Paper presented at Teaching as if the World Matters, 2nd Annual Conference (http://www.utoronto.ca/baitworm/), University of Toronto, May 11-15, 2001

[This is a draft. Do not quote without contacting the authors. Content is subject to change without notice.]

There is no question of the importance of the Internet in all phases of our lives - personal and professional. And professional educators, in particular, are increasingly working with learners in using the Internet as part of their learning setting. While there are many different routes for people to learn to use the Internet (e.g., books (primers), online software, tutoring by others) most educators (indeed people in general) do not have the broader picture of both how the Internet operates and how they operate in relation to it, they have not learned much about the Internet. For most, the Internet appears out of thin air through some technological fiat. Our contention is that the long history of the development of the Internet has led to the existence of a formal structure, and that concomitant with that structure there is a curriculum of the Internet itself (See Krol, 1992, for an early snapshot of the pre-WWW Internet.).

We deliberately use the term "curriculum" as something broader than its usual location as an aspect of schooling, because curriculum is something that provides scaffolding for learning in any setting. Although much has been said and written about the Internet from technical, psychological, sociological and personal perspectives, we believe that ideas from education can contribute to an understanding of issues surrounding Internet literacy. There are two aspects of this contribution: the first is a curriculum which deals with skills in using the Internet, and the second is the structure for learning about the Internet. The former is what we have come to understand as all that is necessary to become Internet literate. However, there is a need to learn more about the Internet than merely what to click, when. The latter, we hope, contributes to a general literacy about the structure of the Internet. If we are all going to use the Internet, and create learning settings within the Internet, then it is important to become aware of how the context of a particular instance fits into the larger context of the Internet itself. This is a world beyond textbooks and Internet primers, into the dynamic world of exploring learning about the environment in which one is working; leading to the construction of knowledge about the Internet itself. It is part of the broader view of media literacy, which enables learners to unpack the underlying educational, political, social and economic complexities embedded within technical constructions.

In "Learning Cyberspace: An Educational View of Virtual Community", a chapter we prepared for Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace, we write about how virtual communities can be learning communities (Nolan & Weiss, In Press). Our strategy was to conceptualize a framework for learning in virtual communities. In this edited volume devoted to learning and virtual communities, we were the only authors addressing the topic from an educators’ perspective. Our thinking led us to conceptualize a Curriculum of Virtual Community, thus enabling us to better understand the kinds of learning seemingly appropriate to being involved in ‘virtual community".

In this paper, we propose to re-think these views in considering the broader community that has been constructed and marketed as the Internet, which has been defined as "A system of linked computer networks, international in scope, that facilitates data communication services such as remote login, file transfer, electronic mail and newsgroups" (NetLingo ref new ref). It has come to mean more than this, comprising almost limitless numbers of communities, and information nodes and networks devoted to among other things: commerce, education, governance, personal affairs. The Internet requires interactions among five key industries: telecommunication, software, Internet service providers, search engine providers, and Web content providers, not to mention content providers. The totality of this framework overarches issues associated with virtual community. Perhaps our starting point should be a brief summary of our views on Curriculum of Virtual Community.

We suggest that there are several locations for learning when considering virtual communities. There is the location associated with first initiating and then maintaining the locus of interaction, what we consider to be the Curriculum of Initiation and Governance. This requires that an individual or individuals make the decision to create and then maintain a virtual site or location (Collins & Berge, 1997). For some individuals, it may be the first time that they have undertaken the responsibility for such a location by adopting the role as a list moderator, web master, IRC chat facilitator, or MOO wizard. Even with prior experiences as a participant in such a space, there is the necessity to collect information about and make decisions on such actions as choosing and implementing software, determining the purpose and governmentality (Foucault, 1991) of the accepted and anticipated interactions, netiquette, and inviting others to participate and co-create the environment that has been initiated.

The second location, the Curriculum of Access, is associated with accessing and becoming socialized to virtual community itself. The kinds of learning that take place include what is required to become a member: learning about the site, how to access it, and the rules that govern membership. Finally, there is the Curriculum of Membership, that relates the actual engagements in the community, the purposes for which the site was constructed and the gains people expect from it. Such purposes may be expressly for learning in the conventional sense, as found in computer supported cooperative work environments, where a range of cognitive knowledge, skills and processes are the usual purposes for such groups, although there may be affective learnings as well.

