Current Issues in Education > Volume 7, 2004 > Number 1

2.Citation Information

Hendricks, J. A. (2004, January 20). The Netgeneration: The Internet as classroom and community. Current Issues in Education [On-line], 7(1). Available: http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume7/number1/

The Netgeneration: The Internet as classroom and community

Jennifer A. Hendricks
Arizona State University

Classroom practice in the real world has become increasingly incommensurate with the lived experience of students. Policy dictates, packaged curricula, the commodification and commercialization of the classroom, along with high stakes testing have objectified students. Young people, consisting of all age cohorts and class fractions, have never known their world to not include the Internet. They are well versed and completely comfortable with negotiating its space. They have been utilizing this technology since before they started kindergarten, whether it was in games that they played or Internet sites they logged on to.

Much has been made of the Internet's potential to wrest power from the interests that dominate it. The Internet allows ordinary citizens to spread the word and organize resistance as a form of popular culture. In short, to fight power. As a technological artifact and a popular image, the Internet provides a site for exploring and positioning "the world.” It is necessary to recognize and critically examine other sites and or institutions as places of knowledge learning. And where do the technology savvy teens go to learn? They utilize the Internet as a major pedagogical site. As John Street (1997) contends, "…culture neither manipulates nor mirrors us; instead we live through and with it" (p. 4). It seems that we are not compelled by culture to imitate it but rather to immerse ourselves in it. In studying the culture of emerging (trans) national cybersocieties, we have arrived at a new moment in history: a moment in which such terms as class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and ideology are no longer useful (because they assume singular "identities" for example). We are, according to postmodern theories, now in a culture that is post-national, post-ideological and post-class--a culture shaped not by "production" (labor) but by our social relations of shopping ("consumption").

Thus the Internet is best thought of as a place, which is far more than a highway. It is a destination, a place where we can create new social designs, where we can dissolve and reconstruct the classroom.

The global Internet transforms this - for those, as always, who have access to it - because it enables like-minded people to form communities regardless of where they are located in the physical world. Before the Internet, teens had little contact with other teenagers outside of their high school, or school district. Meanwhile, fans of obscure bands would have little to do with their counterparts elsewhere, and people interested in certain hobbies, or artists, or skills, could only feed their interest through one-way communication processes such as reading a magazine or newsletter about it.

The Internet changed all that. Now, regardless of where they are in the world, teens with similar interests, or with similar backgrounds, or with similar attitudes, can join communities of like-minded people, and share views, exchange information, and build relationships. In practice, what these communities look like are teenagers sending electronic text to each other. the Internet surpasses the restrictions of fixed locations such as schools and opens up a new world of understanding and knowledge. Participants in cyberspace may come and go, but the websites will remain.

Thus, the opportunity for counter education exists on the Internet. As Giroux (1995) contends students, as well as teachers, and their empowerment as radical intellectuals change the concept of school as a part of a general struggle over essential social change (p. 30). The Internet offers students boundless possibilities for exploration and exchange of ideas (Westera and Sloep 2001). On the Internet, students are free to ‘log on’ at any time and place of their choosing. They are ultimately free to explore in a new construction of the ‘classroom.’

Technology makes possible a reconfiguring of school; a refocusing of everyday life, and the use of the tools and techniques of computer and image technologies expands the field of politics and culture.

Author

Jennifer A. Hendricks,  Jennifer.Hendricks@asu.edu.

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