As Current Issues in Education enters its third year of publication, the journal continues to seek innovative uses of the medium. Increasingly, the Internet provides enhanced opportunities for visual, audio and video interactivity. The potential to incorporate features that advance or surpass those traditionally used in print journals is yet to be realized by authors and publishers of ejournals. In this article, we underscore transformative characteristics of media use as they relate to communication and begin an ongoing discussion that will focus on this changed character of research reports.
Web technology frees scholarly publications from size limitations imposed by the high cost of print.
Additionally, the Internet delivers research data in a multiplicity of new formats. This mode of delivery, by making the record of data public to skeptical examination, fundamentally alters our mechanisms for establishing validity of reported research. The existence of the interview transcripts in their entirety allows the reader to function as a co-analyst with the researcher better and more critically than if he or she had to take the word of the author without ready access to the data. Similarly, limitations inherent in the use of summary statistics in research reports are an unavoidable reality due to space limitations imposed by the print medium. The employment of hypertext in this exemplar facilitates instant and simultaneous access to multiple sources of information.