Internet and Education - General considerations

The setting

Like every new technological development also the Internet is accompanied by very euphoric, in addition, by extremely pessimistic estimates.

If today politicians speaks of the possibilities of the new media, they often turn out in swarms. To Computers and Internet a role is attributed, that the future of society, education system, school and learning dramatically would change. Above all learning with Multimedia is emphasized thereby, because thus everything would go better faster and more economically.

But one knows: If politicians talk about New Media it is as if teenagers speak about sex: everybody talks about it, but hardly someone has experience.

The new media is seen as capable of very much: Classrooms merge into open learning workshops, in which complex learning worlds for autonomous learning processes are created. Co-operation and creativity develop through the Internet, that is a place, which offers new possibilities for language contacts and for the language use at least.

The core terms on the proponent side are:

Autonomy co-operation creativity.

On the other hand sceptical people criticize the isolation of the Learner, the old-manner design of the offered material and are afraid, that effects occur, that are similiar to the language-laboratories: much money for nothing.

So far it could not be proven that the medium Computer educates in a particular way or makes stupid in a particular way. Even the fear, that reality will disappear out of the childhood when usinf the PC, that connections to reality will be lost, that computers lead to an illusory liberty and that the children will become aggressive is far from being based on empiric data or applied research.

As is the case for all media it is for Computers as well: it is crucial, when, where, how and how much one uses the PC. The question is, which influence we can to take as pedagogues on this process and how we can reflect, which is done into our life via the penetration of the Internet.