JEvents

An Essay: Draft 2: 10.03.10, 10.08.06, 10.08.09

Summary: The Internet has been "world wide" since 1991.  Why is there not better low-cost, or free and open, universally accessible, high quality, distance learning available on the Internet already?  If there were, would not that create -- by the intrinsic nature of the Internet -- world wide, to some extent free and open, high quality, education for all human beings on this planet?  My answer is: YES, it would, YES, it could, YES, it should... sooner than later for humanity's sake.

This essay gives an overview of some of the educational problems created by (1) the unethical, socially irresponsible, classically capitalist "monetization" games being played by the larger "Internet Providers", search engine companies, and by the large monopolistic Telecommunications companies, (2) by intentional manufacturer-delayed and crippled and vendor-delayed releases of more innovative computer software and now "more advanced" socially-useful web software as well, and (3) by the persistent use of static web page content on Internet web sites in general and on the very few "historic" distance learning "Web 1.x" web sites and the emerging, soon to be more numerous, and more popular, "Web 2.0" web sites in particular.

It has been 19+ years since 1991 when the Internet became relatively cheaply accessible to the ordinary US, EU, Japanese and S.E. Asian citizen who owned a personal computer or who used one at their work place.  In 1991 Internet-browsing began in earnest nation(s)-wide, for the first time outside the historic academic and medium to large business uses of it since the 1970s and 1980s.  General citizen use of the Internet exploded exponentially with the advent of the first free, graphic-user-interface web-browser software in 1991, later renamed Mozilla.  Thereafter exponentially more and more people in countries world-wide began to have "Internet connectivity".

Also from that time on, there arose a trend to put more and more information of all kinds on the Internet as "web pages" (static web pages).  And Internet users increasingly became able to find "most" of that information more and more easily with "search engines" like Google and Bing, the latter two which became the most popular for people to use world-wide up to the present day.

Yet what we have on the Internet today (2010+) in terms of affordable, or free, easily accessible, well-formed and maximally informative distance-learning in 2009+, is almost 20 years since the popularization of Internet use; it is still pretty meager and mediocre material educationally; but there is a whole lot more of it!  And what educational material, or worse, what edutainment material, exists on the Internet is increasingly dominated and retarded by commercial-ism, in this investigator's opinion and in the opinion of many of her colleagues.  In fact we can argue that commercial interests have come to dominate and slow-down or delay Internet innovation and the types and ways of Internet content presentation that is "truly educational" (beyond a certain point or threshold I will try to define elsewhere on this site).  All Internet content including educational content increasingly is intended -- i.e. it is being channeled by the most wealthy and powerful would-be dominators of the Internet -- dominating more for the purposes of forcing users to view advertising, albeit increasingly well targeted and more likely wanted advertising, which brings the owners higher profits, than is the content itself intended for better informing -- or educating -- the Internet end-user.  And these would-be Internet tyrants, smiling soft-spoken sure-of-themselves hegemons, would have the rest of "us Internet users" pay the highest price for the best content presented to us at the fastest Internet speeds if they succeed.

 

 

For the record and as an historical reminder, this "commercialization process" of the Internet, lately also called "monetization", is very much like what happened to broadcast television after it's debut to the general US and UK public in the 1940s and to radio in the USA after it debuted to the general public in the 1920s(?).  It is also exactly what happened to cable television in the USA which has all but destroyed broadcast network television since it's advent in the 1990s, which then by cable's monopoly power has forced cable television subscribers to pay increasingly higher prices to receive television content 90% of which for 30+ years used to come to them absolutely free -- for the price of owning a television set and an antenna that could pick-up broadcast television signals "in the free and open air".

As has been observed by others elsewhere (Note to self: cite some!), it is as if the richest stakeholders in using the Internet for commercial purposes are trying to recreate "commercial and cable television" type providing of as much of the Internet content as possible, with the imposition of increasingly "cute" and "flashy", but equally dumbed-down, simplistic, intentionally (perhaps propagandistically) distorted, semi-hypnotic Internet content that is also minimal interactivity -- keeping the Internet end-user almost as passive as have been radio, television, and cable tv users for decades!