Our framework of the Curriculum of Virtual Community links to the larger issues of the Curriculum of the Internet by extending the general curriculum elements found in various virtual communities to the much broader conception of the Internet itself - which can be seen as a metacommunity. This metacommunity not only includes the visible locations that most users know about, but also the usually unseen communities that govern much of what happens on the Internet. The locations that the average user will locate at some point include: the use of e-mail; to belonging to bulletin boards and e-mail discussion lists; chat utilities: IRCs/ICQ/AIMs; collaborative virtual environments: MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes; web journaling and logging: blogger.com; and multimedia communities such as idrive.com, napster.com, etc. (Nolan & Hogbin, 2001). Behind these locations lay a myriad of communities that govern the functioning of the Internet itself, such as www.w3.org, ICANN, IEEE task forces and USENET administrators.

For the Curriculum of the Internet, it is not sufficient to merely be aware of the larger presence of the Curriculum of Initiation and Governance. Individuals need to know how their own particular purview is contextualized in the larger environment. We are talking in a mode that is not specific to a particular software or environment, but rather speaking to developing a notion of curriculum that encounters the location of the Internet as a place in which specific activities and interactions take place. These activities and interactions do not occur in a vacuum, a so-called neutral environment. Just as values underlie the concept of "curriculum’ and curricular activities, so is the Internet a creature of social, political, economic and other interests.

As aspects of learning in real life community carry over to virtual community, aspects of virtual curriculum carry over to the Curriculum of the Internet. The complexities of the Internet mitigate against easy understanding of its operation. Much of what goes on on the internet is largely opaque, not readily available for scrutiny. Because of this mostly anonymous infrastructure, we tend to view the Internet as neutral, in terms of values, and a bit of a black box in which magic just happens. How do we get beyond the twin features of opaqueness and the illusion of neutrality? We believe that this requires some conceptual means for unpacking these taken for granted features, and suggest that curriculum discourse offers strategies for raising important issues. Among the concepts we would like to introduce are the notions of the Hidden Curriculum and the Null Curriculum.

Elizabeth Vallance’s work focused on the distinction between the explicit curriculum of skills development and the real purpose (hidden curriculum) of socializing youth to American values in the Nineteenth Century mid-west, the Hidden Curriculum (Vallance, 1977). The term, originally coined by Philip Jackson in Life in Classrooms, has assumed mantra-like importance to critics of educational structures and institutions (Apple, 1980; Jackson, 1968, 1992; Vallance, 1977). The concept has been useful in exposing the values, attitudes, and structural mechanisms underlying the curriculum experienced by learners.

A related aspect of the Hidden Curriculum is Elliot Eisner’s notion of the Null Curriculum. The Null Curriculum is based on a recognition that learning involves both opportunities and lost opportunities; that consideration must be given to the fact that every choice you make precludes other choices that are not or cannot be made. The Null Curriculum is one of what you did not or could not choose. In the context of formal learning environments, the null curriculum may be choosing to study music over studying physics, and represents an interplay between the two. But on a systemic level, the Null Curriculum is more problematic. Testing and evaluative structures that privilege one culture, gender or language group over another represents a Null Curriculum that limits opportunities for some learners while providing advantages for others. At a deeper level, national funding strategies that privilege different social groups or place restrictions on the scope and choice of learning environments available represents a Null Curriculum that influences what kind of things can be learned. These examples are not necessarily hidden, but they are often ignored for what they are, and are taken for granted as factors effecting the creation of learning environments by educators, parents, students and policy makers. The underlying issue of the Null Curriculum is opportunity to learn, or more appropriately, lost opportunities to learn. In the context of the Internet, there are numerous examples of such lost opportunities, ones in which individuals make conscious choices of what to attend to, and those which are structured so that there is little or no choice in one’s activities. The latter is where the Hidden and Null Curricula intersect.

The Hidden Curriculum represents the barriers that cannot be easily identified and problematized. What people think they are experiencing and participating in is the curriculum and often the Hidden Curriculum is what ensures the maintenance of the Null Curriculum. Encountering the Hidden Curriculum and the Null Curriculum involves unpacking these curricula by identifying the ‘taken for granted’ features to suggest strategies for finding the complexities and values that are not explicit. This helps to direct what and how we can learn. By looking at the Curriculum of the Internet in terms of learning about the net and how it is created, structured and governed, we start the unpacking process.

