as Compuserve or America Online (AOL). AOL recently announced a cutback in its advertising efforts, since its service operation has been unable to keep up with its rapid growth in users. The Internet as a whole is growing even faster than AOL, but the distributed architecture of the Internet allows this growth to proceed without a degradation in the level of service available to individual users.
We can summarize this subsection as follows:
Public protocols interoperability.
Distributed architecture scalability.
These principles are essential for the development of Network Democracy, since they allow for participation in the network by the widest possible range of people. We turn now to some of the arguments which underlie the development of the network. We will find that the government's goals in developing the network fit nicely with individuals' goals in using the network for democratic expression.
C. Economics
The simplest economic argument for developing wide area networks as a national resource is as follows. The nation is evolving from the industrial age of the nineteenth century to an information age in the twenty-first century. Just as the industrial age required an infrastructure of roads, railways and shipping channels, the information age requires an infrastructure of computer networks.
Recent decades have seen the start of a transition which is likely to accelerate in the next few years. Businesses have downsized and decentralized their operations. Communication has become a major concern for all businesses, and all businesses will be aided by the development of a National Information Infrastructure.
Computer networks provide for rapid communications within and among companies and government offices and thus allow for increased efficiencies of operation. They also allow for easy international expansion, since the Internet is already a reliable global communications medium.
These observations apply to existing businesses which are decentralizing their operations or expanding into the international marketplace. But the Internet will also provide opportunities for a host of new businesses. One can anticipate the development of new information services and new entertainment industries based upon the technology of wide area networks. The price of entry to the network is very low, so it is likely that these new businesses will develop in great profusion.
The overall economic climate provided through the Internet is one which encourages individual initiative in a distributed workplace. Democracy is well-served in such an environment, and the individual opportunities offered by a networked nation are consonant with broad democratic goals. In the following subsection we will discuss specific ways in which wide area networks encourage new models and social organization and facilitate democratic participation in the network.
D. Society
Several of the economic arguments for the Internet have parallels in terms of individual benefits of the network. A distributed workplace implies flexibility for individual workers - in terms of where they choose to live, what hours they choose to work and what activities they choose to work on. Telecommuting is not only an efficient option for businesses, who save money on overhead expenses, but also a liberating option for workers, since it allows them to work where they please and to a large extent when they please. It frees them of lost commuting time while retaining contact with essential resources and services.
There are aspects of life in the networked nation which go far beyond considerations of simple efficiency and convenience. These aspects have to do with what might be called the "network community," that group of people who interact online. The discovery that people would form functional communities around their network links was one of the unexpected outgrowths of the original ARPANET experiment. It's not unlikely that it is the spirit of this network community that has been the principal driving force beyond the explosive growth of the Internet in recent years.
The whole concept is a hard one to grasp for those who have not begun to participate in online activities. How could a mechanical medium facilitate personal, human interaction? The answer lies in the fact that online contacts begin with shared interests, often interests of great immediacy to the people involved. In this manner relationships initiated via the network differ from those involving next-door neighbors, co-workers and most other everyday acquaintances.
Because network interactions begin with an intellectual resonance, they often have a character which eludes other relationships, even ones of long standing and close association. It is inevitable that as the network grows the number of online relationships that any individual has will become an increasing fraction of all that person's relationships. While it's hard to predict the significance of this fact, it's certain that such relationships will have an increasing influence on each individual's life.
Because the network itself is new and rapidly growing, a typical network relationship involves neophytes in the use of the technology. Such people join the network with understandable trepidation. It is, after all, a global community of some 20 million people, some fraction of whom have a sophisticated knowledge of both the technology and its many applications. Yet individual interactions tend to be warm and informal. A typical first message on the Internet will contain a request for information and perhaps a plea for help. These messages invariably produce helpful responses and often lead to rewarding personal contacts.
Since each individual is likely to be greeted with a helpful response, their own attitude toward the network biases them toward sharing their own knowledge with others. The degree to which members of the network community go out of their way to help newcomers is remarkable. One might ask whether this openness will survive the network's expansion into a new mass medium. This spirit does survive at the level of 20 million users. It seems possible that it can be retained as the network grows - an attractive prospect for the networked nation.
There is an element of online activities which we have not yet emphasized but which forms an essential component of network democracy. This has to do with the fact that the Internet involves two-way communication. Individuals who participate in network activities are at once seekers of information and providers of information. Through the Internet present participants can reach a global audience of 20 million people. As the network expands this audience will expand. The possibility exists for town meetings in the global community; and in fact there are thousands of such meetings going on at all times. This type of forum has never existed before, but it offers an attractive way of extending the virtues of small-town democracy to a larger and more complex society.
The manner in which educational institutions have been charged for access to the network has tended to encourage the use of the network for the dissemination of ideas and information. Billing is typically for bandwidth, or maximal possible data rates to and from a given site. There are no charges for connect time or for message traffic. Hence the incentive is to use the resource, not hoard it. For those who have information to offer, this means that others will access their information, provided it is useful and interesting. The network thus serves as a large-scale publishing medium, attracting large numbers of authors and collecting for dissemination a large body of significant information.
