This report is also available as an Acrobat file.

Contents
Authoring and Design for the WWW

PRINCIPLES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

The Web as an educational medium

The extended HEI

The internet allows students to experience a greater pluralism of ideas no longer bounded by a physical environment. Students can be connected across sites and across HEIs both nationally and internationally. Increasingly the non-Web aspects of the internet, such as e-mail and newsgroups, are available within Web browsers.

Usenet groups can be set up as alternative discussion groups outside class contact. (Tessier 1996) All messages are accessed and posted to the usenet group through e-mail (a feature increasingly accessible from with in Web browsers). Like the telephone, and unlike the Web per se, usenet groups offer two way communication, but in addition, a message can be posted to hundreds of readers, so that all conversation takes place in a public forum.

Usenet groups can be used to encourage students to participate in a course-based discussion, with two aims:

to provide a collaborative learning environment in which students could discuss topics, see the richness and variety of arguments, alternative points of view
by debating issues it was hoped that students would be more prepared for their examinations. It was also hoped that it would provide greater opportunities for part-time students to take part in the debates.

Augmenting students' skills

On-line communication has a tendency to be less formal than paper-based discourse. Students often use complex cross referencing systems, quotations and graphical symbols to indicate different levels of information to create the feeling of an interactive improvised dialogue. Nevertheless if this medium is being used as part of an academic discipline then it also threatens definitions of good writing and careful reading' (Bolter 1991). We need to be able to communicate clearly in this medium, but what this means in practice remains to be seen: it should not be taken to mean that writing styles should or will remain unaffected.

Student work on the Web

HEI staff should not regard the Web as their own, one-way, means of communicating to students. For a student or groups of students collaboratively to put work on the Web offers the following advantages:

student motivation: as the Web becomes more a part of everyday life, students will become more blase about it, but even so, there will be some satisfaction for students in knowing that the work can be seen beyond the confines of their course.
peer review: once work is published in this almost effortless way, responses to it may be received from around the world, allowing students ideas to be tested in a far wider sphere than was traditionally possible.
encouraging professionalism: much student work is effectively a private matter between student and tutor. The opportunity to have one's work seen round the world is likely to promote a greater interest in others' perceptions of one's work than would normally be the case.
the wider community: students will have an opportunity to discover that they are not alone: feedback from students and others around the world, together with the research that students will probably undertake to discover what sites already exit touching the same areas as their own will tend to make them aware of the outside world.

The potential of the internet as a communication medium changes the interpersonal boundaries of the student's experience. The use of E- mail, Internet Relay Chat and usenet groups, together with Web pages by students and staff alike, creates an extended society and new academic groupings. In order to validate new forms of learning we need to devise new criteria and styles of assessment.

Facilitating contributory learning on the Web

A framework needs to be established to allow students and staff to contribute freely to the Web. Prerequisites include:

liaison with external relations/publications department if material will be accessible to the outside world (and in general we believe it should be), enuring conformity to university standards, quality assurance, and copyright.
technical support: hardware, software and staff time
staff time for collation of material in electronic form

These needs fit into the broader range of requirements listed under Creating a maintainable site (p89).

Contents

Graphics Multimedia Virtual Environments Visualisation Contents