The Berglund Mission

Steven Boone

by Steven Boone <sboone@pacificu.edu>
Director, Berglund Center for Internet Studies

The Berglund Mission
Director of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies

The Berglund Center was founded to help individuals, communities and organizations utilize the new technologies being made possible by the Internet. One of our tools for achieving this objective is promotion of discussion and debate and sharing best practices though this journal, The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet, which we refer to simply as Interface.

The learning curve in understanding the Internet has been very steep, there are still more questions about the impact of the Internet than well researched answers. We expect this will be the situation for some time, in part because technology continues to develop at a very rapid pace, and the user base continues to grow and evolve. While the Internet touches society in many ways, we will focus on only a few of the most important in Interface. These areas of emphasis are education, and the development of community and values. Since education, community and values are important components in most e-commerce ventures, often significantly more so than in brick and mortar enterprises, we will comment from that perspective as well as from our platform in academia.

Communication, commerce and education are the areas of society most impacted by the evolution of the Internet. Of those three, the structure of educational institutions will be altered the most significantly. Perhaps because of the potential magnitude for disruption, the ways in which education will be altered is not as clear as the directional signals we see in communication and commerce.

At one end of the spectrum, we know educators who do not believe computers and related technology have any role in classrooms. They believe learning occurs when students listen to lectures and memorize facts. We think most holding such a position are intimidated by technology, per se, and generally resistant to any kind of change. At the opposite extreme some believe the role of the instructor and classroom is rapidly becoming obsolete and most universities will be virtual in a few years. They think learning will occur through collaboration with other students and interaction with software modeled on games like Sim City, http://simcity.ea.com/home.php, and Age of Empires, http://www.microsoft.com/games/empires/.

There is a growing middle ground in which instructors increasingly see themselves as facilitators. They are eliminating most lectures and substantially reducing classroom time. Students are learning problem solving and developing analytical skills by collaborating with each other on projects. Such projects are often developed as web sites to facilitate sharing and modification of the work by multiple students and continuous input from the teacher. Technology such as Windows XP, which allows real-time editing by multiple computer users working on the same document, will increasingly facilitate this approach.

Which of these three positions is closest to the educational landscape we'll see in five, ten or twenty years? Clearly the head in the sand viewpoint should change. Computers and the Internet are here to stay and being added to classrooms at a furious rate. There will be virtual universities. We expect they will thrive. But we do not recommend rushing quite yet to sell all of your classroom buildings. The Internet will not cause a mass exodus from those ivy covered buildings. Rather, the reality, at least in the next ten or so years is probably somewhere closer to the middle position. Some studies, for example, have shown that the majority of the audience for distance-delivered courses is actually the on-campus population at the universities where they are created.

There is also a growing recognition that computer mediated learning is more appropriate to certain kinds of curricula and its effectiveness may also be a function of the age of the students. For example relative to the question of age, studies may indicate that universities which cater to eighteen to twenty two year old students should use the Internet in a different role than institutions which serve older students. Berglund will explore these issues.

We do believe one of the most positive areas of impact of the Internet will be to foster life long learning and maintain a university's connection with its students long after they graduate. Berglund will share the templates of those with exemplary practices in this area.

How can we prepare to address these issues though sound, reality based assessment and savvy educational policies? What are the new ethical dilemmas posed by the use of information and communication technologies? These are the issues we plan to address in upcoming issues of Interface. We'll share our experiences and the research being conducted by Berglund Fellows. We'll feature articles by individuals who've developed best practices. We hope many of you will choose to contribute. Please contact our editor Dr. Jeffrey Barlow at barlowj@pacificu.edu, or view our style sheet at http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/style.php.

We think the Internet will have the most positive impact on education of any invention since the printing press. It will make possible the development of world wide communities in ways only dreamed of by science fiction writers just a few years ago. It will help shape the values of those communities and the individuals who comprise them.

At the end of the day the Berglund Center will measure its success by the difference we make in the lives of the individuals, communities and organizations impacted by the development of the Internet. And that is all of us.