The time required for the development, refinement, and adoption of appropriate new pedagogies may be a decade or more. To our colleagues on this long journey project organizers, curriculum developers, researchers, and teachers we pass along six recommendations. Although we ground these recommendations in our research on network science curricula, we seek to apply them toward educational uses of technology generally and toward use of the Internet in science education specifically. Use the Internet to broaden the context of locally grounded inquiry. For curriculum to use the Internet effectively, it should employ the Internet as a supportive context for extending student inquiries.
Students can now investigate almost any topic using resources available on the Internet.
However, teachers and curriculum developers should anchor initial investigations in local phenomena so that the concepts involved remain comprehensible and meaningful to students. Maintain the classroom, not the online community, as the primary learning environment. The most effective network science curricula foster a strong sense of inquiry within a classroom rather than among distant classes. The network provides resources in the forms of expertise, data, and information, all of which support and extend classroom-based inquiry. Provide teachers and students with multiple entry points for technology use and curriculum.