- Email: [email protected]
The Internet — a catalyst for change
PII:
Computers & Geosciences Vol. 24, No. 7, pp. 617±621, 1998 # 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain S0098-3004(98)00037-5 0098-3004/98/$ - see front matter
THE INTERNET Ð A CATALYST FOR CHANGE JOHN C. BUTLER* Department of Geosciences, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204 (Received 1 August 1997; revised 3 September 1997) AbstractÐHype and hyperbole about the Internet and its impact (or lack of impact) are widespread and many authors have felt compelled to add their favorite metaphor to make a salient point. As there is always room for one more, it is suggested that the Internet can be characterized as a catalyst for change. The expectation for change is probably the one constant that should be anticipated if one decides to use the Internet as one tool for the construction of learning environments. # 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Key Words: Education, Internet.
INTRODUCTION
Systems (such as the Internet) must be able to generate descriptions (or images) of concepts de®ned in their domain. The use of carefully selected dynamic images ±metaphors± may be a key to the explanation, retention and application of the insights and skills inherent in the system being described. The use of analogies to highlight selected features in these descriptions can greatly enhance their eectiveness, as analogies are a powerful and compact means of communicating ideas and descriptions. Metaphors, similes, analogies all create knowledge of concepts that are unfamiliar to us by linking them to concepts that are familiar. Are these bits of knowledge fair, honest, and unbiased? Clearly, this is a matter of personal opinion. Fortunately or unfortunately (again, a function of perspective), the greatest impact of these ®gures of speech will be on those unfamiliar with the concept being addressed. On the other hand, metaphors, similes and analogies may be little more than mirrors which re¯ect the bias of the author. Few endeavors of signi®cance in the past half decade appear to have generated more diverse verbal images than the Internet. Most individuals are collectors at heart. From excess baggage to frog-gigging sticks, most of us collect something. My stepson Aaron collects basketball cards and I collect verbal images of the Internet. Personal favorites are those that clearly have been carefully thought out (or at least appear that way) and those that come on strong. Regardless of whether I agree with the images, favorites usually invoke a curiosity as to what the author is not sharing with the readers; that is, what *E-mail: [email protected]. 617
set of circumstances interacted to produce a particular image. In a relatively early collection of metaphors in a geoscience-related publication, Pickering (1995) noted that: ``we ®nd hymns to the broad sunlit uplands of hyperspace or jeremiads against the coming electronic dystopia. The positive hype is probably the more dangerous, since it may encourage unrealistic expectations''. True, there is ample evidence of unrealistic expectations (the information superhighway, the Internet as a Global Educational Resource, and the Electronic Frontier for example). On the other hand, negative hype can be just as dangerous as it may discourage experimentation or understanding both by an individual and by others who report to that individual. Professor Paul Browning (1995, www.bris.ac.uk/ Depts/Geol/gig/article/article.html), in an attempt to produce his own TLA (Three Letter Acronyms such as URL, WWW, and LAN) coined MIS ±the Men-In-Suits. ``Part of the problem is the generation gap that exists between IT-illiterate managers and younger sta. The Men-In-Suits, who hold the purse strings, don't really see the need to invest in information technology as they don't use it themselves''. In a more recent image of the establishment Browning (1997, www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/ conf/diss/report.html) notes that ``the perception is that (in IT terms at least) it is an organization of befuddled old men left over from the Cretaceous who (and this is dangerous) don't know what they don't know''. Nearing completion of 30 years of teaching at the university level, there is a temptation to remind Professor Browning that senility is not necessarily positively correlated with chronological age (you
618
J. C. Butler
