Subtopic: General

Developers of educational applications and tools… spend a substantial proportion of their very limited resources inventing and creating such services. Progress could be much faster and more efficient if each project did not have to invent basic services but rather could build upon a common services infrastructure.

Individual schools are not autonomous: they are part of a school district, a local community, and a state education system. If internetworking is to support educational reform, the infrastructure must encompass the entire school district and community.

Because schoolchildren are located all over the world, they can often monitor many more sites for environmental studies than the professional scientific community could support. Eventually, when large numbers of students and teachers have the appropriate tools and skills and network participation, they will fill an important role in areas such as monitoring atmospheric ozone, ultraviolet light, water and soil pollution, and bioindicators of global, regional and local change.

There is a danger that the networks could be used to transmit and amplify traditional and outmoded elements of schooling instead of providing a mechanism for the transformation to lifelong learning needed by all citizens … The way we shape and engineer the technology, tools, organization of knowledge and virtual communities on the expanding Internet information infrastructure will directly impact on the potential productivity, roles, and equality of opportunity of young people both in the near and distant future, and thereby will affect the kind of society we evolve into.

The central value of internetworking to support learning and teaching for our changing world is that internetworking can support or enable authentic learning experiences and cross-institutional collaborations needed for reform of education.

Educational opportunities for all could increase as more people participate in the Internet if networking infrastructure, services and applications develop in ways that help people contribute to the information infrastructure.