This dissertation is a consideration of the way that the Internet is being used in British education at present and suggests alternative modes and models which could be applied to the problem of raising learning standards. These modes and models are drawn from two key areas - which are both examined in Parts 2 and 3.
Part 2 presents the concept of learning and the Internet in terms of classic communication theory, using particularly Berlo’s S-R-R model to explain the learning process and how it fits with the Internet (also discussing the uses of behaviourist models). This section also looks at the concept of personal space within cyberspace.
Part 3 looks at how a young but sophisticated audience is already using the Internet for educational and other purposes; the nature of those other purposes (especially communication) is analysed, and the concept of communities being created both on-line and in a new hybrid off/on-line form is discussed. The issue of edutainment versus communication is considered.
Suggestions for future development of using the Internet in education are made in the conclusion.
Part 2: Learning paradigms An examination of some Communication Models analysing learning
In exploring learning strategies, it is useful to be familiar with the commonest versions of communication models relating to how people learn.
We have already, in the Introduction, considered how the "bull’s-eye" concept of communication is being applied to the introduction of the National Learning Grid, but this is radically at odds with the way that learning is usually perceived to occur. A fair better model for explaining the process is Berlo’s S-R-R model :
Berlo’s S-R-R Model of the Formation of Habit Strength, 1960
Image from the Cultural Communication
Media Studies Page
maintained by Mick Underwood
Here, we can see the Interpreter as being the person who is on the receiving end of the learning process. No longer is the situation that of Laswell’s "bulls-eye", where any information is meekly gleaned. Now a complex set of condition is observed for learning to take place. To follow this through, a stimulus must exist that will initiate the learning process - where a stimulus is any event that an individual is capable of perceiving. To take a simple example, it could consist of being given a web address to look at by a teacher. This process will reach the Decoder (i.e. the interpreting student) and be interpreted., and then encoded into some form of response, whether overt or covert. In the teaching process, a teacher will generally require an overt response, whether it takes the form of completed homework, a question answered in class, or seeing a student correctly downloading a page from the Web. Ultimately, within the education system, the response will be tested by examination or tests of some kind. It is only when the response is repeated by the same stimuli over a period of time is learning recognised as having taken place - and this is the function of many aspects of education - evoking this overt response. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that many learning processes are covert - and none the less effective for that!
At this point, behaviourist theory enters the communication process with the concept of reward. This again might take simple or complex forms - ranging from the "gold star" stuck on the primary school text book, to the award of a degree for a far higher standard of response¹! Whether one accepts or rejects behaviourism as a way of analysing human behaviour, it is undoubtedly true that speedy gratification by reward does enhance the learning process, whether it comes in the form of a word of praise or a certificate.
Related to this idea of reward is the concept of reinforcement. No learning process can be guaranteed, it is argued, unless the process is re-enforced, and the response to stimuli becomes a habit. Indeed, so fundamental is this to the whole process that the very name of Berlo’s model - Model of the Formation of Habit Strength - reflects this. Indeed, there is an analysis of five key ways which should be present to bring about this vital reinforcement in order to create the habit: through the frequency of rewarded repetition; the isolation of the stimulus-response relationship; amount of the reward; time delay between response and reward; and effort required to make the response - where the lower the level of effort required occasions the greater level of reinforcement.
Some of these areas can be clearly seen in working with the Internet, but others - crucially - are not. Indeed, it is in this area of reinforcement where the dichotomy between training in the use of IT skills and using the web as a learning tool becomes strongest. For while it may be easy to reinforce the learning of skills - i.e. the training component of the drive to develop the National Learning Grid - the ability to reinforce the use of the web as a learning tool is far more complex. If we look at each of the defined areas in turn, this dichotomy becomes even more dramatic.
For it is clear that some of the reinforcement areas can be fulfilled in using the web as a learning tool. Using the web, for example, as a research tool can bring fairly instant returns, once students have been instructed in the best ways of achieving this - such as the use of search engines. Nevertheless, there are problems here; there may be equipment failures or problems with downloading (band-width for example) that may impede the free flow of information. It is a cliché that students who are initially scared of or excessively impressed by new technologies rapidly reach a state where they become impatient of the slowness of the tools they are using. At the same time, after being initially impressed by the sheer amount of information, students then become dis-enchanted when whatever they require is not instantly available and accessible. All of these elements may be regarded as constituting a noise source that can interrupt smooth communication (as demonstrated by Shannon and Weaver’s model²), and thus create a time delay that frustrates reinforcement.
