Weaving a Virtural Web: Practical Approaches to New Information Technologies
 

Once upon a time there was a Kingdom ruled by a wise and generous King. This King had heard about the great Technology Revolution sweeping other lands and called for a seer of his own to help bring great things to his people. The IT person came and brought with him Technology: new computers, a LAN system connected to the latest servers, and a T1 connection to the Great World Wide Web.

And the Kingdom was happy. Until one day when the King realized his instructors and students were only using their new prize to surf the web and forward to each other silly jokes via email. What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t they realized their dreams of Interconnectivity and Great Learning?

Too bad this Kingdom didn’t have Sibylle Gruber’s new collection of essays, Weaving a Virtual Web: Practical Approaches to New Information Technologies; it would have made all the difference.

An owner’s manual of sorts for those seeking to utilize the WWW for instruction and communication, Gruber has drawn on the expertise of a diverse group of authors, from visual and rhetorical theory to pedagogical practice to hypertext communication in MUD Object Oriented environments. Click on the left bar to read a bit more about a few of the essays.

Weaving a Virtual Web dodges some of the problems plaguing pedagogical/technical texts, but does fall victim to the quick-fading reality of webpage links. Click on your right (my left?) for more about each of these mortal sins.

The text is packed tight with references and links to useful information on the Web. The links to the left give potential readers a taste of the text, even a complete essay, in addition to some terrific teaching tools essayist Kevin Leander brings together in his essay, “The Craft of Teaching and the World Wide Web.”

Gruber’s collection of twenty essays pushes its readers out the door, daring us to be innovators, sharing with these writers the task of building a Web that meets our needs, that excites us, and pushes information technology to a deeper, wider, higher, more complete level. Weaving a Virtual Web accomplishes this goal and should leave you a bit more intrigued the next time you log on.