What the Web Does…

Since bursting into the national consciousness in the mid-90’s, the media focus has been on what the Web can do. Descriptions of the Web in the media have ranged from the solution for all that is wrong with education to the symptom of all that is wrong with society.

The Web is described in many different ways:

• The world’s largest shopping mall: Web commerce continues to grow exponentially with no end in sight.
  
  
• A source of up-to-the-minute news: You can find late-breaking, in-depth news from around the world on the Web.
  
  
• A source of entertainment: You can listen to music and watch movies and video, play games, etc. For many, the web has become the dominant source of entertainment.
  
  
• A communications medium: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and blogs have become the preferred means of communication for many. Extremely portable laptops and tablets are replacing desktop computers and smartphones are merging the capabilities of cell phones and the world wide web.
  
  
• "The Information Superhighway": It is this aspect of the Web that has generated the most interest among educators. The Web does offer phenomenal resources for both students and educators. Information on nearly every topic imaginable does exist somewhere on the Web.

While all the other aspects of the Web are of value to busy educators, it is the access to educationally relevant content that makes the Web so useful.

The notion of easy world-wide access to documents stored on distant machines was not an entirely new idea when the Web came along.

The concept of easy access to distributed documents was first proposed by Vannevar Bush in an article in Atlantic Monthly in 1945. At that time, nothing even remotely like the Internet existed and the article sounded like something out of a Jules Verne novel.

Ted Nelson expanded the concept in a system he called Xanadu in the late 60’s and early 70’s and even coined the term "hypertext" to describe the method of linking distributed documents stored on networked computers. But, the computers and networks of the day just hadn’t evolved to the point where the system would work.

It wasn’t until the late 1980’s and early 1990’s that readily accessible networks were in place that would allow users to actually utilize the concepts proposed by Bush and Nelson.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, at the time working for CERN, a research institution in Switzerland, proposed the creation of a "World Wide Web" of computers connected by the Internet. The use of a simple universal computer language call HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) would allow these computers to use HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) to transfer documents and images directly from a host computer to the client computer in graphic form.

In February of 1993, a group of young computer science students working at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, released Mosaic, the first web browser to use a graphic user interface (GUI). Mosaic incorporated helper applications that made it possible to seamlessly access both text and images right in the browser window. Using the World Wide Web proposed by Tim Berners-Lee became a simple matter of "point and click". The easy access to distributed documents envisioned by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson became reality.

Netscape, the commercial spin-off of Mosaic was released to the public as "freeware" in early 1995. Microsoft quickly jumped in with Internet Explorer and the Web rapidly expanded beyond the academic community and exploded on the national consciousness in the summer of 1995 with a media blitz unparalleled in recent years.

Widespread use of the internet/world wide web has grown faster than any other new technology in history.

In this next online exploration, you will read a retrospective look at the web and watch a short YouTube video developed in response to that article. You will also explore several trend analysis charts and graphs that document who is using the web and what they are doing on the web.

If you are interested, you can also read Vannevar Bush's original 1945 article, an article on Ted Nelson and a 1996 article on web searching that accurately predicted some of the key issues and technology that have evolved in the past decade.

Take a moment to consider that as you explored those articles that you were seeing Bush and Nelson’s dreams of distributed documents in action. The websites exist in remote locations somewhere out there on the Web. The hypertext links on the course website (which is actually being served off a computer in the Silicon Valley of California) initiate a hypertext transfer protocol (http://…) that bring the text and image files directly to your computer where your web browser converts the digital information back into a readable format.

Online Explorations: What the Web Does