Acknowledgments

This text is a result of my more than 15 years experience in the field of using the ICT in education. During that time I have collected and explored really large amount of such "bones". So, now I can try to classify them and hopefully offer a slightly nontraditional and informed view that can help others to find a sense of direction in this field. I would like to thank all the colleagues that helped me to collect these "bones", especially Vra Suchnkov, and above all, my teachers that taught me to assemble them, e.g. Rudolf Kryl, Eduard Mazk, Alfred Bork, Margaret Cox, Rachel Cohen. The most important role was played by such experts e.g. Seymour Papert, who I had the honor of meeting only through their publications and mainly via the Internet. Therefore I decided to enrich my text with some of their interesting opinions. My original intention was to use this material as my PhD dissertation thesis. As I declare by the contents of the motto above, there is nothing but transference in it (not my own authentic research), it may be used rather as meta-analysis study or monograph. It could even serve as a teaching material for teachers being prepared for the introduction of technology to schools.

THE OBJECTIVES
This study material was created using the experience gained during organizing the European courses Socrates - Comenius 2.1 that were dealing with the training of teachers in exploiting the project methods for instruction. These were formally the PIST (Project makers In-Service Training), TRANSPRO (TRANSnational educational projects using the PROject method and ICT in in-service-training for teachers) and the currentPROMISE (the PROject Method In School projects through E-learning). These courses are based on the methodology of project learning being implemented in Scandinavia, especially in Denmark, for many years. Therefore, there already existed a theoretical background of this methodology derived from practical experience. Another integral component of these courses is the implementation of modern technologies. During the terms of early nineties of the 20th century it was not an exception that teachers with only little experience in computing applied for the course. It resulted in wasting precious time teaching them basic computing skills. As there were official state action plans for implementation of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education introduced in many European countries, this situation has gradually changed. Therefore now the teachers generally enter the courses with quite sufficient technical and computing skills, and the process

of integration of computing and methodological activities of teachers working with project methods can be launched. These are the primary objectives of this text. The core of this study material is exposition and further description of the impact the ICT have on educational processes. We may assume that there should be certain influence. In fact, the recent predominating opinion is that this impact is essential. It is not necessary to mention that the current society is often beginning to be called "Information Society". Technologies penetrate into every aspect of human life. The sphere of education is not an exception. But the necessary changes in education take place slowly and reluctantly. Nevertheless they are inevitable. A certain transformation process has already commenced by introducing the ICT and the Internet to schools. This transformation is not always ideal. Lets try to define the form the changes brought about by the introduction of ICT into education should have. The description of these changes with various recommendations, examples, quotations, and links may serve the teachers and professional public as a guide in this field and help to make up his/her opinion. The aspiration of this material is to increase the interest of teachers in using the ICT in proper manner. One of the objectives is also to offer the theoretical base and support of activities the ESP organization (European Schools Project) has been doing in the field of implementation of Internet into education for more than 10 years. This body was behind the above-mentioned courses and today, within the project Comenius Network ECOLE (European COllaborative Learning), they are building a network of cooperating European and overseas institutions keen on the best way of incorporating the ICT into real educational service. Our institution (The Department of Information Technology of the Charles University Prague, Faculty of Education) is honored by the fact that it coordinates the work on all the projects mentioned here in the Czech Republic. It is also the solver of several international researches in the field of educational technology. The most prestigious of these is the Second Information Technology in Education Study (SITES). So it naturally becomes the dissemination body for these ideas and methods among Czech teachers.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and ... in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of

The first significant technological change that was reflected in education was the invention of typography. textbooks. But it took several centuries before books were available Thomas Alva Edison for every student's individual education. Other attempts in (famous inventor), 1922 using various teaching aids (generally technology) are connected with the industrial revolution. In education, of course, it is not the steam engine, with which the beginning of technological progress is generally associated. But, for example, the famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison had the idea of replacing the textbooks with motion pictures. Similar ideas appeared with the emergence of phonograph, radio broadcasting, tape players, TV as well as video. These attempts were rather unsuccessful. None of these aids replaced standard textbooks nor changed classical instruction methods. The mass form of one-way information transfer, such as in public broadcasting, prevents individual learning, because it does not reflect individual needs. The sequential presentations such as tapes and videos, etc. do not allow for working with the piece of information actually needed. Therefore these means can only play a role of supplementary specialized material.
The primary reason technology has failed to live up to its promise (of the 1980s) lies in the fact that it has been viewed as an answer to the wrong question. Decisions about technology purchases and uses are typically driven by the question of how to improve the effectiveness of what schools are already doing -not how to transform what schools do. Jane L. David (Director of the Bay Area Research Group, Palo Alto, California, Apple consultant): The Unfulfilled Promise of the 1980s, 1994

Similar attempts were noticed in the 70's and 80's, when first personal computers reached the markets. There were suggestions that computers would soon replace not only textbooks, but also even teachers. These hopes turned out vain again. The computers of that time were trying to manage the instruction process in such a silly way that the interest of students was rapidly vanishing. Instead of the subject matter the students were keener on gaining the best results, which was often possible without relevant knowledge.

Today we find ourselves in similar situation, but on a different level and with different consequences. Individual technical teaching aids have been transformed into integral information and communication technology. Interconnected computers are able to play the role of all the above-mentioned technical aids including textbooks. There is no need to wait for the exact time the desired information is broadcasted or to walk to the library or video store. The range of possibilities in using the ICT is even much wider. They enable verysophisticated control of the work of the users of educational applications as well as uncontrollable communication of all the connected people via the Internet.

In order to get some basic orientation in the field and to understand the advantages and disadvantages of technologies, we will start with a small excursion into some branches of science that may have certain connection to our subject matter the impact of technology in education.

INTRODUCING THE INTERNET TO SCHOOLS

4.1 What is the Internet about?

After the necessary explanation of correlations in the previous chapter, we finally get to the main point of this material. Probably everybody has certain idea about an Internet nowadays. As it is obvious that phones connect people on a long distance, it is common knowledge that the Internet interconnects computers. The idea of interconnecting computers emerged soon after the first computers appeared. During the 60's the need for efficient use of the machine time of huge mainframe computers was mainly behind these attempts. Some advanced numerical procedures could be done during the same time on more machines and, thus, the outcomes were available much quicker. Apart from various scientific numerical calculations the high performance was also needed for calculating the trajectories of missiles and rockets. So it is natural that the Ministry of Defense of the technologically most developed country after the WWII - the USA - was at the birth of computer networks. Some American universities were working on this military contract (ARPA Net). The content was not only performing calculations, but also communication and command structure. It was very nice of the U.S. Government to allow for the result to be used by these universities, as well as by all the educational and non-profit making institutions around the globe. So this is how the global network Internet was created. Besides the transfer of programs and data, the E-mail enabling to exchange messages among the users of all connected computers was one of the first widely spread applications of the Internet.
A World Encyclopaedia no longer presents itself to a modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge

All the institutions of science, universities, libraries etc. were interconnected by the Internet at the beginning of the 90's. The cooperation of scientists on long distances increased significantly and first attempts of using the network for educational purposes were made (e.g. European Schools Project more in chapter 8.3). But in that time it was technically very difficult to access the needed information. In order to search the public archives one had to have the knowledge of nearly an expert in the given field. It became obvious that large investments would have to be made in order to secure further development towards such a fantastic vision as the World Wide Encyclopedia.

and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared. It would be in continual correspondence with every university, every research institution, every competent discussion, every survey, every statistical bureau in the world. It would develop a directorate and a staff of men of its own type, specialized editors and summarists. They would be very important and distinguished men in the new world. This Encyclopaedic organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. Herbert George Wells (British writer): World Brain, 1938

The idea of creating a global network that would preserve all the knowledge of mankind in consequences has been on a table for a long time. First scholar, who came up with such a vision, was an English science-fiction writer H.G. Wells in the late twenties. In that time and for a long time afterwards, in fact not until long ago, it was a mere dream. Nevertheless there had been some visionaries who tried to find the appropriate tool for the concrete realization of this idea. One of the first in this field was an American scientist Vannevar Bush in the late thirties. The World War II interrupted his work, because he was in charge of the coordination of American warfare science. That's why his project of the machine called Memex appeared as late as in 1945 [11]. As the computers were in their early age then, he used microfiches to store the data. Although this idea has never been practically used, Bush was the first one, who made the experiment with nonlinear connection of documents. This device was a model not only for the realization of the Wells' utopia, but it also reflected the ways of storing information in the human brain itself.
Xanadu is a system for the network sale of documents with automatic royalty on every byte. ... Any user should be able to follow origins and links of material across boundaries of documents, servers, networks, and individual implementations. There should be a unified environment available to everyone providing access to this whole space. ... It is a system for a point-and-

The next one, who tried to realize similar idea, was a former Harvard sociology student Theodor (Ted) Nelson. In 1960 he subscribed to the course of computing and, Ted Nelson (author of the term "Hypertext"): Project Xanadu, 1987 until today, he has been working on the implementation of nonlinearly connected documents on computers. Although he has not got to any practical realization of his project (Xanadu) so far, he has become well known for the term he used for such a type of document - hypertext.
click universe. This interactive docuverse. is a completely

