How Do We (Not) Teach Online (Yet)

Ushi Krausz – The Virtual Campus for youths, Tel Aviv University & Eli Hurwitz – The Rothschild Fund

Many people and institutions teach youths and children via the Internet.  Our claim is that a large part of them translate, verbatim, the textbook or handbook to the screen.  Translate and miss out.  Below, we will propose revolutionary models that take advantage of the Internet's uniqueness.  Some of them are already in operation, some will be offered this year, and some are only in our dreams.

In this workshop, we will demonstrate different original alternatives for existing Internet teaching.  For example:

• The Golden Mouse championship: How to teach 2000 children around Israel about Um Kultum, pneumatics (what is it, anyway?), modern physics, cartesian axis systems, and… spoken Mandarin.

• The "Yerucham Crown" town game – a whole town participates in the game: the Internet as means of communication, but not only, and the town itself as living bibliography.

• The Path of Israel contest – Reality television style Internet: human pawns, the country as bibliography, and twenty anxious teams of teenagers running around everywhere.

• The ICQ Strike – Too subversive? A national educational event for 6^th graders, secretive, surprising, and virally distributed.

Where Are You?  Online Teaching and Education and the Members of the High-Tech Industry

Eli Hurwitz – The Rothschild Fund, & Ushi Krausz – The Virtual Campus for youths, Tel Aviv University

Shoemakers (do they still exist?) will make shoes, programmers will program, engineers will design, and teachers will teach.

And we want to ask, will they?

We do not intend to claim that anyone can be a good teacher.  Teaching is a profession, and education is a field in and of itself, but, we claim, the technological revolution of past years offers opportunities for fascinating collaborations, which are not implemented often enough.

What is the role of industry professionals?  Donate funds after their exit and leave?  And what about creativitly?  And what about the possiblities for unique development of innovative models?

In this workshop, we will illustrate different models for possible cooperation between creative people from the high-tech industry and educators.  We will discuss potential educational models based on your technologies, and announce the launch of a think-tank (that will continue to operate after Kinernet) in which industry professionals will work with us on breaking the boundaries of traditional teaching and building novel models.