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• Author: Mildon, Marsha

Whither the Web?

In June 1993, a little over six years ago, "there were but 130 WWW servers on-line world wide; a year and a half later there were over 10,000 WWW servers and [in October 1996] there were over 200,000 web servers", according to the online Journal of Mediated Communication 2:3. Associated Press told us in 1998, that "A computer search for a needle in the cyberstack now involves sorting through about 320 million Web pages, and even the best search agents index no more than 40 percent of them"

Speaking of the same study, Hyman Hirsh, a computer science professor at Rutgers University, said, "[e]verybody knows the Web is enormous and that finding things on it is very difficult," he said. "It is an unorganized, uncoordinated collection of information sources that is totally overwhelming."

We are now yet another year of web-building later, and it doesn't seem that the speed of growth is slowing. It is little wonder if classroom teachers, confronted by the very wealth of the internet--at the same time as ongoing cuts eat other resources including time--may wonder what on earth to do with it all.

How can the Web be used?

However, there are some ways to surf more fruitfully through the building electronic wave. In her article "Teaching and Learning on the World Wide Web", Shirley Alexander, from the Institute for Interactive Multimedia in Australia examines what to focus on in using the WWW. After a quick history of technology from Plato to Wired, she reports a study (Saljo 1979) which examined what individuals understood by learning. The study suggested five categories:

"1. Learning as a quantitative increase in knowledge.

2. Learning as memorising... storing information that can be reproduced.

3. Learning as acquiring facts, skills and methods that can be retained and used as necessary.

4. Learning as making sense or abstracting meaning... involves relating parts of the subject matter to each other and to the real world.

5. Learning as interpreting and understanding reality in a different way."

If we take those five categories, it is easy to see that there is a break after category three in the type of learning that is being described. Categories one to three involve something like the empty vessel theory of the student who arrives at school to be filled, generally with concrete information and skills, especially valuable in the earlier years.

The addition of content to a course of study is one of the areas where the WWW...