Many hypertexts systems have been developed since. Their first practical application was in organizing the documents of companies (e.g. NASA program APOLO) and in constructing the help assistance parts of various computer programs. This sphere has been their domain ever since. As more and more teachers started to use computers, the hypertext systems also penetrated the field of education. Nowadays these systems offer not only plain non-linear texts. Various sounds, pictures, animations, and videos are also incorporated into the hypertext documents. These are called hypermedia. Almost all the common CD-ROM encyclopedia titles on the market are based on this platform. An expert of Geneva based CERN institution Tim Berners-Lee concluded the Students are better able to retain learning experiences that involve development of the system of internal hypertext sounds, pictures and interactive documents transfer in the 1991. As this high opportunities. ... People retain standard scientific institution was already about 10 percent of what they read, half of what they see and fully 90 equipped with the internal network based on the percent of information that is through interactive same protocol (TCP/IP) as the Internet gleaned participation. (intranet), the resulting system could be transferred from the CERN to the whole World. Brenda Pfaus (teacher, specialist in The most popular Internet application - CAL, Ottawa), 1996 the World Wide Web later developed on this platform. Not many people realize today that the original hypertext was the base of this environment. The WWW service has been improved to such extend that it meets all the requirements on hypermedia software. There are a vast number of servers or computers where the WWW documents can be placed, so the possibility of Web publishing is open to virtually anyone nowadays. All the evidence shows that the Internet may be the tool for the realization of the ideas of Wells and his followers. But, as usual, everything turns out slightly different. The original intention of the world encyclopedia has been to collect and store only serious information important for the development of knowledge of human kind. The Internet may have served this

sole purpose till the year 1993, when the network had been considered as a noncommercial academic tool only. But then, due to the high costs of development and maintenance, the U.S. Government decided to open the Internet also to the commercial sector. After that the Internet started to be used more and more for trade as various commercial companies found a fertile soil for their activities there. So we can find a lot of advertisements, spam, pornography, etc. on the net today. On the other hand, the Internet is a good assurance of the freedom of speech. Thanks to the decentralization it allows hundreds of millions of its users (1 billion is expected by the 2005) to communicate through E-mail and publish their opinions on the Web no matter what the content is. It is hard to predict what influence this unlimited publishing and spreading of thoughts will have on the development of human society. In comparison to the changes initiated by the invention of typography (availability of the Bible and various interpretations of its content) the changes may be unforeseeable. Almost everything can be found in this global hypermedia encyclopedia. It stands as the mirror of the consciousness of human kind and therefore it should be used in education. But Internet provides only the access to information, which is often hidden somewhere, and it is very difficult to judge its validity on the spot. The art of evaluation and processing of the information is a very important condition for using the Internet in general. To fulfill this requirement is very difficult. It is necessary to have a stimulating environment at schools. This is mainly a social issue. Without the suitable social environment at school and in the family this condition appears not accomplishable. Professional teachers play an important role in this aspect.
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? T.S. Eliot (American poet): Choruses from "The Rock", 1934

4.2 Connecting to the Internet

The connection to the Internet is the first and crucial condition of the Internet use. But it is not the only condition, as some authorities would think. There are several ways it can be realized.

The most common is the dial-up connection, computers into the using an ordinary telephone line. As this form Getting classrooms is much less important of communication has been designed for than getting the important ideas into transmitting human speech, the frequency the classroom. range is rather limited. It is necessary to Fellows (mathematician and convert the computer digital data to analog Michael computer scientist, University of electrical signal of the frequency of human California), 1996 voice. This is done by a modem. The modems do not have very high speed of transmission (max. 56 kb/s). Another disadvantage of this type of connection is that it is impossible to remain connected for a long time, as there is a charge for the time spent on the net (in most of the countries). The phone line cannot be used for making calls when it is used for the Internet. Therefore the connection is established only when necessary. It is not suitable for schools, but is often for households. A dedicated line is more natural and more expensive way of connecting. It is a direct line to the Internet provider. The connection exists permanently. In fact it could have several forms - an ordinary telephone line that is fixed to the destination and bypasses the exchanges, optical fiber line, radio or satellite transmission, cable TV, etc. There is also a modem on both sides of the line, but a more sophisticated and faster one. The speed of connection is much higher (at least hundreds of kb/s). The charge is made mainly according to the speed. Sometimes there is a charge for the transmitted amount of data, but it would not suit the schools. The question of speed of data transmission is in reality more complicated. It also depends on the quality of connection of the providers. They must have the highest speed links among themselves and fast international connectivity. For these high-speed long distance lines there is a term "information highway" [19]. The speed rapidly increases due to more demanding multimedia and real audio and video transmissions realized on the net today. Only the high speed dedicated line connection ( broadband) would be sufficient for schools. Even households in developed countries more often use it and for schools it should be in commonplace. It not only enables more people to work at the same time, but also there is a possibility of running own network servers inside the school that are permanently on standby for teaching purposes and also help the school with its connection and presentation to the public. The use of Internet in education cannot be done spontaneously. So every school should work out a plan of ICT development in written form and keep with it.

4.3 Operation praxis

The organization of the operation within the school is important for the successful use of the Internet. In many cases there is a local network that enables the access to the Internet from any computer. Only the situation when every student and teacher can work on the Internet when needed is ideal. Every teacher should have his/her own computer and students that do not have one at home should be allowed to do the work at school also after teaching hours. Modern schools usually build libraries with computers for individual work of students with professional assistance. At some places the situation got that far that every student has an individual laptop to use. The current stage of development demands every classroom to be equipped with a computer and presentation facilities (data projector, interactive whiteboard). Obviously, every computer must have relevant software installed (word processors, spreadsheets, presentation programs, several specialized teaching tools as encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.).
A technocratic belief that computers and networks will make a better society. It ain't necessarily so. Our networks can be frustrating, expensive, unreliable connections that get in the way of useful work. It is an overpromoted, hollow world, devoid of warmth and human kindness. Clifford Stoll (astronomer, writer, leading authority on computer security): Silicon Snake Oil, 1995

There must be a specialized employee to look after the technology equipment at school the technology coordinator. He/she would not only be a network administrator, maintenance engineer, the collector of compulsory data for the authorities, an annual report printer, etc., but he/she would also assist the teachers with the educational use of ICT. This position deserves a professional person - often an IT teacher is in charge of it in expense of his/her teaching activities. At some bigger schools, there is a team of more people doing this job. The more liberal access to the Internet the students have, the higher is the risk that they would misuse the computers for undesirable activities. Therefore every school should have a set of clear and obligatory rules for the use of the Internet. These rules should define the purpose of ICT at school and also ethical standards of conduct on the Internet. The list should also include the rule that those students working on school assignments have higher priority to access the computers. There should be sanctions imposed for breaking these rules (e.g. denied access to the Internet). So that no one could claim that he/she doesn't know the rules, all the students should be required to sign the rules as a condition for obtaining the access rights. The contract should be co-signed by the parents of minors.

4.4 Access control

The possibility of accessing undesirable Internet materials from school computers is a rather controversial question. It is not easy to define exactly the categories that are undesirable. The opinions differ here. The situation varies from place to place depending on local conditions. Somewhere the children can be brought up towards taking responsible attitude to their conduct, at other places restrictions and orders must be used. In order to limit the access to unsuitable materials, usually the filters can be used. If the users could trust the authors of WWW pages, the self rating system would work. The idea is that the author labels all his/her pages according to contents. The Internet Content Rating Association (http://www.icra.org/) is dealing with this. But this kind of protection is not always sufficient. On the school level all data for Web browsers usually go through a proxy server, which decreases the loading of the Internet connection of school network, by recording all the accessed sites for next potential user. Here the list of all visited addresses could be maintained. So it is possible to find out which of the visited pages contain explicit matter and therefore they should be banned. In reality it looks like that the administrator is watching the list of visited addresses and, if the content is not suitable, he/she puts them on the black list. The children usually find it very entertaining to search for the sites that have not been filtered out so far. Professional commercial services can also be used for filtering. Usually the schools Internet providers offer this kind of service (e.g. Research Machines in Britain http://www.rm.com/). The advantage of this solution is that the network administrator is not bothered with checking the addresses, but looses any influence on the process. Another way of dealing with this problem is by installing special software on every machine (e.g. http://www.surfcontrol.com/, http://www.netnanny.com/ etc.). This solution is recommended mainly to parents for household use. Even the professionals are not able to find all the materials that should be filtered out in the ever so wide offer on the Internet. It also happens that suitable Web pages are put on the black list because they contain certain keywords. For example it happened to the site on breast cancer. The principle based on searching for defined keywords in order to expose some vulgar sites has also another disadvantage - the existence of multi-language contents. As the young generation is very skilled in using the ICT, it seems that it is not a big problem for them to bypass the barriers their parents and teachers impose. It may be evident for example from the server PeaceFire -

http://www.peacefire.org/. Still, there is a law in the USA prescribing the filters for schools and all computers with general public access. So, what would be the most suitable solution? Probably a combined one. Filtering is necessary especially for young children, so they wouldn't come across these materials by accident when searching for something else. There are also specialized directories and search engines that offer only sites suitable for children (e.g. http://www.yahooligans.com/). Family filter can be engaged at any advanced search devices or even browsers themselves. The only reliable solution is to pay attention to the children and their activities on the Internet. It does not mean to watch them all the time and prevent them from doing what they want, but to motivate them for such activities that are in accordance with educational goals, supervise them and take restrictive action only when it is absolutely needed. The same principle applies on both - the parents and the teachers. The source of additional information and the news about the EU rules in this field could be found for example in The Safer Internet Action Plan site (http://www.saferinternet.org/).

4.5 Experience from the world

The USA have been the world leader in the field of modern technology and science since the WWII. The rest of the world is trying to follow them. The same situation applies on educational technology as well. The U.S. government was the first one that took into account the scientific prognosis of the development of human kind towards Information Society and included the introduction of ICT to schools among its priorities. A breakthrough was the arrival of Bill Clinton to White House in the 1993. A plan to connect every American public school to Internet by the 2000 and have at most 5 pupils per one educational computer was adopted in the 1995. In March 1996 president Clinton and vice-president Gore supported the project Netdays and personally joined thousands of volunteers in wiring schools to the Internet. The goal was to connect as many school libraries and surrounding classrooms as possible. This action was very successful and started to take place annually throughout the whole country. The project Netdays was not an isolated action. Except the direct financing from the U.S. budget, there were and still are many programs and grant schemes financed by various foundations and private bodies. It seems that the 1995 plan was fulfilled. It turned out that the problem is much complicated than only stretching wires. Therefore the education of teachers is the highest priority in the sector of education in the USA nowadays.

