This column is reprinted from the Technology department of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (JAAL). It contains the following sections:

• Author's Message
• Issue of the Month
• Portraying Yourself on the Web
• Literacy Web Page of the Month
• Interpretations
• Glossary
• References

About 15 years ago I spent some time in Alaska working with Andee Rubin, Carol Barnhart, and teachers in village schools. We wanted to see whether a computer system with word processing, e-mail, a database, a writing planner, and other tools could be used to help students improve their reading and writing. I remember presenting this program (Quill) to the local school board in the tiny village of Shungnak one evening.

When the chair of the board asked us what the program could do, I explained that their students could learn about people all around the world by communicating through e-mail. Electronic communication would open up vast opportunities to learn about the world and other cultures. The chair listened thoughtfully, paused to reflect, and then asked, “That is good, but can our children also use these tools to tell the rest of the world about themselves?” He was intrigued to think about using computers and networking to learn about the world, but students using the same tools to teach the world about themselves was far more exciting.

This desire to teach about oneself, as well as to learn and to express one's ideas, feelings, and values, is at the heart of the computer experience for many adolescents. They do this through chat rooms, which for many have replaced the telephone as a means of daily communication; through e-mail; and through multiuser games now percolating through the Internet.

The diversity and richness of adolescent life is also portrayed through personal web pages. This month, the Portraying Yourself on the Web section offers a small compendium of examples of this means of self-expression. You can easily find many more such pages. One way is to search the web using as the search keys “about me” and “years old.” You'll discover an incredibly rich set of pages, each one revealing and impressive in its own way.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

What are the best resources for learning? In The School and Society, Dewey (1915/1956) characterized the “impulses” of the child as the true resources of the school. These include the impulses to communicate, construct, inquire, and express oneself. The impulse to communicate derives from the human need to participate in social worlds, to ask questions, to share, and to gain new knowledge. The importance of the many functions of language to learning is reflected in the centrality of language to nearly all models of teaching. The impulse to inquire is the desire to understand the physical, biological, and social worlds around us. It, too, is fundamental to the learning process. Dewey also saw that young people have the need to construct, or make things, and to have effects upon the world around them. Finally, he identified the need to express oneself, through language, visual arts, and music. Although these impulses are separately named, they actually constitute different aspects of the unified whole of the learner's purposes. There is no implication that they should be separated out in schooling or be practiced and acquired in isolation.

Dewey suggested that however else we might conceive curriculum, we cannot ignore the fact that for learners the curriculum begins with their background, abilities, interests, and prior experience. These elements are realized through the learner's impulses, which in turn provide the inescapable foundation for learning. The recognition that these impulses are the fundamental resources for learning—as opposed to computers, books, videos, labs, worksheets, or scope and sequence plans—does not imply that they are all of learning. Dewey, in particular, wrote at length about how education must recognize the needs of society and the collective accumulation of knowledge, not simply respond to the child. Nevertheless, Dewey saw that in the bringing together of child and society, the interests of the child were often neglected. If we could instead attend to these interests, we might gain a deeper understanding of the learning process and of the role new technologies can play in education.

Using new communication and information technologies, teachers and students are discovering more ways to communicate with others, to make things, to learn about the world, and to express themselves. Their discoveries point to exciting possibilities for learning today and in the new century. Thus, these new tools expand the range of possibilities for students to learn through communication, inquiry, construction, and expression.

Despite their great potential, there is now ample evidence that the existence of new media for learning does not in and of itself lead to better teaching and learning. If anything, the new media may simply amplify existing approaches to teaching. Thus, we need to look closely at how new media are actually used.

In a 1997 study of some of the most advanced technologies for learning (those supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation), Jim Levin and I found that many new systems do provide rich environments for communication and inquiry, reflecting attention to two of the impulses Dewey identified. There was less opportunity for construction, a consequence perhaps of many systems emphasizing the rich digital content now available on the web. There was even less support for personal expression, consistent with the assumption in many curricula that art and personal expression are somehow less central to learning, and can be neatly parceled out from learning content and skills.

Although some would argue that we need to parcel out the impulses, I see the power of the web and other new media in the support of more integrated learning. In fact, without much explicit effort on the part of curriculum or technology designers, students are using the new technologies to do exactly the kind of integrated learning through communication, inquiry, construction, and expression that Dewey envisioned. The personal Web pages included in the next section and those referred to in the Literacy Web Page of the Month represent but a few examples of how students are telling the world about themselves. In the process they are learning new technical skills, practicing language use, and enhancing their understanding of many topics.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

The Web has provided a new medium for personal expression. Young people, and those not so young, are using the richly intertextual, multimedia canvas not just to learn, but to teach the world about themselves.

The excerpts below give just a glimpse of a few Web pages. They don't include the background music, the photographs, the video segments, the rich graphics, or the imaginative use of fonts and backgrounds. In order to see those, you need to search the web itself. (Youngsters' names have been changed and e-mail addresses omitted to protect privacy. Students' typographical and grammatical errors have not been altered.)

