Internet interactive authoring, teach and learning-a breakthrough for education

The Internet is a telecommunication medium providing an inverted open platform through a common browser user interface and common network platform. This platform allows numerous information handling technologies to coexist. Using the cross platform language, JAVA, as a glue, very complex systems can be built rapidly and inexpensively. More importantly, this technology can be applied to education, providing sophisticated teaching and learning systems based on the common browser interface. Even an authoring and Web publishing system can be offered in the same way. Users only need to know how to use the browser and are not required to learn programming languages to produce publishable and accessible teaching content on the Internet. Furthermore, the Internet can be used for asynchronous interaction or synchronous interaction, depending on the bandwidth of the telecommunication medium affordable. Hence, the Internet is a breakthrough for education for the following reasons: the Internet is almost ubiquitously accessible with a reasonable cost; information publishing is a main strength with lots of freeware; a common browser interface is easier to master than numerous different user interfaces; specially designed Internet education systems are now available for pedagogic research or teaching at an affordable cost; and it absorbs all IT technological advances and yet protects users from obsolescence by the user community's own actions.