There is one more American experience worth mentioning. It is the desire to lower the divide between different social areas in the ICT access (digital gap). The schools from poor regions and from the countryside have certain advantages in applying for the grants. A similar project was consequently adopted also in Europe. The European politicians have started The traditional "rationalist" conception of educational reform to realize very soon that it is vital to follow the involved producing a blueprint in development in the USA. The reason was mainly advance and then advancing arguments to economical, but also social. It is not hard to convincing persuade people that changing understand it as the computer literacy is essential the system would represent when applying for a job. So in the 1996 the improvement. European Parliament adopted the document Laurence Miller Learning in the information society - Action John (developmental psychologist): plan for a European education initiative. The aim Interpersonal Computing and was to recommend the member countries a suitable Technology, 1994 procedure for introducing the ICT into education on all levels. The attitude of each country was different, so the situation in the member countries varies until today. The first big European project reacting to the political demand commenced in the year 1996 was the Web for Schools. Financially, it was backed by the industrial development program in the field of information technologies ESPRIT (http://www.cordis.lu/esprit/). This initiative mainly dealt with interconnecting of about 150 European schools or local school networks, and also designing of educational materials. Today, there are hardly any traces of this project on the Web. In the year 1997, an event inspired by American model called Netd@ys took place. It was a part of the above mentioned EU project "Learning in the information society". In Europe it is not focused as much on connecting schools to the Internet, but on the application of the network technology itself. Since the year 1997 it takes place regularly every November (http://www.netdayseurope.org/). It is not surprising that it was mainly industry oriented program that initiated the official support for introducing the ICT to schools, as it actually started the development to this direction. But generally the educational programs took a lead later and, at the end of the 90's, the main sources of finances were concentrated into the project Socrates. Pilot Comenius Thematic Networks CoMuNet (http://www.xtec.es/comunet/) andPICT (http://www.europict.org/) loosely followed the Web for Schools. They also already finished their activity. The current Comenius Network COMP@CT (see 8.4)

is based on their outcomes. All these projects are mostly technically and organizationally composed. But the higher number of technologies introduced to schools calls for the appropriate application of the didactic aspect of their use. This is the field the ESPassociation deals in (more in chapter 8.3). Those states that took this initiative seriously and accepted it either on government or parliament levels have their own Action Plans for introducing the ICT into education. The Great Britain, Ireland, Finland, Denmark, or even Estonia seem to be most advanced. The up-to-date overview of the situation in this field is available on the Internet, e.g. at The European Union On-line server (http://europa.eu.int/). TheeLearning program (http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/education/elearning/) from March 2000 is the latest European initiative at the time of writing this text. Its main objective is to equip and train all the teachers in this field by the 2002. By the year 2003 all the basic school graduates should be computer literate. The main tool in implementing the EU strategies here are the project Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci and Youth. Their budgets have been increased by 30% to current 3.52 billion EUR in the term 2000-2006. In the mean time the entire world has started to pay attention to the technology education. Various international institutions such as OECD, UNESCO, The World Bank etc. are executing researches (more in chapter 9). This topic was also discussed at the G8 conference in Okinawa in July 2000. The adopted Charter on Global Information Society claims: "We are committed to provide all our citizens with an opportunity to nurture IT literacy and skills through education, lifelong learning and training."

In this place I would enter a little interjection. Please, note the way the Memetic theory perfectly fits in this field. This theory claims that there are some basic elements of thinking and culture - memes, as genes are the fundamental particles of biological life. These may be thoughts that manifest themselves in simple combination of words or even certain characteristic signs that attract our attention. Due to their simplicity the memes spread easily and could last a long time. In some cases it is possible to talk about "memetic infection". The branch of information technology is very rich on perceptible examples. The typical way they spread is that some authors of specialized articles, essays, studies, and grant applications overuse them on various levels. They seem to know very well what keywords are in fashion in order to succeed and be attractive. Thus, we often meet words like "globalisation", "information society", the at-sign "@" instead of some characters, "learning society", "digital gap", the letter "e" instead of an adjective electronic, etc., always in the direction of the current political wind.

5.1 Teaching machine

From what was mentioned above, it seems that the instructive way of applying technology in education is the easiest. The pupil is firmly controlled by a computer during such instruction process. The applications of this type originate in the behaviorist didactic theory. The desire to control all the sensual inputs of learners results in the drive towards creating as short curricular steps as possible. Within these short steps this control can be easily exercised. Typical example of such a concept is the programmed learning, which formerly started without computers. Every step is determined beforehand and no space for individual initiative is allowed here. The program shows what should be studied, then asks multiple-choice questions, and if this is correctly answered the program goes on to next subject matter. If the answer is incorrect, the program goes back to additional explanation. The basic part of computer application of programmed learning is called the triad. It consists of stimulus, reaction and system response. The stimulus is the basic explanation unit resulting in a situation demanding reaction from the user. This reaction could have a form of a direct answer or some other user interactivity in more modern applications (e.g. placing bone on a right place within the skeleton). The system responds to this activity of the user in a form of a notice on the performance and further progress. This is also called the feedback. In theory, all the subject matter prescribed by the curriculum could be programmed in this way. According to the supporters of this obsolete view, finally all the instruction process could be automated. First applications based on the theory of programmed learning were the teaching machines during the late 1960's. One of the best machines of this type was developed in the Czech Republic - Unitutor. It was not a real computer, but single purpose electronic equipment based on transistors and a screen. On every screen, there was an explaining text with a multiple-choice question at the end. According to the selection made by the user the program diverged into different directions. The information whether the answer was correct or not represented an immediate feedback. As these machines were rather complicated and ineffective, they didn't find much practical application. Only limited experiments on the basis of programmed learning were carried out on the mainframe computers during the 1970's. Many applications connected with the programmed learning emerged with the appearance of microcomputers and later personal computers in the 1980's. At first these were simple tests withmultiple-choice questions. We can still come across this software. They often start with login of the user. A flow of multiple-choice questions follows. The computer mostly informs the user about the correctness of the answers immediately after the selection is entered. There are points assigned for every answer. These points are usually shown on the display and the final score is saved for the use of teachers.

Some more sophisticated software of this kind can even choose questions and offer choices on random. The best solution is when there is much wider databank of questions and only a fraction of them is really used during testing. So the outcome is that every test is different. This limits the possibility of cheating. A record of longitudinal statistics of the question performance with other details is saved for the later use of the teacher. The use of the computers for examining only could not be sufficient and became the object of criticism in the middle of 80's. Therefore various units supplemented the scheme of programmed learning, where the user would have at least a small chance for individual initiative. An explanation based on the hypertext was added to the tests and, if needed, computer based exercises were used, based on, for example, animation. Whole lessons were built out of these units. And the lessons formed whole courses later. The progress of students was to be controlled depending on their results. The lesson of this kind could have the following form: After the login the student was given a pretest, which was to find out whether the student had the minimal required knowledge for the lesson. If he/she failed, he/she was not allowed to carry on and had to complement the knowledge before trying the pretest again. If the lesson was a part of a long-term course, the student was redirected to the place where the lacking information was located. After passing the pretest, an explanation of new subject matter followed. The student was free to roam within this section and could spend as much time as he/she wanted to. When he/she thought the subject matter was completely clear, he/she could carry on with topical exercises in order to reinforce the knowledge. A multi level help was offered on demand. So the information from the help could be modified according to the immediate needs. The student could also be redirected back to the explanation section. The last part of the lesson was the test. Due to the feedback the student had a chance of being informed gradually on his/her performance. At the end of each lesson the final evaluation took place. Some more sophisticated systems could even take into account various other details, e.g. the time spent on the lesson, the appropriateness of the path, the outcomes of exercises, the use of the help, etc.
What are computers, how are they being used? I watch as kids use thousand dollar machines as flash cards. Rote memory skills on software. Predicted questions with predicted answers. Now, flash cards are good. I learned Mandarin Chinese by using flash cards. My flash cards cost me about 50 cents to make. The ones students are using are about 50 dollars! Let's look at the

In the late 80's, there were several attempts to organize whole courses out of SUB TEXT of the situation. When I put a student in front of a computer to learn, such lessons on local school networks, what am I telling that student about where every student would have been learning? I am telling them, this is how you marked and controlled since the beginning learn. Alone. When I give a teacher or a parent some flash cards and I as teacher to the end. The system would record the or parent invest MY time in helping students' data and the route taken. Work a student learn, what am I saying about could be interrupted at any time and start education and the student. I'm saying that I CARE about you. That teaching has value. on the same place again later. The design That this is important stuff. When I put of courses of this type was extremely a child in front of a computer, what am difficult with the tools available in that I subtexting to the child? Please go hide. . . . I have something more important to do. time, expensive, and didn't deliver the I have something more important than you! desired results. Of course, such programs are affected by the drawbacks that bring Clifford Stoll (astronomer, writer, leading on computer security): lecture, about the instructive approach to authority Buffalo Arts Center, 1996 education. They leave only little space for the student's activity. The position of a teacher is even worse. His task is limited to controlling the technical equipment and to give an interpretation to the recorded results. The cases, where computer tests are appropriate, exist. But modern advance computer test cannot include only multiple-choice questions. However, if these are still used, they often offer more options such as e.g. more answers may be correct or even none. There are also other types of questions. A numerical type is used with the possible adjustment of the allowed deviation from the exact expected answer. The advancedtext entry (essay) type of question is an invaluable part of high performance modern tests. It is more difficult for both, the examinee and the author of the test. The program has to react appropriately on all the possible correct answers, expected partially correct answers and incorrect answers. A well-constructed text entry question enables to find out much more about the examinee and limits the possibility of coincidental correct answering. Virtually any application can be run on the Internet today. Because the instructive methods are easily programmable and there is a strong tradition in using them, we can also meet them here (more details in chapter 6.1). Within the current applications of distance learning, the computer supervision of the results is also implemented to a certain extend (see chapter 5.6). Let us have a look only at an example of Internet implementation of a simple knowledge test, which can be created by anyone.