E. Education
If the network is to be extended to reach all members of society, an important step will be to reach all the schools, all teachers and all students. This process is likely to be a rapid one, for the technology of wide area networking has the potential of addressing some of the major issues confronting education today.
The first of these issues has to do with equity. As information becomes an increasingly important component of the everyday business world, access to information will become an increasingly important measure of equity in society. By networking the nation's classrooms, we can provide the framework for equity of access to information in all schools nationwide. This cannot be done for free; adding a single networked computer to every classroom in the country would cost around $5 billion for the hardware alone. But no other systemic approach to educational equity offers the promise of such great benefits for each dollar invested. The benefits include the access to all information in the public record, whether it was developed through government programs or through individual initiative.
The second major educational issue for which networks are relevant is one of isolation. Teachers and students in the traditional classroom are isolated from their peers and from external resources. Network connections at the classroom level can help end this isolation.
The third issue has to do with educational reform and school restructuring. The goals of restructuring are in the direction of individual initiative, "real" classroom activities and authentic assessment. Individual initiative is encouraged at the school level through an emphasis upon local control and at the classroom level through student-centered activities. The idea of decentralized school management is a parallel to the decentralization going on in most major businesses. Wide area networks can support this process for schools just as they can support it for business and government.
"Real" activities imply a connection with the world outside the classroom, a goal which networks readily facilitate. Authentic assessment involves the direct evaluation of student's work, as opposed to indirect evaluation through standardized tests. Networks facilitate access to this type of material and hence aid the development of this assessment paradigm.
The development of a networked nation gives a new watchword for the nation's schools. We can speak of the "3 Rs" of the twenty-first century school:
* Research. Students and teachers who use the network learn to find information, evaluate it for accuracy and relevancy, and integrate it with their own personal knowledge. These skills are essential for doing research and useful in a wide range of creative and practical endeavors.
* Retraining. Rapid changes in technology create a climate in which the character of business also changes rapidly. As a result most workers have to contemplate periodic shifts in employment or wholesale career changes. The network's online resources can facilitate this process and stimulate the practice of life-long learning.
* Restructuring. The development of workgroups sized appropriately for a given task is likely to be an ongoing goal of the business and educational communities. Networks allow for the formation of these groups and provide them with the resources they need to accomplish whatever task they have set out to do.
F. Democracy
In the previous subsections we have discussed the economic, social and education roots of an emerging Network Democracy. We have mentioned aspects of the National Information Infrastructure which can nurture this democratic movement. Here we review these points and discuss some of the activities likely to take place in this new environment.
A metaphor for the connected Internet is one of a cloud of many loosely associated particles. The millions of computers attached to the network represent those particles, with connectivity possible through many routes across the cloud.
Consider now the status of one computer connected to the cloud. Let's say, for specificity, that we are talking about a computer which provides information services at an elementary school. This computer can provide services for students and teachers in the school - news groups, curriculum materials, computer tools, etc. And it can also provide services which have been created by students and teachers in the school for use by people in other schools or in the community at large. Possible examples include students' work, teachers' lesson plans, homework assignments and various school projects and activities.
Access to the school server is similar to access for any other information server on the network. Thus the school is an equal, in terms of information dissemination, to the Library of Congress, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or any of the other information providers on the network. Of course the total holdings of large institutions may be much greater than those of a single school, but people never access these holdings in their totality, and there may be as much interest in a single item at a given school as in any single item provided by one of the larger institutions.
We give the example of a school, since schools are traditional information-providers to the community, if only in the sense of providing information by teaching the children of the community. We could extend the example to individual authors, collectives or small businesses, since the intrinsic cost of Internet connectivity is very low, and the hardware required for this connection is readily available at affordable prices.
The potential audience for schools, businesses and individuals on the network is large. Already it numbers in millions, with a current doubling time on the order to six months. Of course not every item is broadcast to every person connected to the network. Rather the sophisticated searching mechanisms available through the tens of thousands of computers which act as network servers enables people to locate those items which they wish to use.
The scalability of the network assures that a large audience will be able to use the network to access a large body of information, which each user of the network being able to locate items of direct interest and to avoid inundation by the increasing volume of information which is not of direct interest.
II. Examples
A. Kidsphere
B. CoSN
C. CK:P
D. Participation
In this section we will discuss three examples of educational activities on the network, which help illustrate aspects of Network Democracy. The examples all relate to specific interests and activities of the author. Each has many counterparts on the network of equal value and relevance.
The three examples involve activities, respectively, on the international, national and local levels. Each involves collaborations which have been facilitated by the network, and each offers the promise of expanded future activities.
A. Kidsphere
Kidsphere is an electronic mailing list on the Internet which deals with the topic of school networking. Many teachers subscribe to this mailing list, and many use it as their first point of reference on the network. Other subscribers include people in the software, hardware or networking business, university educators, people from funding agencies and interested parents.
Discussions on the list have seeded the development of a huge variety of projects. These range from collaborations between pairs of teachers for activities involving a handful of students at two different schools to large-scale national and international activities.
