This paper discusses the impact of the Internet on school education. In the first section, the paper introduces a project titled Think Quest, which promotes cooperative study by middle and high school students across national borders. This project shows us the possibility of globalized study, because it involves students who live in different countries cooperating to create a home page using e-mail. At the same time, it promotes participatory learning by students, because the students can actively participate in the process of producing learning materials. In the conventional school model, authorized agencies and school teachers have been considered the main actors who write textbooks and compile teaching materials, while the students have been considered passive receptors of what is given by the teachers. Thus, the new system indicates that a new relationship between teachers and students may be appearing with the emerging Internet.
The second section discusses the creative side of home page building, using Nonaka's theory of the knowledge creation process. By creating a home page, students learn how to collect the necessary information corresponding to their intellectual curiosity, how to organize the information into systematized learning materials, and how to express the outcomes in a style which other students can easily understand.
The third section indicates how the Internet has created a new value concept, named “copy left, ” which permits the free use of intellectual products. The concept of the copyright emerged together with the development of book publishing enterprises and the university system. The idea of the copyright is deeply rooted in the academic recruitment and promotion system. But with emerging Internet, the conventional idea of the copyright is being challenged by the newly emerging idea of “copy left.”
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