The American server FunBrain (http://www.funbrain.com) is focused on the complex support of the instruction of pupils on the basic school level. A free access service called QuizLab is a part of this service. Any teacher can design a test on the basis of multiple choice, true/false or simple text entry questions (these cannot be combined). Many tests that have already been created using this tool are archived there and available for general use. All tests created by one teacher can be seen after entering a key word of choice. The teacher tells this key word to his/her pupils so they can get to the test after entering the name. The results of all the tests are available to the teacher on the server or may be delivered by E-mail on demand. This system is not able to choose questions on random or to randomly swap offered multiple-choice answers (in the time of writing of this text). The number of similar systems is expected to grow and the quality of these is expected to rise.

5.2. The source of information

As it is ever so easy to publish data on the Internet, the quantity rapidly grows and even today there is an unimaginable amount of information available. Nearly every organization has a WWW site; publishing of any private WWW pages is possible on public servers. In theory there is enough information on the net suitable for teaching purposes. The question is how to find it. It is easy, when you know the address of the page you want to visit. Every Internet user has several favorite pages and knows their addresses. So he/she simply inserts the address into the browser and that is it. The teachers usually know the address of their school, the address of their E-mail administrator, and also others - e.g. the directory of suitable local links to press, weather forecast, TV guides, list of cultural events, etc. Every teacher should also have a favorite and serious source of professional information. It may be the Ministry of Education, local school services provider, organization offering in-service training for teachers etc. There is no doubt that the European Schoolnet (http://www.eun.org/) is one of the prime sources of information for the teachers in Europe. We shall have the opportunity to explore this service later. The situation that the address of the desired information is not exactly clear occurs more often. In this case special Internet services and some skills are needed. The strategy of the search is not simple and differs according to the subject matter. In many cases it takes some patience, as the result is not seen straight away. It often happens that we come across various interesting links to something different than we were originally looking for. The loss of orientation is a common danger of hypertext systems even smaller then the Web. Back option (alt + left arrow) should not be forgotten. It usually enables us to leave the current page and go back to the original path of the search. Language skills, mainly the knowledge of English, are of a great

benefit for obtaining the proper information. Majority of pages on the Internet are in English. Also in non-English speaking countries the pages of international importance are in English versions as well. For instance you are looking for something where you do not only know an exact address, but also the subject of search cannot be defined straightforward. For example you would like to go to the cinema and you are not sure what you want to see and where. In this case you need a local cinemas guide. The same situation occurs when you are looking for the directory of schools, car-dealers, computer service agents, etc. For all these purposes you need something like a phone directory (Yellow Pages). There are many services of this kind on the Internet. But let us not imagine these as classical phone books of the past listing all the existing phone lines. Today the books like this cannot exists even in the field of telephony, as there are various providers, mobile phones companies, etc. The same situation applies on WWW pages. The existing directories work with databases of various topically categorized links to pages that are known to the administrators or the authors asked for their pages to be listed. This type of service is called generallydirectory. Here only the address with a brief description is available. Various directories differ in the policy of accepting the links to their databases. It depends on their range and focus. Different procedure is applied, for example, in the world directory YAHOO (http://www.yahoo.com/), and other education focused Education World (http://www.educationworld.com/regional/). For the teachers a source of inspiration may be found in special directories created by professionals. Only those links that have been explored and found worth mentioning are listed. Classical example of these is the site of a former American librarian - Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators (http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/). Especially not exactly highly paid teachers would appreciate directories of Internet services that are free of charge, such ashttp://www.thefreesite.com/. Everybody should be able to find the suitable directory for individual purposes in a short time. Most of the directories also enable the key word search within their database. It should be understood that these directories only work with information recorded in their databases (e.g. title of the page, brief description, and category). Therefore we cannot expect to find what is really written in those pages using this service. There is another kind of service that searches through the actual existing documents for the entered key word. These tools

An example of switching between directory and full-text search onhttp://directory.google.com/

are called full-text search engines (Search the Web option in the picture). The computer operating this service records as many WWW pages as possible. Although it may seem incredible, some high performance search engines store almost all the interesting content of the Web (the Google stores over 1 billion of pages). So the keyword can be found not only in the title of the page (there is no description in this case) but also through the whole content. That is why it is called the full-text search. As these two kinds of services are usually integrated today (such as the above exampled Google Directory -http://directory.google.com/), it is often hard to tell whether the search window is currently using the directory or the full-text. But we can tell by the result. The output of the full-text search for general key word usually consists of incredible number of links. We can try to illustrate the use of these search tools on the following example. For instance we would like to offer our students a source for an essay on "Thirty Years War" in Europe. At the beginning we have no idea where the appropriate materials could be located. Wars in general are not a common category of the directories, so we would not expect the Google Directory to have one (Home > Regional > Regions > Europe > Arts and Humanities > Humanities > History > By Time Period > 17th Century > Thirty Years' War). So we use the Google full-text search (http://www.google.com/), which is one of the most popular today, because it offers very good results. When entering the key word war the Google offers over 24 million links (see the picture). We are obviously not going to explore all of them. If we have a look only at the beginning of the list, it is clear, where the service is based.

Google result of searching for the key word "war"

So, instead of war we put in the whole expression - thirty years war. In this case, there are about 600 thousand links. It is because the engine searchers for all pages that include the given words no matter where. For example we could be directed to a page about a man, who is thirty years old and goes to war. Only when we put the expression into quotation marks - "thirty years war", the result significantly improves. Here we get about 19 thousand links. Now we probably start to pay attention to what has been found. Google tries to put the most relevant pages at the beginning of the list. But the number of links is still quite high. The best option would be to specify the search in more detail using the Advanced Search.

Google Advanced Search

If we are interested in the historical weapons of the Thirty Years War and don't want to have the word library in the text, the number of links drops down to 1400. Then we have to hope that the suitable links are really listed at the beginning of the list. Obviously not all the materials found are relevant. Sometimes we can tell from the short extract displayed on the search result screen, where the context in which the words are used may help us. But we can only be sure, if we actually open them. In this case the thorough check would take several hours. A crucial skill in searching for any information on the Internet is the art of clear specification what is desired and what is not. It is the only way to get to the goal in acceptable time. The results of only one engine search are not enough for the real search masters. They usually combine the output from more engines for perfection. Some specialized WWW services (e.g. http://www.metacrawler.com/) or locally installed programs (e.g.Copernic - http://www.copernic.com) enable this kind of professional search. It is advisable to read the help section of all these tools that tells us how to go on with the search in detail form. So, we can see that it is not always easy to find the relevant information. Above all, one can never be sure whether the source is trustworthy. Obviously there is a different value to the information on the page of serious scientific institution than on the page of some anonymous individual. Often several different sources have to be compared. It is advisable to evaluate all the materials found. The following criteria should be followed:author, organization, reason of

publishing (conference, special event, etc.), year of publishing. If we would like to recommend the sources to our students, we should observe also other features: level of use of foreign language, extensive use of technical terms in the material, relevance for the topic, etc. In some complicated cases a specialist - modern kind of librarian should be consulted. We can expect that the future development of WWW will lead towards more comfortable acquisition of relevant data. The stage when computers will be able to independently analyze the data has still not been reached. But today we can already come across WWW systems where the users can adjust the appearance and content of the pages. They are called the portals. They originate in a combination of directories and search engines. Today their services have been enhanced. They often include free E-mail accounts, discussion forums, chat, WWW publishing, virtual malls, etc. They keep their users informed about everything that could be interesting for them. The relevant information of the chosen kind appears straight away in the personal browser window. Some of them specialize on education or even teachers. As an example you can see TeAch-nology (http://www.teach-nology.com/) of the Teachnology, Inc. with interesting "The Best on the Web for Teachers" service. The proper way is to build educational portals under the support of the local authority, e.g. The Birmingham Grid for Learning - http://www.bgfl.org/. The following example shows my private page at the BBC server (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/mybbc/mybbc), where I set the kind of information I was interested in. Such an adjusted page may be used as a home page for your browser.

BBC portal

If there is certain information that cannot be found by means of common tools, there is also a service co-financed by the American government at the Syracuse University AskERIC (http://ericir.syr.edu/). Besides searching in huge database of educational sources and the access to various school archives, it enables also to ask a question (in English of course). The reply is sent by E-mail within two days. There is a network of experts and librarians - specialists on the Internet cooperating with the service. They are able to retrieve almost any information from the field of education. Obviously, this service is primarily focused on American schools, but they are ready to answer any sensible question. Before you ask, have a look at the archive of previously asked questions (Question Archive) and try to solve your problem by the common search engines.

AskERIC home page

The process of searching for information calls for patience and single-mindedness. Unfortunately most of Czech pupils lack these qualities. The students are often used to being given a clear instruction on what to do or what to learn by heart (to memorize by repeating without understanding). So it may be expected that a teacher trying to implement a constructive way of using the Internet in Education would have certain problems. The worst situation will probably occur with some children that are used to the instructive approach and really lack single-mindedness. These will probably give up the search after several attempts with the excuse that nothing relevant can be found. The teacher has to be able to help and, above all, he/she must be sure that the information is really available somewhere. Plagiarism is another danger. If the students find some picture or text, they usually think that the work has been done. They simply copy everything and claim it as a result of their work. They often even do not read the text. So it is up to the teacher to tell if the text has not been literally stolen from somewhere. There are even some specialized Internet services (paid) serving this purpose, (e.g. http://www.plagiarism.org/).
The worst images are of people who are overloaded with information which they don't know what to do with, have no sense of what is relevant and what is irrelevant, people who become

A more important task is to make sure that the students can process the information information junkies. and transform it to knowledge with relevant Neil Postman (professor, University contexts. It can be achieved by e.g. presentation to of New York): Visions of Cyberspace the whole class and following discussion. But, (interview), 1995 under the term presentation, we should not understand a mere reading of some text of unknown origin. According to my own experience, the computer supported presentation, or presentation from the students' own notes is a problem for many of our students. But it is one of the possible ways to achieve the desired goal. Another question is the existence of huge amount of information the children should be protected from. It is a complicated one and we will get to it later.

