A couple of days ago, I taught my 9th graders about the Internet.  My slides in PDF format are on the course website.  I took a bit of a risk: this baffles me and I think explains a lot about the sad state of education, but kids don’t expect more than ten minutes of lecture time.  We did about thirty minutes and it went surprisingly well.

I really wanted to do this because I believe in understanding what I use.  Just having a little bit of a sense of how computing tools work and why they were created can go a long way in becoming a better user, I think.  The first thing I did in this summer class was have students take apart computers and that worked really well for increasing understanding of computers but it was less clear to me how we would learn about the Internet.  We ended up having a conversation about it.

A lot of really interesting questions came up that I hadn’t necessarily anticipated:

• Where is the Internet? Demonstrates that students really have no idea what it is.  We talked about how it’s not a place, it’s a big distributed system spread all over the world.
• What does the Internet look like? I had a representation in my slides that helped but wasn’t entirely satisfying to them.  Is that a picture of the Internet? Well, we can’t take a picture of it since it’s really quite abstract.  The best we can do is draw computers on the network as nodes and draw lines between them to represent physical connections and attempt to capture how many hops there are between them.
• What would happen if a terrorist hit a backbone connection? I didn’t anticipate this question though part of the idea in giving this lesson was that students would better be able to assess policy questions surrounding the Internet.  Two different sections were really interested in this and the next day I added a slide about the Alexandria cable cuts that compromised Internet access for millions in late 2008.  Students had no idea the Internet was this vulnerable and couldn’t believe we had cables dangling in the oceans.
• What would happen if a terrorist hit the main address book? (I didn’t really go into details about DNS and root nameservers thinking the address book analogy was sufficient)  Again, I thought students were very sharp to notice a vulnerability there that I wasn’t going to go in much detail about.  Though there recently have been increasing efforts to mirror root nameservers, the whole system is surprisingly vulnerable.
• So I can make any webpage popular on Google? I don’t know quite how students imagined that Google worked, but it didn’t seem to have occured to them that it was exploitable in some ways.  I think that notion made them uncomfortable.  Who can they trust if not Google?!

Some students tuned out after the first 10 minutes but a lot were very engaged and told me afterwards that they had learned a lot.  I think this kind of material needs to come in somewhere.  I know it’s not hands-on and flashy, but it’s really important (I’d love to see a simulation of how data flows through the world and see what happens when we cut cables, etc).  So where does it fit in?  It’s part history, part networking, part geography, part civics.  I think we owe it to ourselves to make sure it fits in somewhere.  In the mean time, I’ll keep teaching it whenever I get the chance.