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Global Distance Learning and the Transformation of Knowledge
Construction
Molly Freeman, ABD, The Union Institute; Lecturer, Dept. of Human Development, California State
University, Hayward, California, USA, mollyfreeman@telis.org
Margaret Wheatley says, "I would like to work in an organization where I am so well trained that I can go
(into the field) and know what to do under any circumstance...."[Wheatley,95] This summer I participated in
training 1,000 K12 educators in Santa Clara County, the center of California's Silicon Valley. We trainers
were trained so well, over periods varying from one to three years, that we did know what to do. We knew the
fundamentals of appropriate use for learning with technology: 1)personal networks, 2)curriculum integration,
3)Internet skills. We knew that the Internet in the curriculum transforms the teaching process to facilitating,
guiding, observing, listening; that it is a catalyst for self-motivation and creativity, and that it invites
collaboration, cooperation and co-learning. We knew that patience, humor, practice and reiteration were keys
to the mastery of new skills.
The Web, or Internet, became the occasion and the medium for new experiences and images of learning and
creating knowledge.
In the five day training we enabled participants to: 1)forge personal realtionships around their interests in
curriculum and teaching stragegies, 2)acquire Internet navigation skills including Web, Gopher and Telnet
searches, Email management and basic HTML and 3)conceptualize learner-centered curriculum projects. An
additional three days led by professional facilitators focused entirely on collaborative curriculum projects.
Common denominators among the participants were: 1-interest in mastering Internet navigation skills, 2anxiety
about the project development process, and 3-uncertainty regarding the technical assistance,
connectivity and access to computers in their respective schools for the ensuing year. Frustration, anger, some
tears and despair were closely juxtaposed with determination, persistence, timidity and elation as familiarity
with the technology increased from Day 1 to Day 5. People who had no prior experience with the Internet on
Day 1 were planning Internet integrated projects by Day 5 and elaborate, collaborative learner-centered
projects by Day 8.
Complexity theory has a way of explaining how this happened.
The Web captures the imagination, it compels us to stay tuned, clicking and searching, replying and
expounding, mixing and relating. The Web is the ongoing report of interdependent information processing
systems, humans and computer code, combinations of zeroes and ones with meanings, values and perceptions.
A part of this attraction is the novelty of the Web and the ongoing novelty it makes possible through HTML
linking and site building, through color, sound and image with text.
Participants in the Summer Institute were told that they were helping to determine how education would be
transformed by the new technology, and within two days they came to experience the diversity of the Web
itself. They experienced themselves as information providers and users, as senders and recipients of email.
They were hooked because they were intimately involved. Hands-on activities included scavenger hunts where
the labs became hushed, with silences punctuated by "I got it." Email retrieval activities were replete with "I
got mail!" "Did you get mine?"
We set forth almost 1,000 teachers prepared to utilize the Internet with classroom curricula across five counties
in northern California because people experienced themselves as interdependent and vital to change. People
experienced themselves as active learners enticed by the opportunity to be on "the cutting edge" as
contributors, so work was transformed to voluntary participation with responsibility.[Lee, 59] Self-motivation
was activated by the energy released from learning and acquiring new competency.
The Summer Institute96 succeeded in preparing teachers to envision and plan Internet integrated curricula
because we worked off the energy released by the Web. We had the extraordinary opportunity to introduce
people to this new way of accessing information and one another, to a new way of being in the world. We gave
them discrete activities that provided a sense of accomplishment and an awareness of themselves as learners,
analogous to what Paolo Freire means when he speaks of enabling people "to name their world."[Freire,70]
We enabled K12 educators to "navigate the new world of information."
The new competency releases enormous creative energy for actualizing the curriculum projects, which may