September 1997 — Features

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The Boulder Valley Internet Project: Lessons Learned

  • "In the very beginning it took me three months to figure out e-mail. I mean literally, how do I do this and that? Now it seems so natural for the kids. They can do whatever they do on Netscape. It has opened up so many doors."
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    Trialability, or "the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis"[1], contributed to adoption of the innovation by teachers and students alike.

  • "there is no control, no predictability. If you donít find what you are looking for, the skill is to go back. Can I refine my keyword search? There are some pre-sorting and management skills for bookmarking so that once the kids find a site, they donít have to spend an hour tomorrow finding that site again."
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    However, the project was not without its unintended side effects. Students could easily download sections of Web pages verbatim, cite them in more or less cavalier fashion, and hand them in as their own original work.

  • "We still donít have good ways for kids to document their resources, so now the district is saying, ëmaybe we need to get together.í"
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    Teachers now had to contend with the problem of tracking down the original sources and verifying their authenticity -- often a time-consuming task. They came up with some rather novel solutions that required student performance as well as products. Could the student retrace his/her steps and find the original source? Could the student prove that he/she could actually carry out the procedures documented in their paper, such as calculating elapsed time for various dog teams in the Iditarod race? As student meta-skills increased with their use of the Internet, their teachersí assessment procedures had to change as well. It was a learning procedure for all parties concerned.

    One of the most innovative members of the school at which we conducted the embedded case study enlisted about a dozen multi-age students to join a new Web-based science course geared toward student-generated questions and inquiry learning. Students used the Web not only for accessing information; they also contacted astronauts, Jason Project oceanographic researchers, explorers, and other experts. Building knowledge with their distant colleagues and their own classmates, they created their own Jason Project Web Page and designed a set of projects that were used by the Denver Natural History Museum.