Role of computers in promoting environmental education

Computers have caused a revolution in education, but the tremendous changes seen in the last decade may be surpassed in the next, as those computers are connected in a global educational network.

High school teachers and students take samples of the water in Lake Baikal in Siberia, while in other lakes around the world, other teachers and students take similar samples from local lakes and subject them to the same simple water quality tests. Through their school computers, they exchange their results and their observations about how water pollution problems are the same all over the world. They are part of a “global laboratory” project that includes scientists specializing in water pollution.

A similar computer network links citizen activists, along with students, teachers, and scientists, in “sister basin” groups around the world.

Amateur bird watchers and biologists pool their sightings of rare birds into a North American computer network that is connected to bird researchers in Central and South America.

The differences between classroom and community education are blurred in the global computer networks. Voluntary organizations, government agencies, students and teachers are all involved in a real that has become, for many, a virtual classroom, without walls and increasingly without borders.

Pilot projects already have high school students sharing the methods and results of field studies of environmental quality, using computer telecommunications to cross national borders. Elementary school children share their life experiences and visions of the future in the same way. Their mutual messages, transmitted with great speed and shared simultaneously among many classrooms, provide powerful personal lessons in science, geography, and human relations.

Environmental education curriculum development, undertaken independently and often in isolation by teachers, school districts, and universities over the past two decades, is now linked in a global forum that can immediately respond to increasingly complex and urgent environmental issues. facing the world. Teachers from around the world connect with their peers to discuss how they can do their jobs better. Coordination of international education projects is less burdened by time constraints and travel budgets, as computer networks provide forums for collaboration.

The technology for this exchange takes advantage of the personal computer’s ability to communicate over standard telephone lines using a modem. The simplest networks connect personal computers in a “store and forward” system that repeats messages from one to another until everyone has copies. These lower-cost networks are connected to larger, faster computers that act as central storage banks and relay stations. In turn, they exchange information with each other and harness the power and data in the computer systems of major educational and research institutions.

In many ways, this vast new sea of ​​information presents its own challenges, often akin to “drinking water from a fire hose.” The sheer excess of facts and opinions is impossible to swallow, and has forced those who wanted to test their power to devise new ways of organizing and sampling the flow of information.

E-mail services and computer “conferencing” allow students and teachers to communicate with each other privately or publicly as members of large discussion groups. Computer conferences are organized much like those where people meet face-to-face, except that the meeting rooms are inside each participant’s computer. Computer conferencing transcends time zones, as participants review and comment on each other’s written posts as their time and interest allow. Everyone can read and think about the questions or statements raised in a lecture, and everyone has an equal opportunity to respond.

Computer networks are making classroom walls disappear. Real environmental problems are now entering classrooms via computer networks, and students are seeking understanding and solutions together with scientists, citizen activists, journalists, government officials, and community leaders of all stripes. While access to computer networks is still remote for most people on the planet, it is increasingly available to the gatekeepers and opinion leaders who help shape a common understanding of the global situation. The increasing abundance of the multiple sources of information available through computer networks, when viewed as a well-supplied market, may also stimulate demand for more and better goods by the world’s information consumers.

Citizen participation in the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), for example, has been coordinated through computer networks on seven continents, giving NGOs access to the full text of UNCED documents. preparatory committee and providing public forums for news and debates on issues. . This availability of information has a dramatic effect on how an event like UNCED permeates the media everywhere.

Behind the often chaotic vision presented by the media, structures are being developed to channel the new rivers of information to empower this and the next generations to deal with the problems it describes. A variety of efforts in networking for environmental education provide some excellent models. At bottom, all these efforts are based on the same notion: that environmental problems must be seen with a global perspective, but answered by individuals acting locally, in their own communities or homes.

All of this new technology comes at a cost, and developed countries are clearly in the lead in access to computers for education. But even in the United States, where computerized telecommunications are becoming commonplace, profit, rather than education reform, is a dominant force in determining who has access.

The harsh reality has motivated citizen computer networks to unite in the International Association for Progressive Communications (APC) to make access to computer networks widely available. APC hosts several promising educational efforts on its partner computer networks that now span more than 90 countries around the world. These services can be taken advantage of by anyone with a personal computer and modem, often through a local call, at costs roughly equivalent to a monthly newspaper subscription or phone bill.

The educational projects offered on APC networks are examples of how low-budget computer communication can fit into community classrooms and programs.