CHAPTERTWO LITERATUREREVIEW
1. The Internet Age
1.1 Historical Overview of the Internet
The notion of interconnected references and information stored in an electronic device can be traced back to the 1940’s in the United States. Vannevar Bush (1945) who was an American engineer conceptualized this unprecedented design in his article “As We May Think.” Bush described a futuristic machine called “Memex,” which could be used to store information and knowledge: “A Memex is a device in which an individual stores all [an individual’s] books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” (p. 121). In the 1960s, this “mechanized private file and library” was developed respectively by Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. Nelson coined new terms, Hyperlinks and Hypermedia, to describe this technology. A hypertext is a “text which contains links to other texts,” while Hypermedia is the expansion of a hypertext to include text, graphic, video or sound
(https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html). Upon the improvement of hyperlinks, Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web based on the fundamental concept of the hypertext in 1989. WWW was initially a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) project attempting to make the sharing of information among universities and research institutions easier. WWW provides a cyberspace that consists of hyperlinks and hypermedia. In 1993, the World Wide Web was released and became free to the public and has ever since revolutionized our knowledge culture.
There are many monikers in use to describe our present digital era. The Information Age, the era of big data, the digital age, the knowledge economy – all of these terms denote just how much computing technology and the Internet have changed global culture. With the rise of the Internet, human information has not simply increased, but exponentially expanded so that “data is expected to grow 64% every year, and some categories of data, such as the data produced by particle accelerators and DNA Sequences, grow much faster” (Stoica, 2013). Computing technology was revolutionary in-itself, as it emerged in the twentieth century, but the invention of the Internet allowed a knowledge culture in which users are not only consumers, but also creators of information. This dynamic dramatically unsettles previous consumer-driven models in capitalist culture and just as importantly leads to the exponential increase in data, in turn driving the need for faster processing technologies as well as data storage, servers and related infrastructure. This phenomenon also “represents a worldwide knowledge transformation on a global scale” (Harasim, 2012, p. 23) that continues to expand. According to International Telecommunication Union (ITU), there were 400 million Internet users worldwide as of 2000. In the intervening fifteen years, billions more went online. There are currently 3.2 billion people who are using the Internet out of the global population of 7.4 billion. Furthermore, 46% of households have Internet access. These statistics vividly indicate the digital transformation our civilization is experiencing.
1.2 Education in the Internet Age
The advent of the Internet has undoubtedly changed our education system as well, redefining what it means to learn and to be a student. Betram Bruce (1999) predicted that learning has shifted from the traditional educational setting. In the past, learning was largely constrained by space and time, for knowledge was “framed within books, or even within the
sole ‘textbook’” (p. 663). The Internet changed this paradigm, making class periods, textbooks and the classroom itself less necessary. Education can take place online; learning can occur anywhere, anytime. Bruce foresaw these upcoming changes that would
revolutionize the dynamics between teachers and students as well as educational institutions and curricula. In addition, Bruce predicted the further democratization of knowledge with the number of students increasing due to the fact that they had seamless access to resources. At the same time, he understood that the demand for instructors would decrease, since pre-recorded video lessons could be delivered at a much lower cost. He further claimed that the education at community colleges or small-scaled institutions would no longer be needed because learners could simply study online while keeping a daytime job. This paradigm would revolutionize curricula, which would necessarily adjust to suit the learner’s career or individual needs. In short, learning material would be highly customizable.
While a new educational paradigm emerged in the Internet Age, the definition of the learner has also been redefined. Marc Prensky (2001) identified learners of the Digital Age as
“digital natives” who are “native speakers of the digital language” (p. 1). What distinguishes students of the Digital Age from traditional students is that digital natives acquire information at a much faster rate through their smartphones, computer tablets or laptops. Seamless access to information is notably the historical phenomenon that characterizes the latter part the 20th century. In conjunction with the prevalence of the Internet, technological devices facilitate learning by mediating networked intelligence. According to Siemens (2005), “in many fields the life of knowledge is now measured in months and years” (p. 1). He specifies that the ability to discover new information, to recognize new perspectives and to alter one’s existing knowledge is crucial in such an accelerated learning environment. Because learning is no longer confined by space and time, it can “reside in non-human appliances” (p. 4). The
exponential spreading of information has drastically compressed the amount of time it takes to gain new intelligence and earn new skills. According to the Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education: Preliminary Report (2013), these “advances in online education enable learning to take place anywhere at any time, forcing us to question the meaning of the strict physical and temporal boundaries of the campus” (p. 9). Such transformations will impact traditional education systems in ways that are hard for many to imagine, moreover.
Even the “typical time period of an academic degree becomes blurred,” shifting “the focus from institutions to a learning ecosystem.” As a consequence, “resources, relationships, and roles may need to be recast” (p. 9).
2. Online Learning vs. Ubiquitous Learning