What is the Internet? Jen Wofford talked it over with an American-born fourth grader. Then she gave him a stack of magazines, scissors, and glue, and he made this picture:

Next, Wofford did the same thing with a child the same age who had recently come to the U.S. from Burma. Here’s what he came up with:

“I was surprised by how many of them put money in their pictures,” said Wofford. “It could mean that computers seem very expensive to them, or it could be that they see the Internet as a place where they can earn money.” The first boy also put numbers in his picture. “He wanted to fill up the whole page with numbers,” says Wofford. “The emphasis on games was also strong for all the children. To them, the Internet is not about communication yet. It’s about getting games and playing with Google.”

Wofford, an assistant dean in the Computing and Information Science Department at Cornell University, introduced ten third and fourth-graders to the Internet in the community room of their apartment complex in Ithaca, NY. These images are from the Expert Voices blog Real Place, Virtual Space, which combines her log of this after-school class with intriguing posts from the students themselves.

“People say that literacy education is not value-neutral. The class showed me that this is also true for training in technological literacy,” she says. In one class, students built and furnished their own virtual structures using Activeworlds, which is software hosted and programmed by Cornell’s Theory Center. A Vietnamese girl who was learning English later commented that she liked how the game allowed to play and learn at the same time: “When you click on the picture of the TV, you will see the little field. You can see the word TV2. Then you just ignore the number you can know how to say that word in English.”

“I never would have thought of that,” said Wofford. “It shows me that we need to be careful not to frame the problems for them using our assumptions of what the Internet is for. We need to let children explore in an open way so they can figure things out for themselves.”