The mailing list itself began in response to questions that were asked on the Internet about the possibility of pre-college students using the network. Patt Haring, an educational consultant in New York City, set up a mailing list on a computer at the City University of New York in May, 1989. The existence of this mailing list was advertised to several other online discussion groups, and readership quickly grew. In September, 1989, the list was moved to computers at the University of Pittsburgh, where it was hosted by the author of the present paper. Activity has continued in Pittsburgh since that time.
Subscriptions reach 20 different countries and about two thousand distinct mailing addresses. Many of these addresses refer to local redistributions, and total readership is estimated to be in the tens of thousands. Present traffic is handled by a single workstation in the author's office. Message volume is now at the level of about ten thousand messages annually. Since each message goes out to two thousand different addresses, the total number of messages exceeds one million a month. This volume is easily handled by the present hardware and network connection.
The Kidsphere service illustrates the ideas of a Network Democracy in several ways. Its very existence was in response to perceived needs of the network community. It operates in conjunction with the continuing interests of its own community of subscribers. Discussion topics are selected by the readership and developed according to readers' desires.
Teachers new to the network commonly turn to Kidsphere for their first online contacts. The experience of receiving friendly and valuable responses to these teachers' initial queries have created a strong sense of community.
B. CoSN
In 1990, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) began to consider the use of wide area computer networks for their own science education programs, they looked on the network to see where school networks were being discussed. NSF staffers subscribed to the Kidsphere mailing list and began to take part in online discussions. Kidsphere contributors were invited to discuss the development of NSF programs which would make use of the network.
In the spring of 1991, the Technology Education Research Center (TERC) proposed to hold a conference on the subject of educational networks. The NSF agreed to fund this meeting but suggested that the list of invitees should include a number of people who were then active on the Internet. The result was a strong Internet focus for the TERC meeting and a suggestion that a new consortium be formed to facilitate the process of school internetworking.
The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) which arose from the TERC meeting is a membership organization formed by state departments of education, local school districts, universities, network access providers, nonprofit organizations and vendors interested in school networking. The group presently works to catalyze school networking efforts nationwide through conferences, demonstrations and online resources.
As with Kidsphere, CoSN was formed in response to the perceived needs of a given community. The network has enabled it to grow and adapt itself to the changing needs of it members. The network provides resources which enable the organization to function efficiently and reach current and potential members at great speed with minimal expense.
C. CK:P
The last example that we will discuss is a school networking project currently under way in the Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS). Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh (CK:P) is a collaboration which involves the PPS, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and the University of Pittsburgh. The school district provides the project's educational basis; the PSC provides technical support; and the university provides overall coordination and assessment.
CK:P is one of four projects designated by the NSF as testbeds for school networking. Subsidiary funding for the project comes from local Pittsburgh foundations and from vendor contributions. CK:P is distinguished from other NSF school networking efforts by its strong focus upon curricular activities and its explicit goal of institutionalizing the use of networking technology in a major urban school district. Successful implementation of this goal will provide a model for other cities nationwide.
The origins of CK:P are not unlike the origins of Kidsphere. At the time when Kidsphere (then Kidsnet) was first established, Pittsburgh teachers were given guest accounts on computers at the University of Pittsburgh and were invited to develop classroom activities via participation in the Kidsphere discussion group.
These activities were successful, and when interest within the school district grew, a formal project gradually evolved. Emphasis upon curricular applications has remained strong, as has a commitment to respond to grass-root initiatives within the school district.
Site selection for CK:P has evolved to include a Request for Proposals (RFP) distributed to all schools in the city. A panel of teachers, administrators, parent representatives and school board members reviews these proposals and selects the best for implementation. Quality is judged on the basis of how well each project identifies a particular problem in the curriculum and uses networking technology to address it.
The RFP process suggests a good mechanism for the allocation of resources within the school district. Equipment distributed to the winning proposals is likely to be used effectively and efficiently. Teachers' initiatives are rewarded, and educational excellence is continually encouraged.
As school servers are being developed for CK:P, there is a growing demand for community services which will allow parents to access information resources in the schools and for children to use these resources from their homes. This is an extension of the idea of Network Democracy from the school building to the community at large. It remains to develop a good funding model for these expanded services, but the interest is there to experiment with a variety of models until a sustainable one is found.
In the long run the school projects of CK:P will be elements of a large and complex community network. It is perhaps appropriate that this community network should begin in the schools, since the full realization of the social potential of community networks will require a major educational effort.
D. Participation
The activities discussed in the previous three subsections are representative of thousands of projects which are currently being facilitated through Internet connectivity. Readers of this paper are invited to join in this work if they have not already begun to do so. Electronic contact points for the activities that we have discussed here are as follows:
Kidsphere. For a subscription to the mailing list and for further information send electronic mail to kidsphere-request@vms.cis.pitt.edu.
CK:P. A gopher server at gopher.pps.pgh.pa.us describes all the project activities of Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh.
CoSN. For further information send electronic mail to info@cosn.org. Information on school networking activities is collected on the CoSN gopher server, gopher.cosn.org.