Educational Horizons and Tools for an Open Society

More importantly, we exchange because we want to learn about one another. Exchanges provide us with exposure to new and different cultures. We exchange in order to gain a new perspective on our understanding of our place in the world -- what it means to us and what we mean to it. Project Harmony exchanges give participants the opportunity to get past the politics that so often divide us to realize the greater commonalities of humanity that bond us together.

How do we accomplish such a feat? We travel. We see, hear, smell, taste and feel another place. We develop friendships, partnerships, lasting relationships. We spend time collecting memories which fill our past and help to inform our future. At its heart, an exchange is an educational adventure.

Thirteen years and over 150 exchanges later, we at Project Harmony believe that there is still much to be learned. There are new experiences to be had, new friends to meet, new adventures -- learning adventures -- to embark upon. Speaking to what this conference is about -- there are new ways to share with one another. New tools have moved the horizon much closer. The distance separating US and NIS classrooms is no longer measured in kilometers, but kilobytes and baud. Our method of transportation is no longer airplanes, but instead a web of satellite, radio telephone and electronic data connections. The language we use to communicate is called TCP/IP, HTML, JAVA.

The Internet. E-mail. The World Wide Web. These are the tools for 21^st century teachers. They are also tools for business, entertainment and recreation. While these uses for the Internet came about as the technology expanded, first and foremost, the Internet was created to be an educational tool. Many of the teachers here today at this conference are stewards of this new medium, assuring that the Internet continues to be used as a tool for education. In doing so, they are placing thousands of doors before their students, each leading to a difference learning adventure. They are empowering themselves and their colleagues with unlimited resources and opportunities.

The Internet School Linkage Program (ISLP) was established in 1996 in order to facilitate this empowerment. It aimed to apply this new technology to the exchange experience that had proved so rewarding for Project Harmony over the past thirteen years. The results of the first year of ISLP-- 20 US-NIS school partnerships and a dozen other educational institutions across the NIS went online. Educators worked together to create Internet-based learning adventures that fast-forwarded their classroom to the next horizon in education.

Through this program, teachers in the NIS and teachers in the US are learning together how to make these telecommunications tools meaningful and relevant in their work. While many countries struggle to restructure their educational systems for the next century, the example set by a small group of Russian, Belarussian, Ukrainian and American teachers through ISLP makes one feel optimistic about the future of international education and exchange. These new tools have proven to reinvigorate educators and excite students about the learning process.

Teaching is just as much a lifestyle as it is a job. Good teachers are not just teachers when they are in the classroom. They are individuals dedicated to a life of pursuing knowledge and experience with the intent on sharing it with others. New advances in technology have helped to expand the opportunities for teachers, but at the same time, have brought teachers back to being elementary students once again. The Internet, E-mail and the World Wide Web are tools that teachers must learn to understand, manipulate and adapt for their own use before they can effectively use them to empower their students.

The best teachers are students themselves throughout their lives. The teachers who have participated in ISLP over the past year and a half are a handful of those best teachers. They have become students again in order to become better teachers. By working together, these NIS and US are defining the new directions for education in the 21^st century. They are the quiet heroes in society today. Their endeavors to bring the Internet into the classroom are not only strengthening their students, but strengthening civil society as well by actively supporting a free exchange of information and ideas. The Internet is -- at its best -- the embodiment of freedom of speech and freedom of information. It is this free and unhindered flow of information -- across classrooms, across borders, across cultures -- that makes for an open society. It is democracy-building at the grassroots level. From open schools to open societies, these teachers are leading the way.