JEvents

 

Static web pages become a big problem for would-be Internet educators when the Internet is used to offer course and lesson content most or all of which does not change for several years.  It is true that "these days" static web pages have more and more multimedia content (such as animations, still picture 'slide-shows', and videos-on-demand) mixed with the plain-text and static graphics (pictures), the latter which have been the staple content of textbooks for decades, even for centuries since the invention of the printing press.

It is true that some of the web content -- and thus some of any existing distance learning (DL) content --  "these days" is "variable" and "conditional".  You will find some of it on what are the so-called latest generation "Web 2.0" web-sites.  And as the site PI, I will be trying to add example web site links on this web site to those other sites which do so.  For example parts of the web page content might pop-up word or term definitions, as this web site now does.  Different displays of content can be made available for different users under different web-site usage circumstances.  That turns out to be a more difficult web site feature for web site developers to enable.  And it is an as yet largely unknown concept for most authors of educational materials to consider offering in their published materials.

Also the layout of the content within various web pages can be more flexible and conditional as well.  But has the core content of those web pages really changed much from hard-to-change textbook or newspaper-like static content?  Yes newspaper-like web-pages can change the static content on them in a matter of 1-2 minutes, making the content more "up to date" and devoid of typographic errors and errors of word use and grammar.  But the content within those pages is still static.  And static content means "one size or one fixed published static content-page" is intended to serve all of the web page viewers.  The web-publishing of Internet web page content on "Web 2.0" newspaper-style web sites is merely made more efficient for the standard largely unchanged old-office-style hard-copy in-print on-paper content creation, editing, and publication that we have become used to creating since the 1980s with "more modern" word-processing software and now with web server computers instead of using the old die-hard type-writers and lead-type-setting that enabled the old on-paper printing presses to work.