Week 6 Reflection

Well, the assignment is to answer question 1a.  The only problem I have with this is that it asks if you think "the Internet and the World Wide Web will have a major influence on the was instruction is presented to learners?"  Hate to be so sarcastic, but hello!!!  It's not a news flash, they already have had a major influence on the way instruction is presented to learners.  In fact, in the chapter itself, it gave the beginnings of how this is happening.  So, I guess to answer the question without sounding  so negative, yes I believe they will have a major influence on the way instruction is presented... and I think they already have.  

Instead of answering a, b, and c separately, I am going to just give some examples of how they have and are going to impact all three areas.   Beginning in the K-12 category, there are local schools that have already gone to having some students take courses online for foreign language, so that the students can meet the state requirements and the district can save money by hiring another teacher.   In fact, at a school I heard about recently, there are 18 students that are taking something like Rosetta Stone as an online course, and the only person that is in the room with them is a non-certified sub.  They are paying the sub $35 for each half day to monitor these students.  I also have heard of some other schools locally doing a teleconference type classroom set up where two classes are taught via the internet, while only one instructor is teaching.  I have not heard a lot about this, but it is something that is being worked on for future cost saving methods of instruction.  

Next, I want to touch on the military side of things.  This chapter actually brought some realization to how a lot of military training has been accomplished in a short amount of time.  Well, I can tell you first hand, from working on a military installation (though I'm not in the military) that much of the year to year certification training that our military has to keep up on is internet based tutorials and tests.   In these tutorials (because I had to take one recently for my computer certification) have pictures, audio, video, and text all integrated in very easy to navigate slides.  Questions are usually multiple choice, and you get immediate feedback on how you are doing.  If you fail, there is a certain timeframe you have to wait before you can go back and try it again.  In fact, I witnessed a gentleman last week taking a Chemical Warfare and Hazardous Materials awareness class.  He had been through a course 5 years ago with an instructor, and this was his "refresher"/ recertification class.  As the book mentions, our military has a ton of classes available through the internet.  

Next, I will briefly touch on the college and University issue.   Hmm.... this class... the degree program...   Each and every day you see commercials on TV, online, and even probably get e-mail messages about online training courses in almost any field of study.  This has been something that has continued to grow over the last 5 years, and will only become more popular in the years to come.

Lastly, it's my opinion that when you look around at businesses, schools, and even military, money is the biggest concern!  Cost savings has been a key issue everywhere, and when you think of the easiest ways to cut costs... it has to do with previously purchased technology being integrated in new ways.  Most of these new ways are online classes, teleconferencing, podcasts, video messaging, and various other things.  These things eliminate large travel expenses, travel time, and therefore decrease in lost productivity.  So, putting all these issues together, it only makes sense to me that the internet and WWW will become even more integrated in all areas than they ever have before.  I am not sure if I think it's good or bad, but we might just want to change with the times, because it seems recently that cheap and average education is more prominent than average costing and quality education.  Hopefully as the uses become more regular, the effectiveness and quality will continue to improve as well.  

I want to leave you with the same thought I have been thinking since beginning this reflection.  If we've come this far with technology (mainly speaking of computers and internet here) in the last 25 years, how far will we be in another 25 years?  Is it possibly that we'll have robots and computers running most of our jobs, and we'll only have jobs to program these computers to do those jobs effectively?   Or knowing that education has changed so much in the past 2 decades, are we making a change that will end up with less quality education for real-life tasks and we'll be taking steps back to catch people up in the next 20 years?   It's a deep thought, and without getting into the political side.... quite frankly I'm torn!