Clearly, many new opportunities are not apparent at the start. Technologies continue to progress after their development and adoption phases, but the changes they make to society are muted, as the technology simply becomes a part of the background. Jet airliners began in 1952, and matured with the flights of the first Boeing 747 and first Concorde, both in 1969, and changed the way people in the developed world took their holidays, by the end of the century. That brings us back once more to the role the Internet will play in the future, helping people to learn, to find information and to gain an education. It is time to consider, in an unblinkered way, the educational potential of the Web and multimedia.
Search engines point to dead links, and offer no indication of quality or suitability.
At least one search engine only lists sites that are pointed to by other quality sites, but this may leave out excellent material, for what is quality astronomical information for me, may not be quality for a professional astronomer, and vice-versa. One solution is to go to a trusted site like the ABC website, to consult their list of links, but this still leaves us up in the air about the level, content and usefulness of the linked sites. Today, the Internet offers remote access to raw data and information, but this is not the same as real education. Judging what the Internet might do for education is like trying to make judgements about an integrated urban public transport system, based on your extrapolations from a glimpse of Mulga Bill s bicycle on a mountain track on a stormy night. The key to the future appears to be the use of metadata, data about data, information that boosts our ability to find useful and trustworthy information.