How the Web has changed lecturing: going the full circle

New educational technologies often appear with a fanfare of publicity that soon dies away once the next new technology appears. Seldom is the impact of an individual technology tracked and assessed over time. The World Wide Web was originally conceived as an aid to help physicists share knowledge via electronic copies of papers and reports. Its capabilities were soon recognized by the wider educational community and some of the most exciting and widely accessed early Web sites were built by educational institutions. Over the last two decades Web technologies have undergone substantial technical evolution while at the same time educators have continued to recognize and exploit what the Web has to offer as an evolving educational technology. Changes in university lecturing over the last two decades are compared and contrasted with developments in Web technologies and a case history, based upon a small regional university, is presented. It is proposed through personal reflection that while it might appear that educators have gone the “full circle” and simply arrived back at where they started it is suggested that the use of the Web in lecturing has had a deeper impact and has in fact transformed the role in a variety of ways.