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Introduction to Internet Technologies

The principle difference - 'What has changed?' is that when we talk about interaction in CAL (Computer Aided Learning) packages, we are usually talking about interacting with computer programs. Internet based technologies are more about interaction between people and in our Postmodernist world, we know that learning is largely a social activity and even the most well thought out multimedia interactive materials lack the flexibility of human interaction.

The use of the term Information and Communication Technology (ICT) rather than Information Technology (IT) emphasises this change. Computers now facilitate communication between people as well as between people and programs or people and data.

Those who were involved in developing CAL packages in earlier decades usually point out that there is nothing new under the sun - which the lessons we are learning today about using the Internet for teaching were learnt before. Others would go further and point out that distance education with print has also covered a lot of the ground before and it is only because most lecturers are only accustomed to the face to face setting that they stumble into well mapped pitfalls when beginning to use internet technologies to teach. All of this is true but it is also true that using the Internet for teaching brings new challenges and necessitates the development of additional teaching skills.

The arrival of the Internet made communication between machines much easier and a number of open protocols and applications were developed to make use of this. Of these, Email was the forerunner and there can be few academics and students that do not have access to this now. Email has its limitations and it was the World Wide Web that really brought the world of networked computers to the general public. The open standards of many of the technologies and the ease with which anyone could publish information encouraged participation by all and we need to remember what is about these technologies that makes them attractive when we try to deploy them for education. However, initially, a relatively small number of University lecturers adopted it for a range of teaching purposes but even fewer did more than post information about their courses or actual lecture notes - usually not modified in any way to take advantage of the strengths of the media such as hypertext.

One of the strengths and principle attractions of the Web is that it can provide authoring access to anybody and this is quite different from the one-way nature of education through CAL or any other media that predated it. The fact that the technology facilitates this does not of course mean that it will take place but then this is true of any educational forum.

While far from needing programming skills, it still takes a certain amount of technophilia to publish a Web page. Creating them is trivial but actually publishing them can be tedious if the institution has not provided a simple means to do so.

This is all about information rather than teaching and learning and it soon becomes obvious to any treading this path that you cannot take the people out of the learning equation entirely. Learning is about interaction and interaction with information alone is not enough.

We can group the Web technologies available for education roughly into 3 areas, outlined below:

1. Digital Learning Resources
2. Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)
3. Computer Aided Assessment (CAA)

They tend to be adopted in that order with novice online tutors first placing their lecture notes online 'as is' then restructuring the materials to take better advantage of the media and perhaps augmenting it with resources not possible in print such as video or creating interactive materials.

Interactions on Collaborative Learning on the Web
Interactions on Active Learning on the Web