Welcome to the brave new world of the World Wide Web. The Web allows people to present information, link it to related materials, and share it with a world-wide audience by computer. It has the potential to change the way that people communicate and collaborate, rendering physical proximity inconsequential. On the UW campus, faculty are just beginning to tap the Web's potential in their undergraduate courses. Dozens of professors have created basic Web sites for their courses, enabling students to easily access the course syllabus and class assignments online.
Some faculty also provide links to related sites, encouraging motivated students to explore further.
An ambitious few have made the Web a more integral part of their courses. I think it was because they were more engaged with the topic. Testing Hubble's Law on the Web Astronomy professor Bruce Margon has elected to use the Web for a single lab exercise in his Astronomy 101 course. For this one lab, I think the technology improves the quality of our teaching. But I can name 100 other things that cannot be matched well to the Web.