This in fact is what all we regular Internet users now experience most of the time, I dare say, when we use our Internet browser programs to view most Internet web pages as well as the increasing amounts of Internet-streamed radio and television programs, popular music, and digital versions of films.  If the commercial interests succeed in dominating content, affordability, and the speed and quality of delivery to us of Internet content, they will also force us to view and hear relentless advertising on almost every web page, or along with every web audio or video stream, we choose to look at, listen to or read.

And that degradation and commercialization of the Internet will include anything that is "truly" and officially educational.  Will the educational materials themselves be similarly distorted to serve the interests of those with the most money and power to control those messages and learning experiences?  At the present day, by my interpretation of present trends, I fear they will.

 

 

The richest commercial interests' technique probably will be similar to what some rich special interests tried to put forward as educational television shows that were shown on cable TV and close-circuit TV channels in the USA in the 1990s!  The precursors of these educational television shows had been produced "in good faith" by at least one of the major U.S. networks, CBS I believe, produced with "reasonably good production values" and USA high-school level content.  But executives and station managers forced these shows to be shown only in very early-a.m. and very late p.m. time slots.  And this went on in the name of nation-wide educational television in the USA in the 1950-1980s.

But here is one big problem with media giants controlling what is offered as "news" or as "educational material":

As the late Russian psychologist Vygotsky pointed out in the 1950s(?), those who control what is most often talked about and heard in their personal and professional lives, also control what is and is not thought about as well!  Most of us spend at least a few hours a day watching television or listening to the radio; now moments including this "content" received via a laptop, tablet computer, or smart phone.  The "impressions" and "choreographed perceptions" of what we see and hear influences us consciously and sub-consciously, for better and for worse.  And that well orchestrated effort to create consistent consumer-related or distorted political "messages for us" is in fact "thought control" -- whether it be 'benign' or 'malignant', intentional or unintentional.  What "messages" one receives and repeats daily -- without employing critical thinking -- controls what a very larger percent of "the public" can and cannot easily think about or change about their individual and community living circumstances.  And as educators -- and advertisers -- well know, very few adults or children in all living generations are good at "critical thinking".

So if nothing else changes soon on the Internet soon, in this observer's opinion we need the choice, the right, to accept or reject whether or not advertising will appear on all the web pages we view.  Then we also need the right of having "equal bandwidth" available for all Internet users, so called "Net Neutrality", for all web site content publishers, and for small business users; bandwidth not limited (or throttled downwards) for those whom the Internet data carriers and Internet Service Providers deem "less worthy", or less able to pay for the higher faster bandwidth (also called quality of service) for which the data carriers wish to charge higher usage fees. I.e. "they" want to put "toll charges" on Internet traffic.  But there are other issues, other "gotchas", that reduce the potential of the world-wide-web, the Internet, to better serve "humanity" at large.  I and other "education progressives" want the Internet to serve everyone free, easily accessible, high quality, scientifically accurate and philosophically diverse educational materials just-in-time, whenever a person wants them, including face-to-face and automated tutorial learning experiences.  I want "the Internet user world" to have them in the nearest possible future and not in the farthest possible distant future which fate certain commercial and governmental interests would impose upon the rest of us who are less powerful, rich, and privileged than will be their most highly favored, best paying users.

 

 

Consider these few educationally problematic details about "the Internet Browsing experience":  In most cases from an Internet-connected web site (i.e. from a web site which vends or delivers web pages) at best we end-users can get what is called "static web page content".  A "static web page" is a web page in which the content, the real "meat" of the web page which people want to read and understand, is FIXED.  That valued web content has for the last 20 years been hard-to-change web pages.  Too often static web pages were authored many months or years ago.  Yes, with modern computers and laptops, and now with smart phones and lighter and more portable tablet computers as well, we can get the information we think we want and find related information in mere seconds.  With the newer "Web 2.0" content management systems installed on web servers, it is easier for web page authors to update the web content they created and make new or derived versions of it.

But how "good" or "high quality" or "accurate" is that information?  Who, if anyone, endorses that information's quality or accuracy?  Is that search-and-find process a good or "better" use of finding and interacting with existing Internet content?  Who is saying or deciding that it is or is not the case?  Are "those decisions" entirely the result of some unspecified secret statistical analysis done by the the giant search engine companies who monitor the public's daily and hourly and per-second use of their search engine facilities?

