Academic Growth Of The Internet

Academic Growth Of The Internet

The internet has seen a rise in the amount of available websites and facilities that help towards the academic side of things. With, VLEs, Google Scholar, Digital Libraries and Wiki's the internet is now a rival to the more traditional ways of carrying out research or education.


Google Scholar


Google scholar provides an easy way to find literature that can be used for many different means. From one place on the internet you can search through various sources. This facility allows users to find digital or physical copies of articles and books from academic publishers, professional societies and universities.


By searching for 'the growth of the internet' you receive multiple pages of results with different articles on the subject. There are an array of formats that they come in and also give an option to show articles similar.

Google scholar has helped the growth of the internet academically because it allows people to now search through a huge amount of articles written by professionals. It can be used by anyone for any reason, including, university work, research and much more.


Wiki's


Wiki's are now a very extensive software since their release. The most popular wiki is Wikipedia with over 26.6 Million articles, however there are a lot more that are dedicated to a particular topic, such as TV Shows or Video Game Series.


Even though there are a lot of articles on Wikipedia, they can be written by anyone and therefore are usually viewed as being unreliable. On the other hand, these articles are often updated by people who are professionals in their field and therefore the articles are quite trustworthy.


VLEs


VLEs (or Virtual Learning Environments) such as Moodle, allow teachers and students to communicate, give feedback or post work to each other, this gives them a way out of school hours to keep up to date with work or improvements.

For example, if a teacher gives a presentation during lesson or makes a template that can be used, they can put it onto the VLE after the lesson has finished that the pupils can download and use in their own time. This gives them a much greater source of resources that they can use.


However, even though VLEs may look superb they do have their downfalls. Because you are normally going to be at home when using this type of facility then you are not going to get the physical presence of your tutor and some feedback may be hard to understand without asking them face to face. This can easily mean that students fall behind in their work rather than get ahead of it due to physical restrictions.




Digital Libraries


A digital library is a library that stores books in a digital format and are accessed on a computer. There are currently large scale digital library projects underway at Google, the Million Book Project and Internet Archive.


There are many advantages to digital libraries:

• There are no physical boundaries as the user doesn't have to go to a physical library and people from all over the world can visit the same one and gain access to the same information as anyone else.
• You can use an online library whenever you want as they are online 24/7, unlike traditional libraries which need to close every day.
• The information contained in the library can be used by many different people all at the same time.
• Digital libraries have very simple interfaces that allow for easy searching, and users can use any search term to find the information they want. For example, key words, titles, authors, names or subjects.
• Because the information is in a digital form it can be preserved for a longer time that its counterpart physical copy, as these can degrade after successive use.
• Unlike traditional libraries, digital ones can store a lot more information as they take up little physical space compared.

Online Learning Websites


There are many different websites dedicated to online learning that allow you to further your education in various ways. BBC Bitesize allows people (especially students) to use the resources for further reading and to take tests on specific subjects.


Other websites such as ICS and Open University allow you to take a course online that you can do at home. You can interact with other members taking the same course as you or with a tutor that has been assigned to help you.


This type of academic facility can easily be expanded to help with the growth of the internet because, it could mean that in the future all schooling may be done at home via online learning websites or university students spend most of their time learning this way.