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In addition to Pennsylvania, this round of the project includes classrooms from Maryland, Alaska, Kansas, California, Texas, Spain, Germany, India, Qatar and Canada.

The Flat Classroom Project, cofounded by Julie Lindsay, Beijing, China and Vicki Davis, Camilla, Ga., speaks to the very heart of Pennsylvania's Classrooms for the Future initiative and 21st Century learning, Nestico said.

Students are not just doing education, they are living it, creating it, and ultimately, reshaping what it will look like for others in the future, Nestico said.

it was a mildly harrowing but ultimately rewarding experienc

Yet, as Vicki Davis quipped at the beginning of the project, “The thing about working on the bleeding edge is sometimes you bleed.”

The reality of asynchronous communication that is at times messy and requires patience was not quite as exciting as they were hoping.

Connecting Cultures For the same reasons but in a far different environment, social studies teacher Suzie Nestico oversees a project that involves 14 schools and nearly 400 students in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, South Korea, and the United States. She teaches students in grades 10 through 12 at the 900-student Mount Carmel Area High School in Mount Carmel, Pa. See Also On-Demand Webinar: E-Learning Goes Global From professional development for teachers in China to the use of mobile technology to bring new learning opportunities to remote villages in Africa, e-learning is bringing advanced courses, expert teachers, and an awareness of life in other countries to students around the globe. • View this on-demand webinar. “We’re a small, rural town of 6,000 with ultra-conservative family values and viewpoints, and most of our students have never gone anywhere else,” said Ms. Nestico, the project manager for the Flat Classroom Project, an international collaborative effort that links classrooms around the globe. She also built a course called 21st Century Global Studies that started this academic year. The course is for students in grades 10 through 12 who, through project- and inquiry-based assignments such as editing wiki pages, learn that working collaboratively with other cultures—an increasingly marketable skill—can be challenging. “It’s a big shift for them to go from ‘me’ to ‘we,’ ” she said. “I can’t help but think that the more kids we involve in projects like this, the more we start to break down some of this sense of entitlement” that exists among students in the United States. “Just imagine if you wrote 200 words on your wiki page, and when you went back the next day, you saw that students in Korea had changed a couple of your sentences because they thought it sounded better another way,” Ms. Nestico said. “There are a lot of sighs at first, and it’s a messy process, but it’s very much worth doing. This is where we truly push learning to the highest level.” Some lessons have less to do with a final grade than with understanding that a simple phrase in one culture can easily be misperceived in another. When a student in California posted an online request last summer for information about a “flash mob,” for example, a teacher from Germany immediately jumped in to write that European students couldn’t even talk about such a thing because of the London riots. And two years ago, during an education-related trip to Mumbai, India, Ms. Nestico had to nix any exclamatory T-shirts that might offend the local residents, such as “Holy cow!,” because cows are considered sacred animals in India.

A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:[7] the first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages,[8] which described the project itself. On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.[9] This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. The first server outside Europe was set up at SLAC to host the SPIRES-HEP database. Accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event. The World Wide Web Consortium says December 1992,[10] whereas SLAC itself claims 1991.[11][12] This is supported by a W3C document entitled A Little History of the World Wide Web.[13]