With the exception of what are known as "Wiki" web pages, and now increasingly many web pages on so called "Web 2.0" web sites, which content can change overnight at an author's whim, static web pages make up 95% or more of the truly informative or truly educational web pages that exist on the Internet.  But they are still more like hard-bound or paperback textbook content, just more quickly accessible and changeable if and only if you have access to a computer.  However most of this content will never be challenged and will never be changed or otherwise updated in the 3-5 years following it's web-publication!  If the content is truly educational, which term I will try to define elsewhere on this web site, then the educational content is too much like that within an ordinary hard-bound textbook:  it will not be changed for 3 or 5 or even 10 or more years!  Also human beings, particularly the original authors and most interested reviewers and revisers of the material, still have to remember that a page or number of pages within the published material needs updating.  And they must remember and coordinate with each other to make those changes in a "timely fashion".

 

 

Static web pages become a big problem for would-be Internet educators when the Internet is used to offer course and lesson content most or all of which does not change for several years.  It is true that "these days" static web pages have more and more multimedia content (such as animations, still picture 'slide-shows', and videos-on-demand) mixed with the plain-text and static graphics (pictures), the latter which have been the staple content of textbooks for decades, even for centuries since the invention of the printing press.

It is true that some of the web content -- and thus some of any existing distance learning (DL) content --  "these days" is "variable" and "conditional".  You will find some of it on what are the so-called latest generation "Web 2.0" web-sites.  And as the site PI, I will be trying to add example web site links on this web site to those other sites which do so.  For example parts of the web page content might pop-up word or term definitions, as this web site now does.  Different displays of content can be made available for different users under different web-site usage circumstances.  That turns out to be a more difficult web site feature for web site developers to enable.  And it is an as yet largely unknown concept for most authors of educational materials to consider offering in their published materials.

Also the layout of the content within various web pages can be more flexible and conditional as well.  But has the core content of those web pages really changed much from hard-to-change textbook or newspaper-like static content?  Yes newspaper-like web-pages can change the static content on them in a matter of 1-2 minutes, making the content more "up to date" and devoid of typographic errors and errors of word use and grammar.  But the content within those pages is still static.  And static content means "one size or one fixed published static content-page" is intended to serve all of the web page viewers.  The web-publishing of Internet web page content on "Web 2.0" newspaper-style web sites is merely made more efficient for the standard largely unchanged old-office-style hard-copy in-print on-paper content creation, editing, and publication that we have become used to creating since the 1980s with "more modern" word-processing software and now with web server computers instead of using the old die-hard type-writers and lead-type-setting that enabled the old on-paper printing presses to work.

In this investigator's opinion, word-processing and image-processing of words and graphics has moved somewhat clumsily to the Internet in "Web 2.0" web-sites.  But it is the same-old text and staic graphics production process done by human beings, now with keyboard and a computer graphic drawing tools in their hands.  Computers can do so much more, if and when more people know what can be demanded of them and of the people who operate and write computer programs for them.

Another problem is that typically for most school use and general public use, the static course web page content is vended to the users from one and only one "web 2.0" web site, also called a "content management system" (CMS), and also called a "Learning Management System" (LMS).  As it has been for the last 10 years of what I call "first generation" education CMS sites, any two or more commercial proprietary CMSes typically do not integrate and work well -- or at all -- with each other.  Transferring content from one CMS (or LMS) to another can be difficult or nearly impossible!  And that create a coercive force which makes the CMS or LMS user population buy-in and "stick with" the chosen CMS in order to avoid the extreme pain of switching to another, better, and more recent CMS!  And that process stifles innovation and delays the what some would say is the urgent need to get appropriate educational information to the students who need the material, the education, but often who also can least afford to get that education.

