The BBC has a fun little timeline showing the development of the Internet since it was “founded” 15 years ago. You can’t talk about web-based distance learning without talking about the development of web technology, of course, so I thought posting this link would be appropriate.
Looking back, I can’t believe it’s been 15 years. The Internet is so ubiquitous now that it is hard to believe. Was Bill Clinton really the first president to create whitehouse.gov? Is Amazon really only 10 years old? It’s still in its infancy as a company! A shocker for me was that the term “weblog” or blog is older than Google, and has been around for 9 of the Internet’s 15 years. So, technically, all of this blog chatter about blogs being a “new technology” is not really true.
Or maybe it is. Nine years is not much. Neither is 15 years. Technically the Internet is still a new technology.
On a personal note, I remember as an intern at the Idaho Falls Post Register trying to access text-only Internet pages back in 1996. It was slow as tar, and all I wanted was a few misely baseball scores, but it was still worth waiting those long minutes for those scores to come up, rather than wait for the AP to send the scores.
Then, I remember getting back from my LDS mission in 1998 and found out the Internet had exploded in two years. Everyone was using something called “email” and I needed help to set up my first Yahoo! email account … an account I still use today (can’t wait for Yahoo!’s new email service to be refined a little more, looks great).
Wow! I can’t believe that was 8 years ago.
Turning the attention towards web-based learning, that means we’re still in our infancy in teaching people online. We know there’s been a lot of discouraging online instruction that has been happening, but a lot of good models too. Hopefully we can now begin to refine the pedagogical methods and models, develop some standards, and create online instruction that truly provides quality education anytime, anywhere.
technorati tags:AECT2006, AECT, BlogTracks
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