The Internet is a Western Cultural construct created by English speaking while males in science-based academic institutions. This ‘taken for granted’ is largely ignored by most of us who work in humanities disciplines, multicultural, linguistic and post-modern learning environments. The net is run by institutions and corporations that do not necessarily reflect the goals and values of those who use it. However, the Hidden Curriculum of what opportunities are available to use are guided and determined, at some level, by them. We can work and teach against this Hidden Curriculum, but we cannot easily over come it, and we should not ignore it. The reason we cannot over-come it is because the hardware and software infrastructure is created developed and maintained by organizations over-whom we have no actual control, and more importantly they have created the Internet over decades, and it is practically impossible to invent a competing network.

See Overheads below.

Subversion == digging up the roots.

To paraphrase an old song, "Now that you have found the Net, what are you going to do about it?" Or for another, " One thing is clear: Our Net is here to stay". But is it really our Net? We have suggested that most of us don’t have ownership. The question is, how can we become more knowledgeable about what it is, how it operates, and how we can be proactive about using the Net for our own interests. How can awareness and knowledge about such issues as open-sourcing versus commercializing the Net enable individuals to make personal decisions about what they use, and even, produce.

We are suggesting that the unpacking of the structures, relationships and interests underlying the Net is a step toward demystification. We believe it is an educational issue and have initiated some rudimentary thoughts about a Curriculum of the Net. The field of education is implicated in many ways with the Net, from calls from politicians, policy-makers, administrators, and parents pushing the system as the only way to compete in the global economy, to teachers who are attempting to create learning conditions for that imperative to be engrained in the curriculum. This is no less so for colleges and universities, institutions competing with each other as to which have the most potent available technology.

We argue that for the most part, these efforts have produced a skills-based curriculum and that we should be moving beyond the procedural, to unpack the deeper structures of complexity of social political economic technical and personal value-making activities that make up the Curriculum of the Internet. What is needed are courses in Internet Literacy to be offered as required courses at each level of the education system, appropriately geared to learners’ capabilities. At the university level, this should not only be found in Cultural Studies, Computer Science and Sociology departments, but cut across the curriculum. In fact, it is possible that Cultural Studies is more concerned with the culture on the net than the culture of the net.

Our foray into conceptualizing the Curriculum of the Internet may be suggestive of one way of thinking about Internet literacy. There is other material from other individuals which may provide more appropriate analyses and prescriptions. What is important is to engage in subversive activity to expose the myths, and create amore literate citizenry. After all, to subvert is to go beneath and expose the roots, all the better to be constructive.

• Relates to initiating and maintaining locus of interaction at a virtual site.
• Information needed: software to be used; determining ground rules, and maintenance.

• Relates to how potential members gain access, become socialized to a virtual community.
• How to become a member, and rules of a specific community.

• Relates to actual engagements in the community, and the outcomes of membership.
• The Hidden and Null Curricula of the Internet

• Looking beyond the explicit curriculum of to the real purpose behind the curriculum.
• The term is useful in exposing the values, attitudes, and structural mechanisms underlying the curriculum experienced by learners.

• The Null Curriculum is based on a recognition that learning involves both opportunities and lost opportunities; that consideration must be given to the fact that every choice you make precludes other choices that are not or cannot be made.
• The Null Curriculum is one of what you did not or could not choose.
• A Null Curriculum influences what kind of things can be learned.
• The Null Curriculum is often ignored for what it is, and is taken for granted in terms of factors effecting the creation of learning environments by educators, parents, students and policy makers.
• The underlying issue of the Null Curriculum is opportunity to learn, or more appropriately, lost opportunities to learn.

• The actual code that lies under everything online was written by and for Western big science institutions.
• The World Wide Web was created in 1989 at CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland, by Tim Berners-Lee, to allow physicists to share data.
• The Internet is English first and foremost, and all other languages are an afterthought.
• URLs are written in ascii, not Japanese or Russian.
• All major software packages are created to western specifications, and are ported to other languages, if it is deemed profitable. Microsoft decided to not port Windows98 to Icelandic.
• Unicode, the multinational standard for character sets is still not the standard format, even though it has been around for a long time.
• HC: Socializing the world to the English Western cognitive and corporate way of thinking
• NC: The opportunity for a truly multicultural multilingual Internet is a fiction.

The Internet was funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) (http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa.html) in the late 1960s as a response to Soviet threat. Work was done at academic/institutional organizations until the US government let it go commercial. Now it is driven by commercial interests.

