Education, Hypermedia, and the World Wide Web: Old Realities and New Visions

This article is an introduction to the special issue of CyberPsychology and Behavior entitled Education, Hypermedia, and the World Wide Web. This article describes the methods for soliciting contributions and presents a brief overview of the authors and their articles. I also discuss some general themes that I gleaned from the authors’ contributions. A central theme that emerges from these articles is that the majority of web-based learning available presently is simply an extension of “traditional” classroom instruction, which suffers from fundamental flaws. A contrasting theme, which also emerges, is that the World Wide Web, in conjunction with societal demands, can serve as the impetuous for a revolution in education, creating a more functional and student-centered system. Some of the applications introduced by practitioners/developers in these articles serve as models of such learning environments.