Impact of the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web emerged about 16 years ago, and has had an enormous impact on institutions and economies around the globe. So, how is it affecting education and training?

Wow, asking how the WWW is affecting education and training is like asking how the discovery of fire affected mankind. We aren’t stuck eating cold raw food, for one thing! But along with that discovery came a whole science that developed over time. How not to burn down your cave, for example. What fuels worked better than others, how to control the temperature, how to create it at will, portable tools and techniques for creating it.

The first thing that the WWW has done for education is made it accessible to anyone with digital access. If we consider education as both formal and informal experiences, simply being able to access Google search, ask.com or Wikipedia results in an immediate increase in knowledge. Meta tags and search codes enable you to find information on the most remote and obscure topics. Thanks to towns and communities digitizing old records you can search for that illusive ancestor, thanks to Google earth you can “fly” to an address and scope out the property. Accessing knowledge in many forms, from written, to symbols to pictorial, has become ubiquitous.

Another impact is the commercialization of education and training. Before the web, we relied on local institutions to provide us with an education. They were responsible for fulfilling society’s need for enlightenment. If you wanted to pursue a degree in an area not offered by your local college or university, you physically traveled to another state and enrolled, or if available, you might take a correspondence course. Well known universities developed reputations that became magnets for certain types of students: MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley as examples.

The WWW has changed all of that. There are more institutions offering online learning, giving the student options to attend classes from all over the world without the physical stress and expense of traveling. Candidates for higher education who could not pursue it due to job and family conflicts can now manage to attend class by cashing on the flexibility of asynchronous learning. The exchange of perspectives brought about by the influence of other cultures and the diversity of global exchange has caused us who use a western approach to learning to question and perhaps rethink education. Established academic institutions must now compete for student enrollments rather than the student hoping and praying for acceptance. Add to the mix nonacademic for profit organizations like the University of Phoenix…this has created cloudy areas of accreditation and reputation.

The web is often said to be a “disruptive technology.”

In his podcast, Kevin observes that “disruptive technology” is technology that upsets established patterns of businesses. Clayton Christensen talks about the innovative dilemma here:

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/teradyne/clay.html

 Businesses use “sustaining” technologies to continually improve their products and stabilize their market share. They make the product that their customer wants. “Disruptive” technologies are innovations that if applied to this established product would decrease quality for a time.  Since pleasing the customer means more profit, no company wants to do something that might lower customer satisfaction.  It’s a vicious cycle – over time the disruptive technology – insert WWW here – will result in a far better product. But the current business model resists innovation for the reasons just mentioned.  Unfortunately, those companies who are unable to incorporate or adapt to new technologies may end up going out of business entirely.

“As the above graph shows, disruptive technologies cause problems because they do not initially satisfy the demands of even the high end of the market.  Because of that, large companies choose to overlook disruptive technologies until they become more attractive profit-wise.  Disruptive technologies, however, eventually surpass sustaining technologies in satisfying market demand with lower costs.  When this happens, large companies who did not invest in the disruptive technology sooner are left behind.  This, according to Christensen, is the “Innovator’s Dilemma.”

A very clear example of the struggle to stay on top of disruptive technologies is to look at Apple and Microsoft. If you haven’t read “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, I recommend it.

How is technology disrupting education?  Trying to transfer brick and mortar approaches to an online setting – YUK, it doesn’t work, and it makes me – the customer – unhappy. Come up with a new way to teach, a new learning environment using these new technologies – innovate – now you have a successful product.  Just look the growing pains suffered as we moved from correspondence courses to radio to TV to CD-ROMs to hybrid to fully online.  There have been some poor adaptations (MOOCs, perhaps?) and some brilliant ones.  I am very happy with my online education in OLIT.

How much do you use the WWW? What do you mostly use it for? Have you used it to learn something? What? Describe the experience and your reactions to it.

I no longer use a “telephone book” to look up a number or an address, I just search the web.  I never pick up a hard copy dictionary anymore either, or an encyclopedia for that matter, even though in K-12 I relied extensively on the family Funk and Wagnall’s.  I’m not totally giving up the past, however, I still like to browse printed catalogues and read paperback books.  But my kindle gets a fair amount of use as well, mainly because it is less expensive to download a digital book than buy the hard copy. However, I do not like not being able to riffle back through pages looking for something; the back click button is clunky.  I use the web daily to read my email, check out the daily stories on AOL, to search topics or words that I want to know more about.  While in school mode, most of my search and web use time is related to class.  When class is not in session, I’ll probably go back to spending more time on EBay.

When I first became interested in collecting costume jewelry from the 40’s and 50’s, I spent a lot of time online searching history and designers.  I found several “Groups” AKA Communities of Inquiry with similar interests.  I learned tons from these people and their resources.  Never had to worry about social presence because our shared interest in jewelry always kept everyone fired up, quick to share, and frequent participants.