Polemic on Education and the Web

What is the World Wide Web good for?

1. Long-distance communication. From e-mail to chat rooms to videoconferencing, the Internet has obviously revolutionized long-distance communication; I'm not so sure it has done much good for short-range communication. It is possible to build conferencing tools that allow students and teachers to "brainstorm" electronically, but I think traditional "face to face" (F2F) discussions are significantly better for that most effective of all pedagogical processes. Web-based conferencing is an important supplement to F2F discussion groups, but is only of primary importance in "distance education" - which is (IMHO) overrated. The HyperTextBook is not a conferencing tool.

2. Bulk information storage. Today a typical hard drive holds at least 4 GB, enough for at least a thousand 400-page books of text or a similar number of high resolution images (a picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words these days). For a few hundred dollars anyone can store a library it would take a lifetime to read. And they can easily fill it up for free . . . .

3. Presentation of information. This store of information can also be delivered to anyone who requests it at rates far surpassing human reading speeds and in formats at least as pleasing to the eye as the most expensive paper textbooks. There are also a wide variety of presentation tools that allow the user and the server to organize that information and optimize the efficiency of its retrieval, provided that the service provider is really there to serve (as opposed to "capturing clients").

The trouble is, most of the information on the Web is either useless for the purpose of First Year Science pedagogy or just plain wrong. Many search engines such as altavista and hotbot or (more recently and much more effectively) google and oingo have been developed to help people find the information they seek on the Web, with increasing success. Whereas the first such public services tended to deliver an astronomical number of links in arbitrary order, most of which pointed to sites with useless content, the latest engines employ ingenious algorithms to produce a link list in decreasing order of relevance or quality. They often succeed, but they still fail much of the time. Moreover, even the best sites are not necessarily appropriate to the purpose at hand.

There is therefore a growing need for "custom databases" of Web sites containing information that is (a) appropriate to a specific application; and (b) certified as reliable by people who ought to know. This, I predict, will be the next big "growth industry" in information technology.

(Parenthetically, let me note that credibility will be the highest-denomination "coin of the realm" on the Internet in the future. Who is going to vett all those Web sites being created by anyone who feels like it? For a sample of one big project already underway, visit Mozilla's Open Directory Project.)