5.3 Communication tool

Another interesting possibility offered by Internet is the communication among users. The main service in this field is the electronic mail known as E-mail. This service has been a basic part of computer networks from the beginning. The access to this service is generally bound to the acquisition of an account (access rights) at some computer connected to the Internet. The user usually gets E-mail box and an address together with the account. In most cases meeting some formal conditions is required and it cannot be anonymous. Employees of many companies dealing on the net, teachers and often even students get E-mail belong to this category. E-mail account may be also gained anonymously on the Web. It means that any fictive name and address can be filled in the application questionnaire there. The most favorite general free E-mail services arehttp://www.hotmail.com, http://www.yahoo.com/ and also many others. We will not pay attention to the technical aspect of E-mailing. There are many publications and courses in this field. We should only remember that the teacher should at least be able to guess the origin and some credibility of the sender by the address. He/she should be able to not only send the letter, but also reply to it, forward it or send the same letter to more than one recipient. It is necessary to know how to add a file as an attachment to a message, set the appropriate coding, keep the address book and archive important messages. He/she has to know about the problems of virus spreading and never run or open unknown or unchecked files. On the other hand he/she should not panic after some catastrophic news about viruses. But certain awareness is desirable. By negligence the user can create many serious problems to many other users as well.

The key idea is that students actively construct their own knowledge; the mind of the student mediates input from the outside world to determine what the student will learn. Learning is active mental work, not passive reception of teaching. In this work other people play an important role by providing support, challenging thinking, and serving as coaches or models, but the student is the key to learning. Anita E. Woolfolk (professor, The Ohio State University): Educational Psychology, Allyn and Bacon, 1993

We will focus on the use of this tool in education. The appropriate use of E-mail is one of the means of cooperation of the class with the environment outside of the school. It could improve the motivation of the students and secure the social contact with other personalities that can be a valuable source of information and wisdom. For example some important scientists could contribute to relevant topic or schoolmates from any part of the world may be contacted.

There is one advantage of the E-mail to the Web. It can be used even when the connection to the Internet is not perfect. In theory, the letters can be read and written when the computer is disconnected. At the moment of establishing the connection the outgoing and incoming mail is quickly exchanged and the connection may be closed again. So it means that E-mail is suitable even for those schools that are connected to the Internet by a standard phone line and pay for the time on the net. Another important criterion is the existence of students' addresses. If they do not have them, the teacher has to organize the-mail exchange. If they do, they can work independently. But there is the danger ofmisconduct and unethical behavior. Therefore every student should be told the rules of using the service before being granted the access. The most important rules are:

Clearly summarize the contents of your message in the subject line. Avoid using inappropriate and offensive language. Keep your messages short, clear, and focused. Do review messages before you send them out. Don't send a message when you're angry. Avoid sending E-mails to large numbers of people (spam). Don't send attached files unless you have a very good reason and only if the recipient is expecting them. Respect other people's privacy. Check your mail regularly and, whenever possible, respond to people who write to you.
There are three ways

Of course it is not an easy task, but it is up to the teachers to teach our create such an environment in the class where meeting these we children: rules would be natural. They obviously have to act as an The first is by example. E-mail and mobile phone messages (SMS) are example; becoming an everyday feature. It is the cheapest way of The second is by example; communication. Many of the college students would not The third is by imagine a contact with their families and friends without the example. electronic means of communication. The children around the Schweitzer world are looking for penpals, in English nowadays Albert (philosopher, doctor called keypals. and missioner) (e.g. http://www.epals.com/, http://www.teaching.com/keypal s/). It is often the case that whole classes of children are exchanging mail on thousands of miles distance. We will get back to the various ways of using the E-mail in education further on. The users of E-mail also create various voluntary interest groups - conferences, where they discuss common topics. A conference is in fact a simple server program, which includes its own E-mail address and a list of all the members. It forwards all the received mail to the participants. As it often happens that the conferences are misused for advertising, the publication is mostly limited to the members only. Therefore the members may be screened at some conferences before being added to the list. The rules of subscription differ from case to case. There are many international conferences focused on educational technology. EDTECH is one of the longest running and prestigious ones. Relevant information including the archive of all contributions is on the Web at the site http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~edweb/. If you decide to publish in any conference, you should pay attention to what you want to say as many people are going to read it. It has happened several times that even an experienced user submitted a letter originally intended as a personal reply. This situation sometimes turns out quite funny, but often there are some odd cases when people get to know something that was not meant to be made public. Therefore it is strongly advisable to check the address of the recipient before sending every Email letter. When communicating with some experienced users, we may come across some language conventions, acronyms and signs that may be hard to understand. Some of the basic ones express feelings or emotions e.g.:
:-) Happy :-( Sad :-@ Screaming 8-) User wears glasses :-/ Skeptical :-D Laughing

;-) Wink

:-o Surprised

More details and other acronyms and signs may be found, for example, at http://www.netlingo.com/. For setting up an individual private conference (e.g. for some educational project), it can be done with the assistance of Web. For instance, the Yahoo Groups http://groups.yahoo.com/, EUN Communitieshttp://community.eun.org/ (see 8.2) or Australian NINEMSN Communities http://communities.ninemsn.co m.au/ are worth trying.
High-tech is the latest educational panacea. First, it was open classrooms, then new math, then the ditching of phonics. Now, everybody jumps on the bandwagon and says sitting kids in front of computers will solve all our problems. When it doesn't, of course, we will all wake up to find they haven't learned the basics. Malkin Dare (founding president of the Organization for Quality Education, Canada), 1996

A chat is a very special kind of communication. It is an Internet application that enables users to interact in real time (online). Most of these applications are based on the WWW environment. The users choose the chat site they are interested in, log in with their name, or more often a nickname, and they can communicate with all the people currently connected. The advantage is that the messages written on the keyboard appear on other screens straight away. Especially the children like it. It should be stressed that the potential educational benefit of most of these chats is rather doubtful. Of course this environment may be used for seeking assistance with solving some problem. But the communication often turns out into something undesirable and vain. The quality of discussion often degrades much more if too many people participate.

An example of a chat on the Pedagonet server

But there are also exceptions. The discussions on this platform should be well prepared beforehand, e.g. within the framework of a certain project. There was, for instance, a very nice discussion in Czech Republic between the children in hospitals and children at schools within the project Children like us in 1999. Open discussions with famous personalities (politicians, actors, sport personalities, etc.) are also useful. Discussions with various scientists and scholars are a common part of the majority of scientific projects (e.g. NASA Quest - http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/). Chat is often used for establishing an online contact between distant schools within many common educational projects. Activities of this kind are worth organizing. They create collaborative learning environment and enable to share information as well as emotions. An additional benefit could be in increasing the writing skills of students. We will get back to this topic in the chapter 7 describing projects.

5.4 Teachers' helper

There is no doubt about the benefits of the Internet for teachers. The teachers have to look for new information to improve their work. So they can be in touch with their colleagues from around the world, or sign up to conferences and receive even tens of potentially interesting messages per day. But there is one serious problem here. Under the normal circumstances the teachers usually have no time for these activities. Half

of their working hours are spent in the classrooms, and then there are other duties as supervising in school canteens or on the corridors, attending staff-meetings, correcting assignments and, above all, preparing for further lessons. For this reason, if the Internet is to be used sensibly, there is the need for some kind of assistance service such as the AskEric or European Schoolnet. There are many other services dedicated especially to teachers. The goal of these services should be, apart from providing information, also saving the time of As long as techno-minded policymakers blame the teachers, teachers. They should be able to search for and ignore the teachers' larger role in organize the available Internet information and the schools, and then expect provide an access to relevant materials. The them to rectify the problem, their dream of computerized simplest service of this kind is the above classrooms will never come to mentioned WWW directories. Some folders pass. focused on education may be found in any public Cuban (professor of general Internet directory. But these are often not Larry education, Stanford University), The sufficient. More sophisticated and comprehensive Washington Post, October 27 1996 are the directories placed at specialized school servers. Our department at the Faculty of Education of the Charles University is running quite a good service for Czech teachers of this kind, which is a part of the server called Teachers' Helper (for the present only in Czech). It is referred to as a "Linker" (http://www.spomocnik.cz/framesp01.html). Similar services are also at other educational servers, for example the EUN eSchoolnet (http://www.eschoolnet.org/) in the folder Resources, the Ferl (http://ferl.becta.org.uk/) owned by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA), or the Canadian Schoolnet (http://www.schoolnet.ca/home/e/resources/). Obviously there are more of them. Nearly every country has a similar service dedicated to teachers. The teachers would appreciate the most the methodological assistance. It could be in the form of Ask an Expert service (e.g. http://www.classroom.com/community/experts/) or lesson plans and work sheets for students, including various suitable Internet links and additional materials. The Lesson Plans Page (http://www.lessonplanspage.com/) or Collaborative Lesson Archive (http://zubov.atmos.uiuc.edu/CLA/) is worth trying here. There are many other databases of ready-made lessons. A further step is made by services that intend to create a complex educational environment with ready-made tools for preparing Web lessons with commentaries, links, and evaluation possibilities on the Internet. Such materials are often called the Webquest. Here is the simple definition made by Kathy Schrock: Webquest is an inquiry oriented activity in which some or all of the information that students interact

with comes from resources on the Internet. [60] Before designing a correct Webquest material, it is important to study the methodology of Bernie Dodge - the godfather of this Internet application (Additional online study material 9 in chapter 12). The special tool for designing the Webquests in the form of virtual trips Tourmaker could serve the teachers with designing intentions. It is located on the Field Trips site (http://www.field-trips.org/). The Tourmaker program helps teachers to create their own lessons in a form of a trip and publish them at any appropriate WWW server. Only a limited trial version of this software is free. The field trips' creators form a community; they support each other, and share the results of their work with others. The library of created lessons is opened also to general public. If we take a closer look at the lessons of this type, we will find out that they more-less help to guide students. Their main advantage is that the suitable Internet materials or links don't have to be sought. Therefore the potential danger of loosing orientation is limited, but at the expense of freedom of choosing students' own path. Although Larry Cuban (professor of there are many individual tasks, it is still not the true education, Stanford University), How teachers constructive style of instruction. A well-prepared taught, 1984 cooperative project would fulfill the expectations of the constructive approach better. We will get to this matter later in the Telefieldtrips category of the Internet projects in chapter 7.2.4.
Occupational ethos of teaching ... breeds conservatism and resistance to change in institutional practice.