• All about me
  Hi. Thanks for visiting my home page! My name is Hilary. I'm 13 years old and I live in Tasmania, Australia. I go to college in Launceston and I have many friends that I hang out with on the weekend and at school. My favourite type of food is Italian, especially lasagne. I love animals and have a horse. I think Hanson are just the best and I like Savage Garden. My favourite subjects at school are Maths and Design and Technology. I like pistol shooting and I'm a member at George Town Pistol Club. I also love getting E-mail.
• Hello, my name is Max but you can call me MATSU
  As you see I'm a big NBA fan. So, now something about me. I'm 15 years old, my birthday is on the 20th of April. I live in Estonia, which is a small country in Europe. My hobbys are as you already know basketball and my second big hobby is computers. I've worked with computers since I was 12 or 13 years old. That would be all for now, if you would like to know something about me send me a e-mail.
• Welcome to the Horrible Page of Mall Rat Madam
  Hello all and welcome to the sorry little place I call home on the World Wide Web. This page isn't going to be really spectacular, in fact it will probably suck. I am just making it to let people have a glimpse of my world. On this page you can learn about what I like, what I hate, why I am the way I am, and not much more. So hang on to your booties, here is my page
• About me...
  Ok, let's see. I am 14 years old and from one of the largest states in the USA, Texas. I am about 5'4" and weigh 107 pounds. I am a tanned, brown eyed, brunette. I have a nice smile with straight teeth, which is good because I love to laugh and smile.
• My name is Tom and I am 13 years old
  Detailed summary:
  I was born in Santa Monica in 1983. My name is Tom. I have lived in California, for 13 years. Like the sand through the hour glass, so are the years of my life. I like to do a lot of different things. Some of my interests are playing sports, playing my electrical guitar, talking on the phone, and watching TV. Some of the sports I play are: soccer, bike riding, roller blading, tennis, basketball, football, and skying. I spend lots of time with my friends but my work always comes first. My favorite subjects at school are Programming, Science, Social Studies, Literature (mythology), and Physcial Fitness. My political views are astray right now with all the negative publicity that the presedential candidates are throwing at each other.
• General description
  What you are going to see here is little bit of information about me and my family. I'm 17 years old, I was born in Guatemala. I was born on November 5, 1979. I'm short with black hair.... We are 7 members in my family, which are Mom and Dad, two sisters and two brothers. My sisters are 16 years old and 12 years old. My brothers are 6 years old and 1 year.... My goals is to graduate from High School and go to college. I will be majoring in Nursing. To help many people that are sick and they need help.
• JOHANNA
  Ik ben dus Johanna. Dit is de eerste keer dat ik een HTML pagina maak hieronder ga ik iets ver tellen over mezelf in het Nederlands, en in het Engels. Eerst ga ik wat over mezelf in het Nederlands vertellen. Ik ben Johanna. Ik ben dertien jaar, en zit op het Zernike college in Haren. Mijn hobby's zijn: schaatsen, tennissen, vissen, taekwon-do, ping-pongen... Now I'm going to tell you something about me in Englisch. I am Johanna. I am 13 years old, en go to a school called “Zernike college.” I go to school in Haren (in the north of Holland). My hobby's are....

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Every year, the creators of the competition ThinkQuest (Advanced Network & Services of Armonk, New York, USA) organize an international competition for students ages 12 to 19 to use the Internet as an interactive, collaborative teaching and learning tool. Students work in teams to create web pages on topics in arts and literature, history, math, science and technology, social science, sports and health, and other categories.

A 1997 winner was To Kill a Mockingbird, Then and Now. It was developed on the 35th anniversary of the film based on Harper Lee's book. The site has a variety of learning activities focused on issues of gender, class, and race, which are illustrated by short clips from the film. As the student authors of the web page say,

The instructional activities also encourage students to look closely at the film and the novel as art forms, considering how they were made and how they affect viewers and readers.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

The First World Wide Web Personal Home Page Survey was conducted among authors of personal home pages on computers in Pennsylvania, USA. Among the findings were these:

• The most common reason cited for writing a personal web page is “means of self expression” (49% of the sample). Other common reasons were “to learn/practice HTML” (48%) and “to distribute information to friends/people I know/people I meet” (43%). Less popular reasons were “to distribute information to people I don't know with similar interests” (34%) or “to distribute information about myself to professional contact or potential contact or potential employers” (24%). Apparently, many web page writers view the web as a place to express themselves and to connect with those they already know.
• Nearly all (91%) of web page authors say they present themselves accurately in their web pages. But only 78% feel that others are presented accurately. Those under 20 years old were more likely (64%) to report that they present themselves very accurately than were older web authors (36%).
• Only 14% of personal web page authors were women. Other surveys have found that 34% of Internet and web users are women.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language, a language for writing web pages. The first web pages had to be written directly in this language, with an expression such as the following to indicate a hyperlink: “<A HREF="http://io.advanced.org/thinkquest/">ThinkQuest</A>.” In this case, were the above link active, the reader of the web page would see only ThinkQuest. When he or she clicked on that word, the web browser would automatically connects to the web server (see glossary entries, below) containing the ThinkQuest site.
Return to Interpretations

Search engine: a program that searches the World Wide Web to locate all of the documents that meet certain specifications given in search keys. Most search engines return a list of web pages ordered by how well they match the specifications.

Search key: a string of text used to guide a search engine (see previous glossary entry) to find web pages. The keys can include phrases as well as individual words or parts of words. Users can specify keys that must be present in the web page as well as those that must not be present.
Return to Author's Message

[Web] browser: a computer program that allows the user to explore the World Wide Web by interpreting documents written in HTML or other hypertext languages.

[Web] client: a computer that allows the user to connect to a server program in order to retrieve (download) or post (upload) web documents.

[Web] server: a program running on a host computer that maintains web documents accessible via a web browser.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Bruce, B.C., & Levin, J.A. (1997). Educational technology: Media for inquiry, communication, construction, and expression. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 17(1), 79-102. (Available on line at www.ed.uiuc.edu/facstaff/chip/taxonomy)
Return to Issue of the Month

Dewey, J. (1915/1956). The school and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Return to Issue of the Month

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online