• The web is run by www.w3.org the World Wide Web Consortium, founded by Tim Berners-Lee. And the WWW has been turned over to business interests. Of the 500 odd members involved with W3.org, none are individuals or appear to be NGOs. Universities, governments and corporations control the standards of the WWW, and do what’s best for them. Corporations directly and indirectly fund universities and governments.
• ICANN.org (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the now the main regulatory body for internet domains, and the public is only allowed to be involved as non-voting members, and only for individuals are savvy enough to know of ICANN’s existence.
• Individuals access the net only through the mediation of corporations and institutions, with the exception of minor players like Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/) and FidoNet (www.fidonet.org)

• HC: The WWW is promoted as the Internet
• NC: The non-corporatized Net is largely hidden from view.
• The hidden net includes all the elements that predate the net: telnet, ftp, gopher, IRC, talk, MOO/MUD, as well as the substrate of the net only open to technically savvy folks.

• HC: search engines control what we see based on how it was programmed to see, and how it manipulates that view for profit.
• NC: search engines perpetuate a Null Curriculum of limited choice.

• It is always important to know What's Not Included.
• Search engines include millions of pages in their databases, but none of them come close to indexing the entire Web, much less the entire Internet. Here is a list of some of what is missing:
• Content of Adobe PDF and formatted files
• The content in sites requiring a log in
• CGI output such as data requested by a form
• Intranets; pages not linked from anywhere else
• Commercial resources with domain limitations
• Sites that use a robots.txt file to keep files and/or directories off limits
• Non-Web resources

(Source: http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/strat/)

Corporations try to be your total net experience, giving you all you want in one easy place.

• NC: reduced complexity and depth of experience
• HC: commercial corporate values become the context for any community, and all communication is mediated by the individual
• Sympatico > Entertainment > Literature means Sympatico is dictating what is valid.

If you restrict yourself to the most superficial commercial spaces, this is true. The price of ease is limitation and superficiality. Making the ‘Internet’ easy just makes it shallow.

• HC: Users are socialized into a corporate driven model
• NC: Subversive elements are difficult to locate
• The Internet is not easy to use.
• It is a space and an interconnection of many communities that takes lifetimes to learn and explore.
• It is not mastered in a day or a year.

Illusion of purpose: Collusion of purpose because commercial interests bombard advertisement on the user and have turned user data into a commodity. Whose interests are being served?

Until recent outcry Microsoft’s Passport terms of service stated that MS would own all content that passed through its servers. Only public outcry caused them to rewrite this policy. The policy "granted Microsoft and unspecified affiliates the right to "use, modify, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display" and take other actions with any messages, files or data entered into the Passport Web site" (Mainelli, 2001)

NC: Non-corporate mediated resources are hidden

HC: All content is potential product.

• Microsoft is Set to be Top Foe of Free Code – no open source lunch
• NAPSTER – control over content
• MS lawsuit – monopoly of code
• Hollywood writer’s strike – compensation for net residuals
• Open Source – seen as failure by business

• Napster was a community of sharing
• Opposed corporate interests
• Opposed corporatification of music
• Community of napster. Variety of interests. Community shut down by conglomerates. The people wrote it. People use it.
• NC: Lost opportunity of unmediated users sharing.
• HC: Control of access to information, content and community.

GET IT OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM.

After rhizome.org refused to put up a splash screen created by 0100101110110101.org, 0100101110110101.org now fleshes out the rhizome.org homepage.

BELIEF IS THE ENEMY. The concept of the "splash screen" is derived from commercial desktop application software. A "splash screen" displays a fancy logo while the program loads into memory. But splash screens are more than just corporate identity symbols. Their purpose is to hide the actual process of the program launching: the linking to libraries, allocation of memory, establishment of file and network access, etc..

THE ANSWER IS THE NEGATION OF THE QUESTION. By turning http://www.0100101110110101.ORG into a HTML sourcecode display of the rhizome.org homepage, we make rhizome.org our splashscreen.

DON'T GET US WRONG. We applaude rhizome.org for using splash screens. Presenting itself in every bit as much as a "portal" as Yahoo, AOL, MSN & Company, rhizome.org critically debunks all false myths that Net Art was ever anything different from corporate mass media and failed dotcoms.

Curriculum of the Internet

• A subversive act
• Subversion == digging up the roots.
• Against the panopticon of observation and bombardment with data collection and advertisement
• The net cannot be replaced with something egalitarian
• Power structures can be countered at every turn
• Users can learn how to find their way around the road blocks on the Information Highway.
• It is possible to someday build an systemic annex to the Internet truly free of corporate interference. But how?