We shouldn't forget the most modern type of service, which is the so-called Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE). This environment is usually designed in the form of virtual building (e.g. school), where there are rooms and halls for various purposes. Some of them, e.g. reception, lecture hall, library, etc., serve as public premises. Other rooms (offices, lounges) are private. All the rooms are furnished and some of them also have special equipment such as whiteboards for writing messages, various decorations and signs. Users can move freely within this virtual environment, they can communicate with each other in the form of sending messages or a chat. It is possible to visit a library, organize various meetings, and attend interesting lectures of important professionals. They can also set up and furnish their own room, to which they can invite visitors. For the access to the environment a general browser enabling Java Compiler should be sufficient. The perfection will be reached only when the networks are fast enough to carry the sound and video pictures in the real time, which is probably not too far ahead. In the picture below, there is one of these experimental places on the Web TAPPED IN, dedicated primarily to teachers (http://www.tappedin.org). More details are in Additional online study material 12 Multi User Virtual Environment and its possible use in Education (chapter 12).

A map of TAPPED IN with a dialogue window in the bottom part

5.5 Students' helper

It is clear that one of the most important goals in preparing students for life in the world that is stuffed with information must be the ability to search and evaluate the relevant pieces of information. The students have to learn to work with the E-mail and use the general searching tools. In many cases it is useful when there is no need for the general search of the Internet when doing the assigned tasks. It lowers the danger of taking undesirable paths. Therefore the recommended sources of information are an important part of all lesson plans where the use of Internet is expected. Some of the suitable resources for students are universal. These are the encyclopedias, databases, archives, museums, etc. In its possibilities the Internet offers much wider choice than even the largest collection of CD-ROMs. There is no point in presenting examples of individual sites here. The directories with potentially useful links for students would be probably more sufficient. The following addresses are worth trying:http://www.kidskonnect.com/, http://www.infoplease.com/, http://www.mrdowl ing.com/, http://www.biblio.usherb.ca/internet/encyclo.htm.

There are also specialized services dedicated directly to the students similar to those that we described when speaking about teachers' resources above. Students may need assistance when they cannot find what they are looking for. The English-speaking students can use various ask-reply services. Some of the general ones work on the system that anybody can ask any question and everyone can answer it ( Ask Jeeves http://www.askjeeves.com/). Obviously these answers should be carefully examined. Other specialized services, such as the AskERIC mentioned in the teachers' section above, cooperate with a network of librarians and various experts, which answer the questions of students and assist them, e.g. Ask An Expert http://www.askanexpert.com/, All Experts http://www.allexperts.com/, Ask Dr. Mathhttp://forum.swarthmore.edu/dr.math/, Ask-AScientist http://www.madsci.org/, Ask Dr. Universe http://www.wsu.edu/DrUniverse/). There are even several servers specialized in assisting with doing the home assignments (e.g. http://www.schoolwork.org/ or http://school.discovery.com/homeworkhelp/bjpin chbeck/). An exceptional source of materials is the archive of the international prestigious competition ThinkQuest(http://www.thinkquest.org/). It is a very interesting event, where the teams of students compete in designing WWW pages suitable for education. It is described in chapter 7.2.3. Other, and for most students more natural way of getting the necessary advice is to ask a friend. The students have their Internet clubs, where they meet, chat and help each other. Not all of the places of this kind would please a teacher. The activities taking place there have rarely anything in common with school. Most often they consult problems with playing their computer games, there are very popular lonelyhearts services, information on drugs spread there and also admiration of various extremist groups may be unfortunately noticed. The forbidden fruit always tastes the best, as we all know. It is sad, but it is true that if someone tried to solve some problem connected to school activities, he/she would be laughed out. Therefore the way of using the Internet by children both at school and at home should be carefully observed. Action should be taken when necessary. An environment for creative and sensible work helps here much more than mere restrictions. It is always the best to pay personal attention to the children. All our children should know that it is the chat where they can meet various deviants. They should never give anyone any hint that could lead to establishing their real identity - sending a photo, telling name, home or school address, telephone number, etc. And the last thing they could do would be to arrange a meeting with an unknown person from there. Some experimental multipurpose virtual environments could be useful also for students. Apart from common services as messaging and chat, they enable to create

a personal space of individual appearance and function. The most progressive one seems to be the American commercial server Active Worlds (http://www.activeworlds.com/), which, under the name EduVerse offered its 3D space to non-commercial educational institutions. The students meet here and build common premises that often serve as virtual schools for any visitor. In the following picture, there is an example of a classroom for teaching the literature. By clicking on the pictures on the wall we can access the relevant materials. EduVerse is using a special client program that integrates the 3D environment, where the visitors roam as virtual persons - avatars, with the WWW browser (the right part) and a dialogue window (in the middle on the bottom). On the left hand side, there is a list of existing worlds that are possible to visit. We can expect that the development of these environments will lead to the use of the tools of virtual reality, which will make the multidimensional simulation almost perfect. One day it will be possible to talk to other visitors and even shake their hands.

Active Worlds Eduverse virtual school

5.6 Distance learning

There are many reasons that support the view that there must be some guidance in education. The more students are interested in learning certain skill and the more concrete the subjects of learning are, the easier it is to get to the goal. As there are many people willing to learn something (e.g. the re-qualification of the unemployed or teachers learning IT), certain more or less instructive methods may be used here. It also means that there is a demand for certain kind of education on the market. Rapid development of the Internet enables to introduce learning in virtual distance forms. As it We don't even call our teachers 'teachers'. We call them 'learning is everyone's responsibility for his/her education, consultants'. And we don't like to we can expect that the one who wants to learn be called a 'school'. We think that something will be able to find someone who would is a throwback to an archaic age of corralling young people and provide the best instruction on the Internet. If it imposing a curriculum on them. really happened, it would probably influence the higher forms of education because the Michael Maser (co-founder of the High Learning Community, students of older age seem to understand the need Virtual a nonprofit private school in for learning more and can work more Vancouver), 1996 independently than pupils of lower grades. Some people claim that it could be the end of classical "stone" universities. The representatives of universities seem to take this threat seriously. There are some schools (higher and secondary) that already offer the full distance programs on the Internet. But nearly all the universities and some secondary schools are introducing some complementary distance forms of education. The courses designed for adult learning seem to have the brightest future, e.g. the requalification courses mentioned above. One of the most important features of distance learning is the possibility to study at any chosen time and wherever there is an access to the Internet. The learners can choose their own pace of progress. Even those students that would not be able to keep up at normal schools have a chance here. The best ones can spend only minimal time on the course and do something else. According to Glenn Russel, there are two basic models for distance learning [57]:
Independent (asynchronous) Learning is unscheduled. Students can access and interact with materials whenever they wish. There are no chat or Synchronous There are scheduled online meetings with other students, teachers and tutors, which can include live chats and

videoconferencing facilities, but email may be used. Students can access lectures or broadcasts, usually on the Web. This model can also be referred to as "asynchronous", because it does not rely on real-time, direct communication between students and teachers. The opportunity for interaction is often restricted.

videoconferencing. This requires collaboration, and communication at agreed times. With this method, there are greater opportunities for socialization, but reduced flexibility because 24-hour access is rarely possible.

It turns out that the combined independent and synchronous forms of distance education may be the best solution. Anyone can choose from the wide choice of distance learning programs the one that suits the best. In fact there is some global competition here that allows only the best ones to remain in the business. There is no doubt that all the institutions (not only universities) willing to remain on the market pay increased attention to the fast development in this field. Basically, it is determined by the technical level and commercial availability ofsystems of distance learning. The number of the truly successful ones is not high. Let us have a look at some of them in more detail. The tools for designing distance courses originate from the systems of long-term guidance of the work of students, described in the chapter 5.1. Teaching Machine. Explanation of subject matter, often as WWW hypertext pages or documents offered to download is easy to be realized by those means. The tools for designing the tests are included. These tools seem to be significant for the quality of the whole system. These systems also include tools for management of individual students' rights of access to the courses. Another important feature introduced by the Internet is the possibility of asynchronous and synchronous communication among students and with the instructor. So they can consult each other, share information, ask questions, etc. Most often the work of the students is controlled by the work time plan that has to be fulfilled within given time range - e.g. learn certain subject matter, do exercises or tests, submit assignments, etc. The following example shows the distance course created in the environment of Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com). This system is fully accessible by means of WWW browser and its great advantage is that it is free of charge for the trial non-commercial usage. The disadvantage is that the user is dependent on the far away server, where all the data are stored.

The instructor's Control Panel on the BlackBoard

The Control Panel in the picture enables the instructor to design a course and to change its content. He/she can make pages with certain content (e.g. an explanation) by means of simple integrated page editor. The instructor can adjust the access rights for individual students or leave the course open. It is also possible to send various notices, mail and open discussions on different topics. He/she may also hand out assignments with predefined solving options (e.g. test). The tests may be composed from different types of questions (multiple-choice, text entry, etc.). When the test is done, it is automatically evaluated and the results are recorded in the database. So the students can see only their own results and the instructor can compare all of them. The author of the course can also adjust the environment, such as the appearance of icons, the students' tools, etc. Another top-class professional systems of distance learning is Lotus Learning Space (http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/tabs/learnspace/). The disadvantage of this system is that very expensive environment of Lotus Notes must be used as a base. TopClass (http://www.wbtsystems.com) has a long tradition, but it needs the not exactly cheap Oracle database. Another system is the Virtual-U (http://virtualu.cs.sfu.ca), which has been developed within the framework of the research project of Canadian Simon Fraser University. The fully Web oriented system Fronter (http://fronter.info/) is used mostly in Scandinavian countries.

The WebCT(http://www.webct.com) is probably the most popular among these systems for its price, availability, and applicability.

