Blog
While Internet Hall of Fame inductee Yvonne Marie Andrés’ popular “International CyberFair” has become a mainstay for Internet collaboration in the classroom, Andrés has not stopped looking for ways to use the Internet to improve education – and the world.
One of her newest ventures is called “Global Forest Link,” which she describes as a collaborative analysis of environmental conditions and forest health. The goal is for students to strengthen Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (STEAM) skills while learning environmental science and data analysis, improving their communication, storytelling, and video production skills, and expanding their world perspective by collaborating with peers in other nations. Self-paced tutorials and downloadable resources are available in multiple languages. Live interactive webinars give students the opportunity to learn from experts, while sharing their own experiences.
“Students take photos and videos to assess the condition of their local forests, both wilderness and urban," she explains. "They document the health of trees to show how they have been affected by insects, fire, drought or human development. Next, they create digital stories that explain what they observed and share those stories with the public and other schools across the U.S., Taiwan, Russia, Brazil, Ecuador and Ghana.”
Students metatag the...
Yvonne Marie Andrés wasn’t a scientist. She had never built networks or written software code. But as a teacher, she had an early vision to bring the Internet into the classroom to help students around the globe connect and collaborate.
The truly global impact of the programs she’s developed to accomplish this has made her one of the rare Internet Hall of Fame inductees without an engineering or mathematical background. For her many and ongoing contributions to growing the use of the Internet in education, Andrés was named in 2017 as an Internet Hall of Fame Innovator.
To be clear, she says, her efforts aren’t about distance learning, which has also been one of the Internet’s great contributions to education. Rather, they are about using the Internet to connect students with each other and with mentors, to give them a sympathetic audience, to help them learn, as well as teach about their respective communities and the world.
It all started in 1984, she said, when she began teaching in a disadvantaged area of Oceanside, California.
“A lot of my students came from homes where their parents were in gangs or prison, and they just didn’t have much need or respect for education,” she said. “I was looking for something to get their attention. A milestone was when a friend of mine went to England on a teaching exchange. When he came back he said the students he met there were fascinated with California and they wanted to know if they could write my...
The explosion of memes, cat videos, and games has pushed the Internet far beyond the initial vision of a global innovator.
A 2017 inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame, Jaap Akkerhuis, spent time with Carnegie Mellon University’s Information Technology Center, Mt. Xinu, and Bell Laboratories before returning to the Netherlands in 1995 to join NLnet, the first Dutch Internet service provider. The research engineer has also served on ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee since its inception.
In a recent video interview, Akkerhuis acknowledged that the Internet has rapidly grown beyond its research roots to encompass decidedly more lightweight fare.
“When we started out, we were…just playing around,” he said. “We had no idea it wound end up where it is today. Today, it seems like it has become way more (of an) entertainment and media vehicle than just exchanging information about research.”
The evolution of the Internet and its uses has caught one of its pioneers by surprise.
A 2017 inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame, Tadao Takahashi, is the founder and former director of Brazil’s National Research Network, one of the country’s earliest academic networks. His efforts to facilitate coordination among academic networks led to the development of what would become the foundation of Brazil’s Internet.
Citing its widespread use by government and non-government organizations for both benevolent and dark uses, Takashai said in a recent video interview that the Internet’s development has gone far beyond the passing fad he and his collaborators expected it to be.
“The Internet today is not the kind of benign phenomenon we thought it would be 25 or 30 years ago, especially when you have those revelations from Edward Snowden….regarding the way the NSA was running a full-scale espionage operation,” he said. “The fact is, the Internet lost its innocence. You have to look at it as an incredible tool for both good and bad.”
On the Alexa list of the world’s most visited websites, the top spots are largely taken up by corporate sites, such as Google, Baidu and Amazon.
And then there’s Wikipedia.
Launched in 2001 by Internet Hall of Fame Inductee Jimmy Wales, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia is the fifth most visited website in the world.
In a recent column published by The Guardian, John Naughton writes that the site and its reliance on volunteers to edit and fact-check is an embodiment of the Internet’s potential to harness society’s collective intelligence.
“Reading Wikipedia discussion pages provides a way of understanding how a particular proposition or assertion came to be made and how it evolved...