Teachers' Conceptions of the Internet and the World Wide Web: A Representational Toolkit as a Model of Expertise

Abstract

Given rapid changes in the use of network computer technologies in education, it is increasingly important to better understand teachers' conceptions of these technologies, especially as used in teaching and learning. This is particularly true regarding teachers' ways of thinking about the Internet and the World Wide Web. Two questions are addressed in this study: First, does a teacher's conceptual representation of a network technology have an impact on how he or she uses it? Second, do experts think about network technologies such as the Internet and the World Wide Web in ways different than novices? To examine the role of teachers' conceptual representations in detail, a survey and ten case studies were conducted among pre- and in-service teachers enrolled in university courses. The survey elicited the representations that teachers had of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The case studies consisted of network problem-solving tasks using think-aloud protocols. The results show a surprisingly diverse set of plausible representations of the Internet and the Web, not related to the level of technical expertise. The case studies reveal relationships between representations and navigation strategies, in which experts employ multiple structurally and epistemically different representations at different stages in network tasks. This suggests that experts have “representational toolkit” containing many different representations. Experts not only know how to use each representational tool, but they know which representational tool to use for which purpose and how to sequence the selection and use of multiple representational tools. This reconceptualization of the nature of expertise has implications for the design of educational applications of technologies, for teacher training, and for learning and teaching more generally.