The overview of results in WebCT

The picture above shows the WebCT output of test results of all the students that signed up for the course. As you can see, the instructor gets complete information. He/she knows who passed a certain test and, in case re-sit is allowed, the number of attempts and the total score gained. Also a complete individual solution with all the inserted answers may be seen any time. So the instructor has a complete control over what is going on in the course. One function of the systems of distance learning is suitable for all kinds of schools. It is the processing of the results of tests and assignments. In future, these records could be kept solely on computers and not only for the purpose of distance courses. The advantage is that the outputs are safely stored and accessible to all competent persons (teachers, school management, students). Also the parents of students can follow the results of their children better and more accurately, if they wish so. This situation will become real only when there is a computer in every classroom. It is a task for the school information systems, with the universal normative enabling compatibility.

But we should not forget to mention the drawbacks of the distance form of learning. Electronic communication, no matter how advanced (e.g. videoconferences) can never replace the natural contact with schoolmates and a teacher. If the strictly Phipps, Ronald; Merisotis, controlled form of learning with set terms of Jamie (researchers): What's assignments prevails, it may result in stress and, the Difference? A Review of Contemporary Research on thus, loss of motivation. It is impossible to reflect the Effectiveness of Distance current happenings, toestablish real Learning in Higher Education. relationship among students. In general, this form does The Institute for Higher Education Policy, 1999 not have the means for upbringing of children in wider sense. For these reasons it will probably never be fully applied in the lower grades of basic schools. In the higher grades the application of distance forms may be considered. The use of only some distance features on complementary basis for common higher presence form of learning is recommended by several professional enquiries [51]. As there are no serious obstacles on the university level, the distance features are becoming almost compulsory here.
It seems clear that technology cannot replace the human factor in higher education.

There are always some students that find the virtual school environment and distance communication more suitable and have better results than in ordinary classroom. So, besides the advantages described above (availability of materials and the control of the processes) there is one important reason for introducing some distance features to the teaching plans of higher education. It contributes to creating a variable learning environment for students of different qualities and offers to choose the most suitable way of learning (see chapter 3.5).

5.7 Artificial intelligence

Computers, as we know, are developing quickly. Their parameters are currently progressing in the pace determined by so-called Moor's Law that claims that they double every two years (e.g. memory, capacity, speed). Therefore the abilities of computer-based systems improve as well. It seems that they will soon get closer to the human abilities. But these are difficult to compare.
The success of educational technologies is judged of how well they imitated what good teachers do.

The main problem of intelligence is in its general definition. As even the human intelligence has not been sufficiently defined so far, it is not easy to state what an artificial intelligence actually is. The self-centered approach (see Philosophy chapter - 3.1) of Alan Turing and other scientists of cybernetics in the 1950's claims that the artificial intelligence should be as near to the human one as possible. Alan Turing is known for his test of computer intelligence [67]. This test is based on an experiment where a chosen person asks questions using keyboard and receives answers on the screen. The task is to determine whether the answering subject is a machine or another human being (http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html).
R. E. Clark: Confounding in educational computing research, Journal of Educational Computing Research, 1985

Wide range of computer applications is based on simulating the human behavior. These are, for example, the expert systems that act as a specialist in the given field. The medical diagnostic programs are typical for this group. They ask patient questions and try to determine the diagnosis from the received answers. But the number of possible questions is limited to the number of actual symptoms of the diseases. Similar situation occurs with programs for translating between languages based on the descriptive analysis of them. The computer assisted learning systems (CAL) that have been developed at many Of course no computer could understand anything real -- or even what a number is places since the 1980's have tried to if forced to single ways to deal with them. replace the teacher and control the But neither could a child or philosopher. So activities of students. The aim here was to such concerns are not about computers at all, but about our foolish quest for react appropriately (in an intelligent way) meanings that stand by themselves, to every situation the student could have outside any context. Our questions about been found in. In fact it meant that this thinking machines should really be questions about our own minds. application had to anticipate all the possible reactions of the student when Marvin Minsky (researcher, professor MIT): AI working with the program. So it was an Magazine, vol. 3 no. 4, Fall 1982 intention to create a kind of an artificial teacher. But human beings are over too complicated to be in all their properties incorporated into one computer program with all the necessary aspects. The instruction process is in reality much more complicated then diagnosing a disease or a mechanical translation from one language to another one (even here the current computers are far from perfection). So the applications trying to directly control the work of a student have not got much further then to what was described in the chapter 5.1 Teaching Machine.

Current applications of this kind are called Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) and are typically based on three separate software modules - expert model, student model, and instructor model (Ong & Ramachandran [43]). The expert model represents subject matter expertise and provides the ITS with knowledge of what is teaching. The student model represents what the user does and doesn't know. This information lets the ITS know who is teaching. The instructor model enables the ITS to know how to teach by encoding instructional strategies used via the system user interface. These systems are very expensive and they are still - on their current level of intelligence - applicable only if someone genuinely wants to learn the given matter. The Artificial Intelligence branch develops in The evolutionary process of technology seeks to improve several directions. Many of its representatives capabilities in an exponential fashion. have understood for some time that Innovators seek to improve things by an artificial intelligence of a machine does multiples. Innovation is multiplicative, not additive. Technology, like any not have to be a simulation of human evolutionary process, builds on itself. intelligence [71]. Computers, which would This aspect will continue to accelerate potentially become a brain of these machines, when the technology itself takes full control of its own progression. have different qualities than people. Even today they outperform humans in the Ray Kurzweil (inventor and innovator in exactness and speed of various computing and the field of ICT): The Age of Spiritual other calculations. Due to the progress made in Machines. Viking, New York, 1998 the research of human brain, there have been several computer programs trying to work in the similar way -neuron nets. They differ from ordinary programs in one serious aspect. They are able to modify themselves, or teach themselves. The robots equipped with the "brains" with neuron net of approx. thousands of neurons are on the level of intelligence of insects now. The development in this field progresses very quickly forward and is often kept secret for its potential military application. The capacity of computer memory increases and is nearly similar, in the number of bytes to the number of neurons of the human brain. The artificial intelligence evolves more rapidly within the virtual environment then the evolution of animals in nature progresses. The properties of a new generation can be tested on a computer basically immediately. It may be true that the computers will not for a long time (or may be even never) reach human competences in abstract thinking or artistic feeling. The question is that if they will not be soon generally more able then humans even without artistic abilities. Some people may think that there cannot be any problem as we can always turn the machines off. It is not that simple. This solution is possible only if people keep the control over all machines - robots. But it is not quite possible even today. We are moving towards the situation, when certain products are only competitive, if they are

developed completely by intelligent machines (e.g. microelectronics). The time is coming, when a driver or a pilot is only a potential source of mistakes and accidents, so it will be safer, if the driving is left to more exact robots. The application of artificial intelligence in the military sector is the most dangerous one. The armament race forces the countries to develop more and more sophisticated weapons. The need for a technological superiority and limiting potential loss of life pushes this development into construction of autonomous intelligent weapons capable of making independent decisions in times of crisis. It is clear that the protection against the possibility of switching off must be a priority of such machines. Unfortunately the hopes that the competition and armament races would stop don't seem to be real. So what is the position of education and Internet here? The interconnecting of intelligent machines enables thedecentralization of decision-making. This solution is still more effective to the one when a central computer makes the decisions. The network also allows the machines to share information about what is going to happen in certain circumstances. People are doing quite the same using the Internet and media. The Kevin Warwick (British scientist): BBC significant difference is that the machinesalways interwiev - Back to the Future, 1999 receive information and never forget anything as long they have memory available. This is where humans lack behind. Maybe some solution will be found in connecting human brain and computer memory. The result would be a hybrid (cyborg), not a real human being [8].
I honestly believe that intelligent machines in this century are going to outstrip humans in many ways and take over from us effectively. But the mid ground, the cyborg ground, part human, part machine, appears to be a possible way forward for humans to evolve.

We can't expect high investments into using the artificial intelligence in education so far. The goal and possible efficiency of such kind of education would have to be specified in the first place. Then we could start to think about its application on wider scale. It is a witch's circle. The only reason for trying it would be to improve general abilities of humans. But, again, we would need a straightforward definition of intelligence. More over, education is in reality still not the highest priority of people. So we have to go on with single-purpose application focused on one given topic or subject. The idea of loosing the dominant position on the Earth is something quite unimaginable to most people. We have to admit that even the scientists are not united here. Let us hope that the catastrophic hypothesis will not be fulfilled. Hopefully, this threat will force the people to keep the development of intelligent robots in their hands and activate the thinking of people to such an extend that they will be able to solve the global problems.

Those who may be interested can find more information at these addresses:

MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory - http://www.ai.mit.edu/ Ai Research Project - http://www.a-i.com/ The homepage of Ray Kurzweil - http://www.kurzweilai.net/ The homepage of Kevin Warwick - http://www.kevinwarwick.com/ The homepage of Hans Moravec - http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/ The homepage of Rodney A. Brooks - http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/brooks/

Internet at home

The way our children use the Internet depends on their interests. And what they are interested in depends on the environment they live in. There are many influences. One of the most important ones is the function of the family and the climate at home. It is a sad fact that many students have better technology equipment at home than the one at school. The home connection to the Internet is not an exception. Sometimes the children are allowed to use their parents' machines, but often they have their own. More and more parents believe that a computer is an important teaching aid. We can only agree to it, but attention should be paid to what the children actually do with it. It is true that even playing games and competing for better hardware with mates contribute to gaining some computer skills, but it is not enough. If a computer is to be used as a teaching aid, certain guidance from the parents and teachers is needed. The ideal situation would be if the teachers and parents agreed on a certain strategy. The teachers should know who has a computer at home and what tasks can be done by it. This fact can then be taken into account when handing out assignments and projects. Also the parents would get the feeling that an investment to the computer is not a waste of money. Some parents do not trust the school and teach their children at home. In these cases the Internet can also significantly help to prevent the children's isolation.
However, when it comes to the use of new technology, children are authorities on a topic of importance and value to adults for the first time in history ... Openness involves being vulnerable, but N Geners have such high self-esteem that they are willing to share their ideas without fear of rejection. It remains to be seen to what extent the free expression tail will wag the bureaucratic dog. Don Tapscott (American author, researcher, consultant, speaker and authority on Digital

Young generation has much closer relationship to the ICT than their Economy), Growing Up Digital - The Rise of the Net Generation. McGraw-Hill, 1997 parents. Those young people with an access to the computers learn to use them spontaneously. If they have the Internet connection, they learn to use it quite soon. They form a kind of Internet community there in order to solve their problems and they do not ask the parents and teachers for advice anymore. But it is important to know, what they focus on. No matter whether their intentions are good or not, there is certainly a change in intergenerational relationships. There has always been a shift towards growing self-confidence of the whole humankind through all stages of the development. But it is the first case in history when children dominate over their parents in some skills (N Generation). It gives them self-confidence and openness. The families have to deal with this situation. There should not be a loss of contact between the children and their parents. The parents should not be afraid to work with a computer together with the children. They have no chance of keeping up with their technologically skilled children, but they should not be ashamed of learning something new. The ability of handling a computer is not the main point here, the parents should try to steer the attention of their child in the right direction on the Internet. Even the grandparents could play the role of understanding facilitators. Some protective measures, described in the chapter 4.4, should be introduced especially with young children. But it should not result in fighting these measures, as they would become contra-productive.