don't need to be old to be senile) but that again, would be venting a personal bias. Although I view myself as IP (Internet-positive), I do not ignore negative images. Potentially a world record of metaphors per paragraph, the following from Professor John Castleford (1997) probably deserves a toast in Guinness if not in the Book of Records: ``Hype and hypertext may be a title yet to be claimed, but there can be little doubt that the sheer quantity of and hyperbole about the educational signi®cance for the Internet/World-WideWeb is now at nightmare proportions. But for many, this blitz of bytes and deluge of data engenders a feeling of perplexed resignation as we become inundated with information, as this two-three year old chimera just grows and grows and grows. Where some savants once stood over¯owing with wisdom, the rest are being drenched in the downpour of slop''. Having made his point(s), Professor Castleford concludes with a realistic (again, a personal opinion) plea. ``So it is now timely to agree a consensus as to our needs and push for the techies to take our wishes on board. Many a nerd would probably jump at the opportunity for human contact''. Personal experience con®rms that they would and they do. My personal images of the Internet which follow have been shaped and enriched by the images created by Pickering, Browning and Castleford. THE INTERNET Ð PANDORA'S BOX
Pandora (meaning ``all gifted'') was the ®rst woman on Earth. The gods bestowed on her gifts such as beauty and charm but also gave her great curiosity. Zeus gave Pandora a box containing all the troubles and diseases that the world now knows. She was warned not to open the box, but curiosity overcame her. Only Hope remained inside the box as she quickly closed the lid again. Suppose that Pandora had visited Tim BernersLee in 1991. What might Zeus have placed in the Box? What if the Box contained poor educational practices ±such as broadcasting (Ehrmann, 1995)± and hypertext became the medium through which such diseases spread outside of the formal class-
room. Will hope be trapped inside once this box is closed (Butler, 1997a,b)? Or, suppose that Zeus placed in the Box an arsenal of strategies designed to aid in establishing learning environments both for on- and o-campus students and life-long-learners? Nothing happens unless the Box is opened but it seems we are too late. The Internet exists and is being used in education. Although each individual has the option of deciding ``what's in the Box'', it seems evident that once the Box is opened, something will change ±for the better or for the worse. .... OR THE MISSING LINK
This oft repeated phrase may have been coined by Thomas Huxley, 1863. He had evaluated a newly discovered skull from the Neander River as essentially human in character, albeit an extreme end member of a spectrum of variation. How would undiscovered fossils display a transition to the characters of anthropoid apes? Would there be a gradual change in characters or would there be some sort of discontinuity. In some chemical systems a reaction will not proceed unless there is sucient energy to form an intermediate complex, a state in which bonds are being broken or formed. That is, there is a discontinuity (in energy) which may or may not be expected by an analysis of the ends of the spectrum ±the reactant(s) and the product(s) (Butler, 1997a,b). Ehrmann (1995) argued that many colleges and universities face a Triple Challenge: 1. how to improve certain unsatisfactory educational outcomes, 2. extend access to an older and more diverse set of learners, and 3. control spiraling costs. Let us assume that we know where we are (reactants consisting of current practices) and where we need to be (products consisting of outcomes). Where We Are Where We Want To Be Can we assume that by expending more energy (mental as well as ®scal) that the forward direction is the direction of spontaneous change? Even if
Table 1. Brian Arthur's (Arthur, 1997) technology timeline Year
Biological evolution
Technological evolution
1640
®rst blue green algae
1810 1930s
®rst multicellular organisms Cambrian explosion
1960s 1970s
Dinosaurs birds and mammals appear
1991
humankind
®rst addition, subtraction and multiplication machines ±early computational life the Jacquard looms-machines that use multiple instructions calculating machines become electrical, government goes statistical, accounting becomes mechanized mainframe computers which dominate through the 70s and 80s personal computers show up but do not fully come into their own until the 1990s the Internet
The InternetÐa catalyst for change
619
Table 2. Internet time line Year
Biological evolution
Internet evolution
1945 1957 1975 1991 1994 1996 1997
Earth formed blue green algae multicellular organisms Cambrian explosion age of Dinosaurs mammals dominant July 28, 1997
memex de®ned ARPA organized evolution of networking protocols Wide Area Information Servers, Gopher and WWW released WWW becomes 2nd most popular service on the Net WWW becomes most popular this paper is being written
thermodynamics con®rms this prediction, what if the kinetics of the system are such that Where We Are is a metastable phase in spite of our investment of energy (Butler, 1997a,b)? Can the Internet act as an activated complex and encourage a rethinking of current practices (a breaking of bonds if you will) so as to better take advantage of its positive bene®ts?
