In 1995, "What's on the Web?," was written with the goal of scanning the Web for what might be useful to teachers and students. The "might be useful" was not individual stellar Web sites, but a broader contextual framework to cyberspace: if not exactly defining the universe, I hoped to at least mark out that some things are galaxies, a few constellations, and many are stars radiating their own special light. Books entitled such things as "Explore the Unleashed World Wide Web in 7 Days for Dummies/Educators" list tens of thousands of "Killer Web sites," implicitly suggesting that once you get a handle on these you'll have "done" the Web. But this is akin to getting access to the Library of Congress and being handed a piece of paper listing someone's Top Ten Favorite Books. Oh yes, and the library's collection doubles in size every three months. So, it's not the titles that are needed, it's the structure, the organization, the forest for the trees.

It's a lot like what you're already doing.

It's unlike anything you've ever done before.

Say what? After exploring the Web from a teacher's perspective, the above paired truths sang out their accuracy. Getting a take on the stuff of the Web proved comforting in that basically the Internet offers lots of information and some learning experiences. Doesn't this sound like the familiar terra firma of the classroom teacher? You might ask then, "What's so big about cyberspace?" "Big" has a lot to do with it. Teachers are frequently bound by the magazines they subscribe to, the television shows they videotape, the books available in their library, the perspectives filtered through textbooks, etc. With the Web you get the world.

Explore the Zen of Teaching with the Web

Our attempt to classify the content and function of Web sites that would be useful to teachers defined seven main categories. If you'd like to find out more about each, turn to the earlier article, otherwise click, surf, and cogitate your way through the table below until the Zen truth is revealed to you.

If you came here for the right answer, all I can say is: Gotcha! Like religion, politics, and favorite foods, the Internet is large enough to accommodate most everyone's taste, bias, and natural inclination. It seems to have something for everybody. This is not to say it has everything for everybody. It is not an encyclopedia (although encyclopedia are available there). It is not abundant in its resources for non-reading elementary students (although there are plenty of images). It is not the storehouse for archived historical documents (yet). Conversely, it's spotty in its range and attitude toward posting the work of contemporary artists (let's be advocates for a sensible Fair Use policy for education). But the Web (just out of toddlerhood in human years) continues to grow exponentially, becoming more robust and sophisticated in what seem like six month increments. So if something you want or need is lacking, either put it up yourself, or wait a few months and check again. Now that I've made a case for there being no one right answer to what makes the Web so great compared to traditional information sources or learning experiences, it's too tempting not to at least offer some fairly obvious advantages afforded learners through the Web.

Basically, the Web-based content and experiences look a lot like what traditionally grows in classrooms. But in other ways the fruit borne of these trees tastes unlike anything educators have chanced to sample before. In other words, educators will recognize old friends like references, resources and lessons, but the breadth, depth, immediacy, passion, and interactivity available in the Web-based brethren open up an entirely new way to educate.

Browsing the Internet garden brings forth specimens that blossom with potential:

it's rich - Blue Web'n

it's immediate - Washington Post

it's passionate - Rainforest Action Network

it's clever - Barbie's Incomplete History of Art

it's funny - The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project

it's interactive - Design Paradise

it's contemporary - Yahoo!'s Picks of the Week

It's relevant - CNN's Daily Almanac

it's authentic - Nonprofit Prophets

So the suggestion is, as you search for Web sites, don't look for the online equivalent of your textbook or handouts (though they may exist), look for the sparks that create insights, the contrasts that excite problem solving, the bells and whistles that motivate, the passion that inspires. Needless to say, if you are new to the Web, it's necessary for you to surf, stumble, search, and lurch your way to finding your own understanding of the Web. It would be a shame to inflict the Internet on students as just one more structured, assigned, have-to dictated by the teacher. Along these lines, the next section makes a case for shifting the teacher's sphere of influence in the orbit of the classroom.

Question: If the basic categories of the learning universe are the same, but they gain the potentials of immediacy, relevance, interactivity, authenticity, etc. through Internet access, how does the teacher's relative position in the learning alignment change?

In other words, when the teacher is the source of the information, the learning path tends to be teacher-to-learner, sometimes skipping the critical process of learning along the way. When the source of information, interaction, opinion, imagery, etc. is other than the teacher - i.e., the Internet and its netizens - what is the teacher now supposed to do? Every few years a term pops up that no one's heard of, but that within six months has become a regular and even tired part of the teaching vernacular. Remember the first time you heard "paradigm shift?" Within months, the metaphor of "thinking out of the box" had gone from little considered, if not unknown, to a standard assumption about what (more) teachers should do.

