Spinning the Web

This is the final part in my 11 part series on the history and impact of distance education. I have taken a British perspective on this, but of course, other views are available. In this final part, another great Briton makes his impact with a contribution to the World Wide Web.

‘Enquire Within Upon Everything’ was an obscure computer program designed 25 years ago by a young software consultant called Tim Berners-Lee. The program may have been obscure but it was also ground breaking as it encapsulated the ideas that would eventually enable Internet users to link directly from their personal computer to any information they required.

Tim Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955. In 1976 he graduated from Queen's College, Oxford University, before working at CERN, the European nuclear research facility in Switzerland. Whilst working as a computer software consultant, Berners-Lee began to consider the problem of how to communicate and access information via computer on the emerging world wide phenomenon that was known as the Internet. In 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project which he called the World Wide Web. Two years later, his ideas had crystallized on the Internet, and by 1993 the principles of his browser system Mosaic was being championed by the University of Illinois. A year later, in 1994, Berners-Lee joined M.I.T. where he headed up the fledgling W3 Consortium.

The World Wide Web is a truly unique and all pervasive innovation - without it the Internet would not be as successful as it evidently is. Browsers make accessing information ‘friendlier’, and pages more navigable. Berners-Lee has campaigned tirelessly to keep the World Wide Web open and free, and this is possibly one reason why it remains largely an un-policed, imaginatively fertile and unpredictable aspect of distance education. For many commentators, the Internet was inevitable - the World Wide Web simply made it easier for millions to use it.

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