Similarly, the question of the amount of reward also seems afflicted by the law of diminishing returns. It might be possible to establish a pattern of people’s experiences in first "surfing" the web; at first they tend to be impressed by the amount of information available, regardless of design or even content. Secondly, they will look for design or added features - such as multimedia elements like animation of sound. However, these seem to pall fairly quickly - and skilled web designers clearly take this on board - patterned wallpapers rapidly went the way of blinking text, while Java continues to develop to create more and more subtle effects. Thus the actual act of surfing becomes proportionally less of a reward in itself, and in a learning context, this needs to be monitored and addressed.
Two elements of reinforcement, however, can be used with advantage in using the Internet as a learning tool. These are the frequency of reward, and the isolation of the stimulus-response.
The former can be achieved with relative ease by a minimal amount of training (in the use of search engines) and research by the teacher or whoever is guiding the learning process. For while it can be immensely frustrating and defeating for the learning process to search for redundant sites, to gather much needed information can be immensely rewarding for students - who will then frequently go on to gather additional information in the hope of gaining the reward of praise from their instructor and thanks and interest from their peers.
The isolation aspect of reinforcement is, however, extremely strong within the use of the Internet. This is not to suggest that the user of a computer is isolated - very far from it - but the physical orientation and posture does increase a sense of isolation. Rather than being in a classroom environment, where everyone is either looking in the same direction - or looking inward around a central table, students will be focusing on a computer screen, whether individually or as part of a small group. This will orientate them away from the group, whereas in most learning environments they will be focused towards or as a part of the group. This in itself is a radical restructuring of the learning environment and differs even from the tendency to separate for project work as opposed to whole class teaching, in that these type of classroom separations have created smaller, separate focuses rather than individuated workstations.
These individuated focuses, of course, rapidly become perceived as personal
space. The question of personal space and the Internet is a fascinating one,
with many commentators exploring the idea of occupying space in cyberspace. The
idea of "writing space" expressed by Bolter (Writing Space: The
Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing, Jay David Bolter, pub.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), has been explored and developed in a
variety of ways as in Randal Woodland’s discussion of how specifically gay
spaces have been constructed on the web. In his essay Queer Spaces, Modem
Boys, and Pagan Statues: Gay/Lesbian Identity and the Construction of
Cyberspace³, Woodland has an instructive anecdote about how people
perceive cyberspace as an actual entity:
One evening I was logged on to LambdaMOO10 , the original system of this
kind. I was in one of the public spaces the lawn in front of the large
abandoned mansion that is the central architectural feature of LambdaMOO where
many people came and went on their way to other places in the MOO. One passerby
asked about the pink triangle that I was "wearing" as part of my
self-description; I explained that the symbol originated as a Nazi
concentration camp badge and that it signified gay rights. Though my new
acquaintance immediately made it clear that he was straight and had a steady
girlfriend, he seemed intrigued by what I said; once I confirmed that I was
gay, he had a number of questions he wanted to ask about homosexuality, some
fairly explicit. Drawing on my experience talking to psychology classes and
community groups over the years, I answered as best I could, as his questions
and my answers got more and more graphic. My clear sense of him at the time was
that his curiosity had no ulterior motive; nor did my responses: in other
words, this was a conversation about sex, rather than a sexually charged
conversation. Since our conversation took place in an area with a fair amount
of traffic, unsuspecting passersby might inadvertently eavesdrop on our
conversation. Mindful of a central principle of netiquett that one should not
subject other users to unwelcome explicit language, I began feeling that we
should move. I explained this to my new acquaintance, and asked, with as little
sense of cliché as I could muster, if he wanted to come back to my room.
He said no.