Thus in these ways a school or other training institution is forced by the so-called "free market place" in so called educational software to "buy-in" to one commercial or open source CMS,or LMS and "stick with it" for years to come.  Then those users, instructors, administrators, and student, must learn how to use that software system well, which often takes months-to-years.  Then the institutions' instructors and students become "invested" in using (aka inured to using) that particular CMS' or LMS'  unique, not standardized, "User Interface" (UI), which is in effect an end-user-addiction created by the software system developers and vendors.   In short: as yet there are no "standard user interfaces" for CMS or LMS.  And if there were, they would probably be mediocre... the "lowest common denominator" of the UIs of educational CMSes and LMSes that are "out there" in the "market place".

Thus an instructor or educational institution is thereby coerced by the "habit forming qualities" of the unique CMS user interface they are using, by their investment in time in learning the unique complexity of how their particular CMS works, and by the lack of portability of the considerable typed and graphic (and animation, audio and video) content the institution has created and stored in the CMS, so that the vast majority of CMS users become increasingly unwilling to switch to another CMS.  Typically they wait as long as the vendor or CMS developer requires they wait until "the next better release" of the product.  And they do not switch usually for many years after adoption of the chosen CMS!  They very often do not switch until the "pain" of using an increasingly outmoded, too slow to change, CMS or LMS is so great that their "user base" is "up in arms" to have something better such as some new software that has appeared on the commercial market in recent months or years!

To summarize then: the two factors of

1. deliberate vendor-created commercial software user-dependency-creation and
2. the vendors' deliberate slow-as-possible software upgrading process

...stifle the much swifter and more innovative improvements of commercial and even of free open source software and software systems for educational purposes.  The faster, better innovations have ALWAYS been possible to create, test, and deploy by the competent eager (if sometimes over-eager) developers.  And those innovations could provide so much better, low-cost and/or more freely accessible educational content to students as well as allow instructors much greater ease-of-use of the host CMS or LMS to create educational experiences with their students via the Internet and within their 'ordinary' classrooms.  Thus the "free market" has created legions of less empowered educational end-users who become subservient to "good-enough software" and systems that experts like myself know could be so much better, subservient to the limitations and constraints of "commercial needs" incuding the manufacturers' need to maximize their "return on their investment" (ROI) of time and money in the creation, testing, deployment, and upgrading of that educational software or their  educational systems.  And again that also limits and constrains bringing truly better educational experiences and materials to students via the Internet.

Worse, only very technically "wise" people, i.e. web server specialists, can setup, load with content, and maintain the educational web site and the education web content -- when the ordinary author or instructor tools in "the system" fail to do what is needed done.  That is the classical 4-decades old archaic propriety, technically called a "closed-systems model".  It is the common-place commercial software business model.  But it is a software and systems development model theoretically to become obsolete in the mid 1980s and through the 1990s with the advent and increasing use of what is called technically "object oriented programming" (OOP) and "object oriented (system) analysis and design" (OOAD).  But the commercial software and systems manufacturers and vendors "mutated" and "dumbed down" or "crippled" their use of OOP and OOAD so that they could continue end-user-addiction and their slow pace of innovation of their products.

And as for the end users, just TRY to get computer naive or computer phobic faculty to "author" those static instructional web pages even "simply" as supplemental material let alone as the only content for their courses.  They must do so with the still not-so-user-friendly, expensive, commercial software word processing and web publishing tools that are "out there", and most widely in use.  They are far less likely to take the time to easily research the "better methods" and software tools they could be using at low cost to create and edit the necessary multimedia content supplements to their "ordinary courses", let alone create an entire "distance learning" course exclusively for deliver via the Internet.  So only the very computer "savvy" faculty -- the so called "early adopters -- tend to take the time and make the efforts necessary to web-publish or all of their course materials.  Do they also have the time to instruct their less enthusiastic colleagues in such uses?  Likely they do not.

So perhaps the evolving, primarily informative and later tutorial, content of the WebLearningTools Research web-site will advance the advent of greater "ease of use" of "better distance learning".  That "better distance learning" will include increasingly more powerful course content authoring, content deployment, and student web tools.  The learning content increasingly will be more dynamic and better tailored to the individual student's educational needs and their preferred learning styles at the moment of content use.  And this PI hopes this web site will be accepting world-wide contributions to this web site in the form of new ideas, new projects, as well as comments and reviews of the site's existing content to make our "meager" efforts in these directions more efficient, effective, and appropriate for educators in all countries and for the more timely benefit of their students.