March 23, 2004
Web technologies in evolution – a context for learning cultures, Professor Wendy Hall
Long before the Web existed hypertext visionaries and researchers foresaw a richly inter-linked world that allowed authors and readers alike to move easily between related items of information in a global network: many were excited by the idea that such environments could be used to support learning. The Web provided the infrastructure to enable those ideas to become reality but in some ways is far more limited than many of its antecedents. Links, the fundamental building blocks of any hypertext system, are still difficult to author and maintain. Associative, personalised links, which formed the basis of Vannevar Bush's off-cited article "As We May Think", are largely missing from both the theory and the practice of building Web sites, and it is left to search engines to fill the gaps. However, the development of the Semantic Web promises to provide a much richer environment for exploring these ideas, and in particular how they might provide a context for learning. This talk will consider how the Web is used today to support learning, and will look forward to the potential for more sophisticated Web-based learning environments in the future as the Semantic Web evolves.