Online Education ?

Q: I am a student at Illinois State University. I am currently taking a class online and one of our assignments is to discuss the Internet and its effect on education. If you wouldn't mind answering, how is the Internet currently utilized in your educational system? How will the Internet be incorporated into your educational system in the future? What is your opinion of the potential of the Internet to promote global interaction and collaboration?

A:Out of curiosity, when you "discuss" things in your online class do you do it on message boards on a Web site, or in-person in classrooms? When I helped moderate an online course we held live discussions on a dedicated IRC server -- not message boards and not in person, physically speaking, because participants were located around the U.S. To answer your question, I use/have used the internet extensively in high school science curriculum. Students frequently use the internet for research (sometimes that's the *only* tool they use for research--it seems they've forgotten that the library is full of *books*, too). I don't have a problem with this; the internet is the wave of the future, and it's great that students know how to use it so well. But I worry about what happens when the internet connection goes down; some of them simply don't know what to do and don't have a clue as to how to look up a book in the

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