ABSTRACT
In October 1969, the first online message was sent. The message was sent from the University of California, Los Angeles, to the Stanford Research Institute, some hundreds of miles away. The content of the message, a test, was intended to be “LOGIN,” but after the first two letters were transmitted the system crashed. Hence the first online message ever sent was “LO.”1 It was sent by an undergraduate student, Charley Kline. The Internet revolution represents a tiny sliver of time in the history of humanity, and yet the impact has been profound. The growth of the Internet and the Web has been world changing. But the beginnings were small and seemingly inconsequential. The vast majority of scientists, academics and educators initially had no interest in computer communication, and the rest of society and business had even less. By 1981, only 213 computers were on the network. However, by 1995, 16 million people were online. Email was beginning to change the world. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 6, educators and professors were among the early adopters. They had begun to use Arpanet (the precursor to the Internet) in the mid-1970s. The 1980s were a time of educational exploration of this new medium, although the going was tough: the logistics were terrible as network connectivity with schools and homes was sparse. (Schools in the 1980s and even 1990s did not have modem connections and the only phone in the school was usually in the principal’s office, who had no interest in classroom use of his phone even if it was a hookup to the sole computer in the school, which was also typically in his office.) Despite the logistical challenges, however, online education took hold even as the field of online technology was taking its baby steps. The World Wide Web was made public in 1993. In January 1994, there were only an estimated 623 websites online, in total. Then: Amazon was launched online in 1995, Google was launched in 1998, Wikipedia in 2001, Facebook in 2003. In 2001, there were 513 million people online; in 2010, there were two billion. The Internet has become a condition of daily life in today’s world. It is an integral part of our work, social and personal communication. Yet, this is not true for the world of education. The Internet remains largely extraneous to the “real” work of teaching and learning in the class, where it is treated as an add-on. Surprisingly, despite the early sparks of interest and innovation by educators, the Internet revolution has not significantly impacted how we teach.
