| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Sherlick’s relationship with these supervisors would later prove valuable during our data collection. Additional interviews were conducted with two groups of professionals within the Ministry of Education, the national government agency charged with overseeing the Israeli education system. Information-gathering sessions were held with several curriculum-development officials responsible for the application of computer technology to various subject areas. Individuals from the Ministry with expertise in the various educational streams of the Israeli education system and a former administrator with the Tali schools were questioned. Finally, supporting research was conducted with professionals working outside the Israeli education system, but who were connected with the system in a unique manner: a teacher-training and software program developer; a former state comptroller’s office investigator for the Ministry of Education who became the head of an Israeli higher-education institution that teaches leadership skills; and the executive director of a Modern-Orthodox Jewish institute that studies, educates, and promotes Jewish values.
All school-based interviews were a rich source of information providing the educators’ rationale for classroom Internet access or restriction. The supporting research offered a clearer picture of the Israeli education system from a system’s perspective with regard to the manner in which computers and the Internet have been incorporated.
The results from this preliminary research indicated that there were tools that the educators and their students used in evaluating Internet messages based on the different frames of reference—the value systems—unique to each sector. While the Mamlachti state secular, the Tali secular, and the Mamlachti-Dati state religious are more comfortable in instilling values from their own frame of reference, they are more at ease in evaluating popular-culture messages from that frame of reference as well.