Pedagogical Value of the World-Wide Web

Tools such as Gopher and WWW have been developed largely to facilitate sharing of technical and corporate information at colleges, universities and research institutions. But very quickly, potential educational applications of these technologies became apparent, especially for open and distance learning. In this regard, WWW has more appeal, because of its hypermedia foundation. Its use is growing very rapidly, and it can now be used to access an immense volume of rapidly evolving information. Thus, another strength of WWW is its access to the latest version of a document. Because of all these characteristics, pedagogical uses of the web can evolve along two major axes: 1) use of the technology on a closed corpus of educational material, for the hypermedia and distance delivery capabilities of the web, on one hand, and 2) use of this technology on an organized structure of links for an open corpus of material that was not necessarily meant initially for pedagogical use, but which can be "redirected" and exploited in a guided exploratory pedagogy approach. These two axes are not antagonistic but can be alternatively or complementarily followed. In this paper, we will describe the main features of WWW, then analyze those features that are most interesting for educational purposes, and finally show an example of a sophisticated pedagogical use of the web. Through this example, we will show how educational programs can be executed remotely through WWW, thus making use of all the interesting features of this tool, i.e. hypermedia and remote access, without giving up on those features that make tutorials "intelligent", i.e. maintain a profile of the user and adapt the behavior of the program to the abilities of the learner. While describing technical solutions which make such pedagogical use possible, this paper will also indicate limitations that WWW imposes on the courseware designers and how these limitations may impact on the pedagogical quality of the material. By this balanced presentation Pedagogical Value of the World-Wide Web B. Ibrahim 2 of strength and limitations, we hope to show realistically the enormous educational potential of this tool.