[Air-l] RE: impressions?

[Neil Randall]

The Internet is as unremarkable to most students today as fax machines are
to us. But part of the reason, I believe, is that they don't realize what it
is and what it can do, and that it's constantly changing - morphing might be
a better term. Part of the fault lies with the educational system (high
school, I mean) and, ironically, computer magazines, both of which have
insisted on the Net primarily as a resource, a kind of big, amorphous
library. And it's also, for the students, a souped-up telephone system.
Libraries and telephone systems aren't particularly exciting institutions,
at least not when you're 19 years old. 

We don't do enough, I believe, to stress the Net in its role as a playground
for experimentation and creativity, and as something that we can all modify,
adapt, and even alter radically. To me, that's what makes it an exciting
medium: there's nothing stopping anyone from developing new ways of doing a
great many things, even if these things are developed only as prototypes. 

There's another reason for the lack of interest, though. You can get a great
deal of free stuff on the Internet, and our students know that. They
download music, movies, software, porn, and much more, and because they've
been doing so since adolescence or even earlier, the stuff has little value
for them. When you're deluged by free music, when you can get it any time
you want, it's no big deal after a while. I realize I'm sounding like my
mother here - "How will you ever know the value of things if you don't have
to work for them?" - but it seems true nevertheless. 

Neil Randall