.... OR A CATALYST FOR CHANGE
Internet images conveyed by both Pandora's Box and the Missing Link are underlain by change and how changes occur. One of the complicating factors, in fact, is the rate at which the Internet itself is changing. Citibank Professor W. Brian Arthur at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico designed a whimsical device to answer the question ``How fast is technology evolving?'' In a recent issue of Scienti®c American (1997), Arthur noted that it was hard to clock something as ill-de®ned as technology's speed of evolution, but one could ask how fast would we have to speed up the natural, biological evolution of life on Earth to make it roughly match some particular technology's rate of change (see Table 1). If biological evolution were speeded up by a factor of 10 million then life would have started some 360 years ago, about 1640. The Earth would have formed in about 1540, the time of planning for the great expeditions from western Europe to the socalled ``new worlds''. Arthur proceeds to lay the development of computing machinery, proceeding at its actual rate, along side this time line. Arthur argues that humankind, ``evolution's most peculiar creation to-date corresponds to the World Wide Web... What counts about the Web is not its technology. That's still primitive. What counts is that the Web provides access to stored memories, the stored experiences of others. What gives us power as humans is not our minds but the ability to share our minds, the ability to compute in parallel. Like humans, the Web is new but its roots are not''. On Arthur's scale, the Web is about 2 years old. Although there will be some debate, consider expanding his scale so as to focus on the roots of the Web. I prefer to start with the publication of As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in the
Atlantic Monthly, July 1945 (Bush, 1945). Bush argued: ``Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private ®le and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, memex will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and ¯exibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory''. With 1945 as the beginning of the Internet time line, a speeding up of biological evolution by a factor of nearly 100 million is required ±nearly an order of magnitude greater than Arthur's model for computing technology (see Table 2). As Arthur (1997) noted, ``the correspondence between biology and technology is striking. And naturally, its not perfect. Why should it be? This is fun, after all ±more whimsy than science''. Super®cial though it may be, the Internet seems to be evolving at nearly 100 million times the rate of biological evolution. ARPA was organized in 1957 to establish a lead in science and technology applicable to the military. Were the organizers aware of Bush's memex? Perhaps a social historian knows the answer. Regardless, given Bush's appreciation of the importance of communication and the role of science in facilitating communication, a relationship seems logical ±if tenuous. The 70s and 80s (Precambrian if you will) were a time of the development of networking and communication theory and applications. False starts in some instances but eventually leading to the development of the ``multicellular organisms'' from which the Internet and the World Wide Web evolved. The Cambrian explosion in the Internet family tree is marked by the appearance of WAIS, gopher, and WWW servers in 1991. During the Paleozoic, the percentage of bytes transferred per month by WWW gradually increased and by the end of the Mesozoic the WWW was the dominant service. Ciolek (1997, www.computer.org/pubs/computer/ kiosk/01/kiosk.htm) raises two interesting concerns about the rapid evolution of the WWW part of the Internet. ``The ®rst concerns the ratio of total volume of networked information (measured in megabytes) to information useful to scholars ±or to
620
J. C. Butler
Figure 1. Variation in number of Internet-based course resources and in number of departments producing these resources.
anyone, for that matter. Is the ratio around 1:1? 100:1? 1,000:1? or perhaps even greater? The other question regards long-term trends and information resources. Are we, with the passage of time, being blessed with an ever-reaching, ever-faster, and overarching information matrix of true reliability, or are we being cursed with tomorrow's multi-media mediocrity'' (MMM)? Put yourself on the Internet time line. I go back into the good old ``dust cloud days''. There is no doubt about the extraordinary rate of evolution of this one branch of technology. Are instructors and learners keeping up? THE INTERNET 1995 TO 1998
In July, 1995 a Special Issue of Computers & Geosciences (1995) on The Internet was published. This was followed by another Special Issue in July 1997 on the Internet and Distance Learning. All of the contributors for both Special Issues were concerned about what would develop between submission of the papers and the publication dates. No one was disappointed as changes did indeed occur. I fully expect the same thing to characterize the papers in this Special Issue. In fact, I fully expect the extent of changes to exceed those between 1995 and 1997. The survey of colleges and universities distributing Internet-based course resources (see Butler, 1997a,b) has been extended to September, 1997 (Fig. 1), In September, 1997, a total of 635 course resources were being published by 141 dierent colleges and universities. As depicted in Figure 1, whereas the number of resources continues to
increase, the growth in number of participating colleges and universities is taking place at a much slower rate. In fact, it appears that much of the growth in the number of resources re¯ects an increase in the number of resources produced by individuals. Although a detailed accounting has not been attempted, it seems as though less than 2% of the faculty in geosciences departments in the United States and Canada are responsible for these Internet-based course resources. Clearly, the use of the Internet in creating learning environments is not increasing in epidemic proportions. Although a detailed analysis was not attempted, it appears that about 33% of these course resources have not been changed since 1995. Will these resources become the worn out, faded mimeograph sheets of the future?
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Having corresponded with more than 50 individuals who are actively using the Internet as an integral part of the courses they teach, it is evident that many truly are trying to enhance learning environments for both themselves and their students. The increasing use of java applets which allow a high degree of interaction, for example, helps produce a learning environment in which visualization is a key element. The willingness of producers of such resources to share them with others is to be applauded. I ®nd it hard to imagine what the resource of the year 2025 will be but I have a strong feeling that the Internet, or the granddaughter of the Internet, will play a prominent role.
The InternetÐa catalyst for change REFERENCES Arthur, W. B. (1997) How fast is technology evolving? Scienti®c American 277(2), 37±39. Browning, P. (1995) www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/ article/article.html. Browning, P. (1997) www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/conf/ diss/report.html. Bush, V. (1945) As we may think. Atlantic Monthly July 1945, 121±128. Butler, J. (1997a) The Internet's role in learning... Pandora's Box or the missing link. The Leading Edge 16(7), 1033±1038.
621
Butler, J. (1997b) A virtual geosciences professor. Computers & Geosciences 23(5), 521±532. Castleford, J. (1997) World-Wide-Web: sur®ng or drowning in a sea of information. Computers & Geosciences 23(1), 101±102. Ciolek, A. (1997) www.computer.org/pubs/computer/ kiosk/01/kiosk.htm. Ehrmann, S. (1995) The bad option and the good option. Active Learning 2, 23±24. Pickering, J. (1995) Teaching on the Internet is learning. Active Learning 2, 9±12.
Computers & Geosciences Vol. 24, No. 7, pp. 617±621, 1998 # 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain S0098-3004(98)00037-5 0098-3004/98/$ - see front matter
THE INTERNET Ð A CATALYST FOR CHANGE JOHN C. BUTLER* Department of Geosciences, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204 (Received 1 August 1997; revised 3 September 1997) AbstractÐHype and hyperbole about the Internet and its impact (or lack of impact) are widespread and many authors have felt compelled to add their favorite metaphor to make a salient point. As there is always room for one more, it is suggested that the Internet can be characterized as a catalyst for change. The expectation for change is probably the one constant that should be anticipated if one decides to use the Internet as one tool for the construction of learning environments. # 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Key Words: Education, Internet.
INTRODUCTION
Systems (such as the Internet) must be able to generate descriptions (or images) of concepts de®ned in their domain. The use of carefully selected dynamic images ±metaphors± may be a key to the explanation, retention and application of the insights and skills inherent in the system being described. The use of analogies to highlight selected features in these descriptions can greatly enhance their eectiveness, as analogies are a powerful and compact means of communicating ideas and descriptions. Metaphors, similes, analogies all create knowledge of concepts that are unfamiliar to us by linking them to concepts that are familiar. Are these bits of knowledge fair, honest, and unbiased? Clearly, this is a matter of personal opinion. Fortunately or unfortunately (again, a function of perspective), the greatest impact of these ®gures of speech will be on those unfamiliar with the concept being addressed. On the other hand, metaphors, similes and analogies may be little more than mirrors which re¯ect the bias of the author. Few endeavors of signi®cance in the past half decade appear to have generated more diverse verbal images than the Internet. Most individuals are collectors at heart. From excess baggage to frog-gigging sticks, most of us collect something. My stepson Aaron collects basketball cards and I collect verbal images of the Internet. Personal favorites are those that clearly have been carefully thought out (or at least appear that way) and those that come on strong. Regardless of whether I agree with the images, favorites usually invoke a curiosity as to what the author is not sharing with the readers; that is, what *E-mail: [email protected]. 617
set of circumstances interacted to produce a particular image. In a relatively early collection of metaphors in a geoscience-related publication, Pickering (1995) noted that: ``we ®nd hymns to the broad sunlit uplands of hyperspace or jeremiads against the coming electronic dystopia. The positive hype is probably the more dangerous, since it may encourage unrealistic expectations''. True, there is ample evidence of unrealistic expectations (the information superhighway, the Internet as a Global Educational Resource, and the Electronic Frontier for example). On the other hand, negative hype can be just as dangerous as it may discourage experimentation or understanding both by an individual and by others who report to that individual. Professor Paul Browning (1995, www.bris.ac.uk/ Depts/Geol/gig/article/article.html), in an attempt to produce his own TLA (Three Letter Acronyms such as URL, WWW, and LAN) coined MIS ±the Men-In-Suits. ``Part of the problem is the generation gap that exists between IT-illiterate managers and younger sta. The Men-In-Suits, who hold the purse strings, don't really see the need to invest in information technology as they don't use it themselves''. In a more recent image of the establishment Browning (1997, www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/ conf/diss/report.html) notes that ``the perception is that (in IT terms at least) it is an organization of befuddled old men left over from the Cretaceous who (and this is dangerous) don't know what they don't know''. Nearing completion of 30 years of teaching at the university level, there is a temptation to remind Professor Browning that senility is not necessarily positively correlated with chronological age (you
618
J. C. Butler
don't need to be old to be senile) but that again, would be venting a personal bias. Although I view myself as IP (Internet-positive), I do not ignore negative images. Potentially a world record of metaphors per paragraph, the following from Professor John Castleford (1997) probably deserves a toast in Guinness if not in the Book of Records: ``Hype and hypertext may be a title yet to be claimed, but there can be little doubt that the sheer quantity of and hyperbole about the educational signi®cance for the Internet/World-WideWeb is now at nightmare proportions. But for many, this blitz of bytes and deluge of data engenders a feeling of perplexed resignation as we become inundated with information, as this two-three year old chimera just grows and grows and grows. Where some savants once stood over¯owing with wisdom, the rest are being drenched in the downpour of slop''. Having made his point(s), Professor Castleford concludes with a realistic (again, a personal opinion) plea. ``So it is now timely to agree a consensus as to our needs and push for the techies to take our wishes on board. Many a nerd would probably jump at the opportunity for human contact''. Personal experience con®rms that they would and they do. My personal images of the Internet which follow have been shaped and enriched by the images created by Pickering, Browning and Castleford. THE INTERNET Ð PANDORA'S BOX
Pandora (meaning ``all gifted'') was the ®rst woman on Earth. The gods bestowed on her gifts such as beauty and charm but also gave her great curiosity. Zeus gave Pandora a box containing all the troubles and diseases that the world now knows. She was warned not to open the box, but curiosity overcame her. Only Hope remained inside the box as she quickly closed the lid again. Suppose that Pandora had visited Tim BernersLee in 1991. What might Zeus have placed in the Box? What if the Box contained poor educational practices ±such as broadcasting (Ehrmann, 1995)± and hypertext became the medium through which such diseases spread outside of the formal class-
room. Will hope be trapped inside once this box is closed (Butler, 1997a,b)? Or, suppose that Zeus placed in the Box an arsenal of strategies designed to aid in establishing learning environments both for on- and o-campus students and life-long-learners? Nothing happens unless the Box is opened but it seems we are too late. The Internet exists and is being used in education. Although each individual has the option of deciding ``what's in the Box'', it seems evident that once the Box is opened, something will change ±for the better or for the worse. .... OR THE MISSING LINK
This oft repeated phrase may have been coined by Thomas Huxley, 1863. He had evaluated a newly discovered skull from the Neander River as essentially human in character, albeit an extreme end member of a spectrum of variation. How would undiscovered fossils display a transition to the characters of anthropoid apes? Would there be a gradual change in characters or would there be some sort of discontinuity. In some chemical systems a reaction will not proceed unless there is sucient energy to form an intermediate complex, a state in which bonds are being broken or formed. That is, there is a discontinuity (in energy) which may or may not be expected by an analysis of the ends of the spectrum ±the reactant(s) and the product(s) (Butler, 1997a,b). Ehrmann (1995) argued that many colleges and universities face a Triple Challenge: 1. how to improve certain unsatisfactory educational outcomes, 2. extend access to an older and more diverse set of learners, and 3. control spiraling costs. Let us assume that we know where we are (reactants consisting of current practices) and where we need to be (products consisting of outcomes). Where We Are Where We Want To Be Can we assume that by expending more energy (mental as well as ®scal) that the forward direction is the direction of spontaneous change? Even if
Table 1. Brian Arthur's (Arthur, 1997) technology timeline Year
Biological evolution
Technological evolution
1640
®rst blue green algae
1810 1930s
®rst multicellular organisms Cambrian explosion
1960s 1970s
Dinosaurs birds and mammals appear
1991
humankind
®rst addition, subtraction and multiplication machines ±early computational life the Jacquard looms-machines that use multiple instructions calculating machines become electrical, government goes statistical, accounting becomes mechanized mainframe computers which dominate through the 70s and 80s personal computers show up but do not fully come into their own until the 1990s the Internet
The InternetÐa catalyst for change
619
Table 2. Internet time line Year
Biological evolution
Internet evolution
1945 1957 1975 1991 1994 1996 1997
Earth formed blue green algae multicellular organisms Cambrian explosion age of Dinosaurs mammals dominant July 28, 1997
memex de®ned ARPA organized evolution of networking protocols Wide Area Information Servers, Gopher and WWW released WWW becomes 2nd most popular service on the Net WWW becomes most popular this paper is being written
thermodynamics con®rms this prediction, what if the kinetics of the system are such that Where We Are is a metastable phase in spite of our investment of energy (Butler, 1997a,b)? Can the Internet act as an activated complex and encourage a rethinking of current practices (a breaking of bonds if you will) so as to better take advantage of its positive bene®ts?
.... OR A CATALYST FOR CHANGE
Internet images conveyed by both Pandora's Box and the Missing Link are underlain by change and how changes occur. One of the complicating factors, in fact, is the rate at which the Internet itself is changing. Citibank Professor W. Brian Arthur at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico designed a whimsical device to answer the question ``How fast is technology evolving?'' In a recent issue of Scienti®c American (1997), Arthur noted that it was hard to clock something as ill-de®ned as technology's speed of evolution, but one could ask how fast would we have to speed up the natural, biological evolution of life on Earth to make it roughly match some particular technology's rate of change (see Table 1). If biological evolution were speeded up by a factor of 10 million then life would have started some 360 years ago, about 1640. The Earth would have formed in about 1540, the time of planning for the great expeditions from western Europe to the socalled ``new worlds''. Arthur proceeds to lay the development of computing machinery, proceeding at its actual rate, along side this time line. Arthur argues that humankind, ``evolution's most peculiar creation to-date corresponds to the World Wide Web... What counts about the Web is not its technology. That's still primitive. What counts is that the Web provides access to stored memories, the stored experiences of others. What gives us power as humans is not our minds but the ability to share our minds, the ability to compute in parallel. Like humans, the Web is new but its roots are not''. On Arthur's scale, the Web is about 2 years old. Although there will be some debate, consider expanding his scale so as to focus on the roots of the Web. I prefer to start with the publication of As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in the
Atlantic Monthly, July 1945 (Bush, 1945). Bush argued: ``Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private ®le and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, memex will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and ¯exibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory''. With 1945 as the beginning of the Internet time line, a speeding up of biological evolution by a factor of nearly 100 million is required ±nearly an order of magnitude greater than Arthur's model for computing technology (see Table 2). As Arthur (1997) noted, ``the correspondence between biology and technology is striking. And naturally, its not perfect. Why should it be? This is fun, after all ±more whimsy than science''. Super®cial though it may be, the Internet seems to be evolving at nearly 100 million times the rate of biological evolution. ARPA was organized in 1957 to establish a lead in science and technology applicable to the military. Were the organizers aware of Bush's memex? Perhaps a social historian knows the answer. Regardless, given Bush's appreciation of the importance of communication and the role of science in facilitating communication, a relationship seems logical ±if tenuous. The 70s and 80s (Precambrian if you will) were a time of the development of networking and communication theory and applications. False starts in some instances but eventually leading to the development of the ``multicellular organisms'' from which the Internet and the World Wide Web evolved. The Cambrian explosion in the Internet family tree is marked by the appearance of WAIS, gopher, and WWW servers in 1991. During the Paleozoic, the percentage of bytes transferred per month by WWW gradually increased and by the end of the Mesozoic the WWW was the dominant service. Ciolek (1997, www.computer.org/pubs/computer/ kiosk/01/kiosk.htm) raises two interesting concerns about the rapid evolution of the WWW part of the Internet. ``The ®rst concerns the ratio of total volume of networked information (measured in megabytes) to information useful to scholars ±or to
620
J. C. Butler
Figure 1. Variation in number of Internet-based course resources and in number of departments producing these resources.
anyone, for that matter. Is the ratio around 1:1? 100:1? 1,000:1? or perhaps even greater? The other question regards long-term trends and information resources. Are we, with the passage of time, being blessed with an ever-reaching, ever-faster, and overarching information matrix of true reliability, or are we being cursed with tomorrow's multi-media mediocrity'' (MMM)? Put yourself on the Internet time line. I go back into the good old ``dust cloud days''. There is no doubt about the extraordinary rate of evolution of this one branch of technology. Are instructors and learners keeping up? THE INTERNET 1995 TO 1998
In July, 1995 a Special Issue of Computers & Geosciences (1995) on The Internet was published. This was followed by another Special Issue in July 1997 on the Internet and Distance Learning. All of the contributors for both Special Issues were concerned about what would develop between submission of the papers and the publication dates. No one was disappointed as changes did indeed occur. I fully expect the same thing to characterize the papers in this Special Issue. In fact, I fully expect the extent of changes to exceed those between 1995 and 1997. The survey of colleges and universities distributing Internet-based course resources (see Butler, 1997a,b) has been extended to September, 1997 (Fig. 1), In September, 1997, a total of 635 course resources were being published by 141 dierent colleges and universities. As depicted in Figure 1, whereas the number of resources continues to
increase, the growth in number of participating colleges and universities is taking place at a much slower rate. In fact, it appears that much of the growth in the number of resources re¯ects an increase in the number of resources produced by individuals. Although a detailed accounting has not been attempted, it seems as though less than 2% of the faculty in geosciences departments in the United States and Canada are responsible for these Internet-based course resources. Clearly, the use of the Internet in creating learning environments is not increasing in epidemic proportions. Although a detailed analysis was not attempted, it appears that about 33% of these course resources have not been changed since 1995. Will these resources become the worn out, faded mimeograph sheets of the future?
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Having corresponded with more than 50 individuals who are actively using the Internet as an integral part of the courses they teach, it is evident that many truly are trying to enhance learning environments for both themselves and their students. The increasing use of java applets which allow a high degree of interaction, for example, helps produce a learning environment in which visualization is a key element. The willingness of producers of such resources to share them with others is to be applauded. I ®nd it hard to imagine what the resource of the year 2025 will be but I have a strong feeling that the Internet, or the granddaughter of the Internet, will play a prominent role.
The InternetÐa catalyst for change REFERENCES Arthur, W. B. (1997) How fast is technology evolving? Scienti®c American 277(2), 37±39. Browning, P. (1995) www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/ article/article.html. Browning, P. (1997) www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/conf/ diss/report.html. Bush, V. (1945) As we may think. Atlantic Monthly July 1945, 121±128. Butler, J. (1997a) The Internet's role in learning... Pandora's Box or the missing link. The Leading Edge 16(7), 1033±1038.
621
Butler, J. (1997b) A virtual geosciences professor. Computers & Geosciences 23(5), 521±532. Castleford, J. (1997) World-Wide-Web: sur®ng or drowning in a sea of information. Computers & Geosciences 23(1), 101±102. Ciolek, A. (1997) www.computer.org/pubs/computer/ kiosk/01/kiosk.htm. Ehrmann, S. (1995) The bad option and the good option. Active Learning 2, 23±24. Pickering, J. (1995) Teaching on the Internet is learning. Active Learning 2, 9±12.