Some years ago Paul Kolers, a psychologist with research interests in perception, presented a paper at an annual meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association in which he illustrated the vast amount of information that can be transmitted and received in very short, visual images. As I recall, his presentation consisted of a rapid fire collage of very brief snapshots with the duration of each snapshot being less than a second or so and the entire presentation lasting not much longer than a minute. I cannot recall the context nor Koler=s complete message, however, I do remember the impact of this demonstration. For me this demonstration illustrates the vast amount of information that is potentially available via the web at the touch of a finger.

Finally, I noted that my students were very reluctant to use this available resource to their best advantage. In my educational setting it is very clear that there is a mismatch between students= short-term and long-term goals and what I, as an instructor, expect them to gain from my IT-enhanced or web-enhanced instruction.

In his recent book Growing up digital: The rise of the net generation Don Tapscott contends that information age technology is changing the way youngsters are approaching education, politics, and life in general. Tapscott is an entrepreneur in the business of education and one of a number of proponents of the use of information technologies for teaching and learning. He predicted, along with many others, that this resource can drastically alter our present long established educational paradigms. In the chapter on N-Gen learning Don offered a new learning paradigm dubbed AInteractive Learning@ as he compares it with ABroadcast Learning,@ the established learning paradigm. This latter paradigm he refers to as traditional Adrill and spill,@ Adrill and kill,@ or Asage on stage@ methods of instruction. The new paradigm is characterized by such terms as hypermedia, construction or discovery, customized, learner-centered, facilitator, and learning how to learn (Tapscott, 1998, p. 143).

It would seem that Ateacher as coach or facilitator@ and the self-regulated learner should work nicely together. Together they should create a dynamic learning environment that fosters knowledge acquisition and understanding using whatever resources are available. Obviously, in the context of this paper, these resources include the Internet and the Web.

For the past two years I have opted to teach my courses without a standard textbook. Last year, for the first time, I did not require any text. This year I have adopted books that would be classed as Aprimary@ or Aoriginal@ sources. For example, in my educational psychology course I have assigned as one of the texts Howard Gardner=s (1991) The unschooled mind: How children think & how schools should each. Additional assigned readings come from government documents and journal articles. I am offering internet/web enhanced courses by providing lecture notes on line, links to assigned readings when possible, providing additional links that I think are excellent for additional reading, and encouraging link sharing and email correspondence. I have included an online lecture concerning aspects of use of the internet and the web and assigned a recent text by Bissell, Manring, and Rowland (1999) with the impressive title: CyberEducator: The internet and world wide web for K-12 education.

What I have found is that my students fall into two categories. Perhaps, not surprisingly, there are students who fit nicely into the category I call the self-regulated learner and students who suffer from what I have labeled as the AIs it on the test?@ syndrome. The self-regulated learners do tend to make use of all the resources available, i.e., the standard ones and the new electronic ones. The Ais it on the test?@ students are inclined to tap the standard resources and shy away from the new ones. They are very reluctant to experiment and seem to be somewhat overwhelmed with the wealth of information available. Sell (1997) warned his readers that they should be on the look out for such students. Sell explored several hidden assumptions that challenge the various claims made for using information age technologies to improve post-secondary education. A relevant hidden assumption here Ais that more information results in more learning.@ He argued that in many cases too much information all at once might result in less learning--the typical undergraduate can become paralyzed by overload. I must say that most of my students, even the self-regulators, are not inclined to explore and utilize this vast resource unless there is an incentive to do so as part of a performance evaluation scheme. And, so far, under these circumstances they appear to tap just what is required without branching out and exploring.

Morris, R.B. (1998). A glimpse at the possible real benefits of the university=s link to the information highway, American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences Perspective Journal (Proceedings of the 1998 Las Vegas Conference), Volume 1: Number 1.