 The Copernicus Education Gateway - the service connecting school with home

One more thing should also be mentioned here. The Internet can improve the contact between the parents and the school (e.g. The Copernicus Education Gateway - http://schoolnotes.com/ - in the picture above). The parents cannot only watch the activities of the school on the Web. They can often observe the work of their own children and see the performance results in important assignments. There is also the possibility of active participation on the work of the school. The parents would be able to discuss any problem with the teacher straight away. They can help the children with their work on various tasks in the field of their specialization. There is a chance to contact other parents and influence, if needed, the vital decisions of the school management. There is a wide range of cases when the Internet can be beneficial in maintaining the contact between the school and the parents. But it will not cause a miracle. If some parents are not genuinely interested, the Internet will not change them.

Global environment

It is true that the Internet makes insignificant where the students study, whether it is their home, school, or any other place. As the enthusiasts mentioned in the Historical Background (chapter 2), who thought that one invention would change the school totally, some people think the same about the Internet today. Several of them go that far that they claim the Internet and the distance

education would replace our current schools, which would no longer be needed. These opinions generally originate in the idea that education is like goods traded on the global market of the Internet and, therefore, they think the global laws of economics are also applicable here. The typical example of this opinion stream is the theory of well-known American visionary Lewis Perelman. He compares the global education to the Japanese production model called Kanban [50]. It is based on such a way of managing the production so only those goods demanded on the market are manufactured. According to this model only what is actually needed (on demand) and when it is needed (just in time) should be taught. On the Internet, such a global competitive environment, where everybody is able to choose the best teacher through the virtual distance form, exists. The propagators of the demand-supply model of education believe that the current school was becoming obsolete (also already mentioned professor Seymour Papert used to be one of them). Perelman likes to compare the current school system to the destiny of Maginot line at the beginning of the World War II. The traditional schools may be simply bypassed in the same way as it happened to the ever so strong fortification line. In the so-called Information The first major social impact of the HL (HyperLearning) revolution is to make society this opinion has some validity. schooling obsolete. You don't have There is so much information available to go to a professor in a classroom to today that it is impossible for one get expert "know-how" or training. The expertise and learning are immediately individual to embrace it all. It is available "on demand" or "just in time." important to be able to solve one particular problem at the time it occurs. Don Tapscott (American author, consultant, speaker and The development in many disciplines researcher, authority on Digital Economy), Growing Up is so fast that it will soon become Digital - The Rise of the Net Generation. impossible for the school to train McGraw-Hill, 1997 students completely for future occupation. The employers will require their staff to learn new skills many times during lifetime. In case of loosing a job, there are probably going to be only positions in different branches available. These are the reasons that support the need for the education "on demand" and "just in time". Therefore some politicians, especially the European ones, are speaking about the "Learning Society" or "eLearning" more often. The question is how to secure that the potential employee will be able and interested in learning. It cannot be solved only by access to information or existence of distance courses. The interest in exploring new things may be

natural, but it has to be supported by the entire environment. It is mainly the task of the families, but unfortunately they often decline in fulfilling it. The undesirable influence of the society on young people even multiplied by the Internet interactions could be fatal. Therefore the role of the school in forming attitudes will remain intact, if not bigger. But the future school will be slightly different to the one we used to know.

Project Based Learning

The project method is one of the most sophisticated forms of the modern concept of education. It enables the active involvement of the students as well as practicing teamwork with cross-curricular links. It is difficult to define it exactly as it may have various forms and it often overlaps to other activities that have different names - global or holistic education, open learning, experience-pedagogy, etc. Project is an assigned task for which the students have theoretical background and certain effort is needed to solve it. It could be individual, but more useful is to create teams of solvers, where each member of the team will take care of one particular part. For example one student can collect the data, other one can prepare the outputs and someone else can be in charge of the processing (in connection to the Gardner's different types of intelligence - chapter 3.3). Everybody should contribute to the final solution by some individual work. The presentation of the results at least to the whole class, even better to wide public (by means of the Web) is an important part. If the project is to be really based on crosscurricular links, the teachers designing the Research proves that the most effective human learning project usually also create teams. So, for actually takes place in the example, the teacher of the main subject context of real-life experience, cooperates with the teacher of IT, providing not in classrooms. computers are needed. Lewis J. Perelman (founder and The use of the ICT is an important part of president of Kanbrain): Would many projects. Processing of text, pictures, you send your kid to a Soviet Wired Digital Inc., numbers, and even the final presentations of collective?, 1997 results cannot be done without a computer. But the Internet is not only a platform for getting information and presenting the results of the school work. It may be used for other purposes as well. If we want to use the Internet within the social context of education, we need to take advantage of its possibility to connect people. This is what the teachers are often focused on when preparing projects where the children from often very distant schools are to collaborate. There are many projects using Internet for this purpose available.

The number of available Internet projects grows as the awareness spreads among teachers. If we are to understand this field of problems, we need to introduce certain criteria for classification. Judi Harris from the University of Texas (http://virtual-architecture.wm.edu/, [21], [22]) came up with the classification of the projects' types, which is a base of the "main activity" axis in the following 3D interpretation of the projects' taxonomy. The reason for using the 3D interpretation is the necessity to express the fact that there are really many activities that can be included under the term "project". It is often difficult to exactly determine the place of a given project according to these criteria. Moreover the project could have different form in its stages and the judgments are always individual. What is easy for one person may be difficult for another one. It is important to realize that there are very easy projects with strictly limited topic as well as some difficult really crosscurricular ones very near a real scientific research. It is obvious that we cannot start with the latter ones without appropriate knowledge and experience.

3D taxonomy of educational projects

There can be more dimensions describing the real project instructional activities as well as there are more criteria for classification (e.g. the time needed, age of students, necessary expenses, involvement of experts, etc.). There is no need to complicate this point any longer. The aim is to help the

teacher to understand the complexity of projects methods environment and to be able to find the most suitable project for the students before the actual realization commences (more in chapter 7.4). Let us have a look at some real projects realized by means of the Internet. We may get the best notion from the description of several practical cases. A good teacher will be able to see how to realize these projects in local conditions, adjust them, or just take inspiration from them. As this field of problems is in the center of our attention, we will dedicate a whole following chapter to it.
Children learn by trying to do something, by failing, and by being told about or by copying some new behavior that has better results. This perspective is founded on the simple but central insight that children are trying to do something rather than to know something. In other words, they are learning by doing. Roger C. Schank (director of The Institute for the Learning Sciences, Northwestern University, New Jersey): Engines for Educators, 1995

We may consider as proven today that the ICT influence the current development of educational methods. Although the use of the technology does not necessarily have to lead towards positive changes in the educational results, there is no doubt that there is a certain impact. This is the reason why this study material mainly focuses on the forms of this impact and the possible risks accompanying it. The results show that the constructive approach of ICT involvement is currently dominating. But it would be a mistake to believe that the development of educational technology is the only cause for using these methods. Actually, they have been, in some way, used since ancient times and later developed into, for example, so called alternative schools (which can function well even without any technology). If the schools on higher level of technological equipment tend more towards constructive methods, it may be also caused by the fact that they have wider access to information. So they could easily find out about new trends in the theory of education and other branches of science and try to implement them more then others (remember the definition of ideal learning organizations by the OECD/CERI research - 9.2).
Computer is an "amplifier," because it encourages both

So, where should the real positive impact of the ICT be found? Its real effect is in accelerating and amplifying the instructional processes. It is not only able to influence the constructive or instructive methods, but it can also amplify any good or bad method, which is not quite the same. The way of using the technology Alan Lesgold (professor of depends, above all, on the knowledge, skills, psychology, University of and talent of teachersand parents. Their task is to Pittsburgh), 1997 foster this implementation in the desired direction. In case they don't succeed, the ICT could support the use of unsuitable methods resulting in the negative impact on the development of the whole human civilization.
enlightened study practices and thoughtless ones. There's a real risk, though, that the thoughtless practices will dominate, slowly dumbing down huge numbers of tomorrow's adults.

For that reason it is important for the professionals, teachers, parents, politicians, and the whole public to pay attention to this matter. All of them should try to force the most suitable incorporation of the ICT into the education process. There are many possible ways - some of them mentioned in this study material - of doing it, but one thing should not be forgotten. And that is that the role of education in forming general attitudes of the youth is important. The global environment of the Internet can help to see the world from a certain detached view and in contexts, which would be hard to imagine otherwise. Nobody knows what the world of next generations would be like. Our future may be quite uncertain, if we do not succeed in changing the egoistic, selfish attitudes of individuals to the society. Our civilization should be rather seen from a more holistic point of view of place of humans in the universe. No matter how strange it may seem, but even for selfish interest of the survival of human race and its sustainable development, there is not much of a choice. Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
Herbert George Wells (writer): A Short History of the World, 1922