Association for the Advancement of Computing In Education Pedagogical Challenges for the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (Web) is the latest in a long line of technological tools which can be used in teaching and learning at universities. Current interest regarding its use coincides with increased use of different methods of teaching and learning at universities and with increasing use of the Web to deliver courses to internal and external students. After locating this article within an extrasomatic information processing framework, the author asserts that the use of the Web poses pedagogical challenges. Some of these perceived challenges are presented and discussed. The author also proposes that the debate surrounding the use of the Web in university teaching should centre around learning and not technical issues. The learning issues and challenges dis-cussed in this article include learning approaches, using the technical features of the Web to learning advantage, assessment, learning to learn and change. The article concludes that the challenges discussed are not new and are mostly the same challenges that have been present in universities for a long time. Humans appear to have a unique ability to carry out extrasomatic informa-tion processing (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993). Extrasomatic means that som