Now this "move" that I suggested would simply have meant that we were
reading information (the room description) from a different section of the
LambdaMOO database in Palo Alto and that the text we were producing was no
longer accessible to other users, but the real life implications of that
invitation, translated by my interlocutor into "real life" terms,
were too much for him to deal with. He did agree, much as he would have in real
life, I think, to move to a more secluded part of this public park so that we
wouldn't disturb other users. We had reached a curious compromise. Our
discourse seemed to me inappropriate for the public space of the front lawn;
the spatial implications of "going back to my room" suggested to him
a discourse he found threatening. Yet both of us understood that spatial
descriptions and appropriate discourse were linked in this particular virtual
world.
Teachers operating within physical space will find, and perhaps should
encourage, students to seek out secure spaces in cyberspace from which to
operate, even within the classroom. As Woodland says:
Spatial metaphors are an important clue about the different "safe"
cyber-spaces that have been established.12 It is important that this should not
be neglected as not only the sense of isolation (in its most positive form) but
also the notion of reward will operate most forcefully when the students feels
a sense of security from which to operate.
This security does not only come from knowledge and skill in using the technologies, but also from the creation of a definite safe space. It is no co-incidence that net technology makes such as play with the word "home" - being the name not only for the site designed by the user, but also the chosen first page in a browser, to which a user who is lost or confused may return for security. Indeed, it is this idea that Howard Rheingold explores in his influential book, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (pub. Addison-Wesley, 1993), looking at a variety of electronic genres, including billboards, MOOs - especially educational MOOs - and chat programs (following Thomas Erickson’s concept that different forms of electronic media should be considered as separate genre: Social Interaction on the Net: Virtual Community as Participatory Genre, pub. in Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences January 6th - 10th, Maui, Hawaii.
Finally, we need to look at the question of how effort can be used as a reinforcement in the learning process. How much effort is put into any task has to be balanced against the expectation of reward. This element can be demonstrated by reference to Schramm’s Fraction of Selection model, which, in turn, is based on Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort - in other word that, all other things being equal, human behaviour will lead people to select the option that involves minimum effort:
Schramm’s Fraction of Selection
Image from the Cultural Communication
Media Studies Page
maintained by Mick Underwood
Here it becomes clear that, the more likely the reward is to be greater than the effort expanded, the more probable it is that the subject will select that pattern of behaviour (or to respond to any particular stimulus).
However, we now come up against a crucial point; if we are to be able to make most effective use of the Internet as a valuable part of the learning process, in order to be able to create a suitable pattern of stimulus and reward, and in order to understand how effort will be defined, we need to look more closely at how a key group - young people - are using the Internet at the moment.
¹ Mick Underwood, on his excellent Cultural Communication Media Studies Page gives the following amusing example in his discussion of Berlo’s model of what can happen when a reward system is not sufficiently thought through: "We find it being used in simple educational computer programs of the 'drill and practice' type, too. When the child gets the right response, a smiley face appears on the screen and a jingle is played. In the early days of such games, programmers often devoted a lot of time to elaborate 'punishments' for the wrong response, e.g. Chopin's funeral march together with a face sticking its tongue out or a complex and very noisy explosion of the whole screen. Children were often so delighted with what they perceived as a reward rather than a punishment, that they pretty soon learnt the wrong answers."
²Shannon and Weaver’s model, 1949, follows the basic "bull’s-eye" pattern, but demonstrates a failure in communication, when a noise source interrupts:
Shannon and Weaver’s Model
Image from the Cultural Communication
Media Studies Page
maintained by Mick Underwood
In this model, the noise source that interrupts is generally seen as being one of three forms: physical or mechanical noise (as when equipment fails or operates slowly); semantic noise (when there is a failure to understand - a page that downloaded in html code rather than WYSIWYG, for example, would create semantic noise for many people viewing the site); and effectiveness noise - where the message is clearly seen and understood but not acted upon - people’s methods of navigating sites in defiance of instructions they have been given could frequently be perceived as the result of this type of noise.
³ Essay online. Randal Woodland directs the Writing Program at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, where he is Assistant Professor of Compo-sition and Rhetoric. He received his Ph.D from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has taught at UCLA Writing Programs. With Jacqueline Berke, he is the co-author of Twenty Questions for the Writer, Sixth Edition (Harcourt Brace). His online identity, Quentin (or Quent), situates him between Quentin Crisp and Quentin Compson.