THE INTERNET AS A K-12 EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE - EMERGING ISSUES OF INFORMATION ACCESS AND FREEDOM

The paper explores issues likely to emerge as K-12 educators incorpora te wide-area networking (WAN) into the curriculum and become both cons umers and providers of materials on the Internet. Issues arising with regard to schools as information consumers include decisions that must be made regarding student access to resources (both data and people) which include those that large segments of the community will find obj ectionable or potentially harmful. Issues arising from the fact that s chools using WAN are likely to become information providers also have several aspects. One aspect concerns legal issues revolving around sch ool boards as publishers of on-line resources. Another concerns studen t on-line behaviors that may reflect negatively on the school and on t he community, and how schools will deal with those behaviors without p enalizing students educationally. This paper describes some approaches for dealing with these concerns based on what others have done and on experiences in a large-scale K-12 wide-area networking project called Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh.