ABSTRACT
Distributed, online technologies are dramatically changing opportunities for education by supporting new forms of engagement between students and instructors. As computing technologies become increasingly integrated into other aspects of people lives, the ease with which they can be extended into the realm of education increases, supporting trend toward distance education and lifelong learning (Beller & Or, 1998). The Internet enables instructors to craft extensive resources that freely combine text, images, video, and audio. Instructors and students can communicate asynchronously through computer conferences. They can communicate synchronously using video teleconferencing and text-based chat. They can provide forms of interaction and collaborative activity that were once solely the province of face-to-face, same-time-and-place classroom, internship, or apprenticeship experiences (Twidale & Ruhleder, 2000).
