Background
What is the internet? “Internet is a huge machine that exists for the purpose of transporting little packages of information called packets” [2]. One can think of these packets as “tiny digital postcards” that are “stamped with the address of its sender and the intended destination” [2]. Technology Review online magazine writer Simson Garfinkel writes, “To understand these packets, every computer on the internet needs to communicate with the same fundamental language. Computer designers call these languages “protocols.” Today’s internet uses IPv4, the 4th version of the Internet Protocol” [2].
Most users who can afford it in America use broadband internet over dial-up internet. “Broadband allows interactive, real-time audio and video, plus extensive graphics to be delivered to desktop computers up to 100 times faster than existing dial-up modems” [5]. Broadband internet access apart from being important for schools and colleges is crucial for big business where suppliers and customers expect to “conduct business over high-speed networks” [5].
“In the early days of computers in classrooms, critics worried that technology would undermine the role of schools in socializing children” [1]. But fact is “linking computers actually increases social interaction and collaboration.” “The computer isn’t the first new technology to excite the imagination of educational reformers. Motion pictures, radio, television and even the airplane also were seen initially as tools that would open the classroom to the outside world and greatly increase what students learn and how fast they learn it” [1].“In 1996, only 3 percent of the nation’s classrooms were connected to the internet, but the World Wide Web had burst onto the scene, and American were beginning to realize that a technology gap was developing” [5]. But today, “more than 90 percent of K-12 public schools are on the internet” [5]. This just goes to show the progress technology has made over a period of a decade or more in America.
