The Impact and Future Prospects of the Internet

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The Impact and Future Prospects of the Internet

The impact of the Internet, that is, the computer and its email and World Wide Web functions, have changed teaching, research, and collegiality. The Internet expands our horizons, our imaginations, and our capacities to find, store, organize, use, teach, and publish information. E-mail provides fast, almost instantaneous, communication with libraries, archives, and colleagues all across the globe, and with administrators at one's own university or elsewhere.

The use of the computer and, by extension, the Internet is as important to History as it is to Biology or Physics. What lay behind this argument was the continuous drift of technology and the funds away from the humanities and toward other departments. The World Wide Web is the other crucially important computer aid for faculty. The Web enables us to search and find most kinds of information within a few seconds. Color graphics, moving pictures, and sounds as well as texts are available through the Web. The information available is nearly unlimited in breadth. There are dozens of search engines that help us discover on the Internet material for students, research, and for everyday living.

With advances in graphic content, streamlined interfaces, and new technology like VRML, Java and Shockwave, the Internet's ability to provide meaningful content is changing. "Almost everyone agrees that the potential of the Internet to improve personal computing is inspiring." What is hotly disputed is exactly how using a PC or browsing the Internet will change. This paper discusses some of the issues related with the impact and future of internet.

THE IMPACT OF THE INTERNET

The impact of the Internet, that is, the computer ...

... middle of paper ...

...d students, that is, the traditional university teaching environment.

A place where many people, hopefully, believe in learning for learning's sake. Where teachers help lead both themselves and their students toward wisdom. As the new technologies become more important, we can still teach our students to be critical and humanistic. But we will fail them and ourselves unless we take pro-active measures to harness the Internet. We have to demonstrate to our students that we can help them order the chaos of facts now available on the Internet into understandable constructions. We can either continue to be leaders in using these new technological tools, or we will very likely end up being buried by them.

Bibliography:

1. "Internet Complete Reference" -- Harley Hahn

2. http://www.microsoft.com

3. http://www.sun.com

4. http://www.duenow.com

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