Last fall, I heard a term three times in two days in three different cities. Disintermediation. Like paradigm shift, disintermediation comes to education from the business world (author's uncontroled soapbox jab: When will the learning community get its gods right?). An example is the easiest way to understand both the concept and implications of disintermediation. Suppose you have two bookstores, one is at the mall and the other is online. Let's say the online version sells books for less (even with shipping costs factored in), has a far greater selection, and is available 24 hours a day without leaving your home. The question arises, "What value does the actual mall-based bookstore offer that the Web-based version does not? This is not a rhetorical question. And answers will vary. Sometimes people don't know what they are looking for and they want to browse the aisles, read some pages, maybe ask a clerk for help or suggestions. Maybe there are latt&eacutes and over-stuffed chairs. Maybe there's the chance to make acquaintance with other (single?) booklovers? Regardless, the mall-based bookstores have to contend with the new competitor who has taken out (dis) a middle man (intermediary) between the book and the buyer. The point for educators is clear: if more information and expertise might be available to learners via the Internet (Web sites, E-mail correspondence, listservs, etc.), what value do teachers add to students' education? Again, this is not a rhetorical question. And answers can vary along with teachers' strengths, personalities, philosophies, etc. But the question remains.

Many years before the Web, educational theories and models began to champion a learner-centered focus in which students take greater responsibility for what goes on in their own minds. Cognitive psychology has been persuasive in arguing that the expert learner's rich fabric of meaning (AKA schema) doesn't come from acquiring a single strand of knowledge, but from weaving together relationships among topics into a complex and synthetic whole. Similarly, constructivism suggests that truly comprehensive understanding of a complex topic comes from learners stitching together the facts, relationships, perspectives, variations, and non-examples from an array of contextually rich (not "text usually limited") inputs. In fact, my personal experience was one of on-going frustration as I tried to implement cog psych and constructivist strategies with the limited resources available pre-Web. Now with the depth and breadth of the Internet becoming more and more accessible to more learners, the marriage of technology with learning seems assured after their lengthy, off-again on-again, courtship.
So rather than view disintermediation as a threat, the power of the Internet has liberated teachers to move from the industrial Age of assembly line learning to an Information / Communication Age where they can no longer sphincter the firehose flow of information shooting through our society. So we get to take on the roles that have been suggested by the learner-centered strategies: facilitator, guide-on-the-side, mentor, coach, etc. After all, we've taken the educational psychology courses and thought about the learning theories, so let's add the human, inspiring, adaptive value that we can bring to make this embarrassment of riches that is the Internet truly valuable to learners.

So if we teachers are not the source of information, what other value do we add to support students? There seem to be three main areas: creating a learning environment, shaping Web-based activities, and hands-on facilitation while students are in the learning process. The remainder of this article will focus on the second aspect, the only one that is exclusively related to integrating the Web into classroom learning. The other two aspects (creating a learning community and in-process facilitation) are well-treated in the literature on student-centered instruction.

Remember the premise that the Internet is an embarrassment of riches that's next to worthless without an educator. If this statement seems filled with too much boosterism, perhaps pointing to a few non-examples of how technology is ab-used will make the case. Perhaps you too have seen technology used as a "Lesson Plan in a Can:" rolling a two hour Hollywood movie with little or no tie-in to learning activities, letting students play computer games divorced from other classroom studies, surfing the Net, or online chatting. It's a little surprising that teachers who wouldn't dream of sending students to the library without a learning task and who would never sanction class time for students to pass notes, do see surfing and chatting as somehow inherently educational just because they involve the Internet. This is a natural response to a new technology. People need to gather to see the latest thing, aren't sure what it's for, and tend to use it in traditional ways. Enough people (and many students from home!) have spent this time and are now ready to see what this new technology will actually do to increase student learning.

What follows is one fairly comprehensive strategy for integrating the incredible power of the Internet with student learning. The strategy offers an easy entry place for newcomers to the Internet as well as more sophisticated activities for advanced users. There are two main phases to the strategy are:

• Harvesting the Web's abundance
• Shaping activities related to learning goals

The chart below outlines the decisions that would guide users toward a particular format of Web-based learning.