Chapter 4: The Internet in Social Studies Classrooms: Lost Opportunity or Unexplored Frontier?

The editors of this volume identify 1984 as the start of the “information age.” If this is the case, then the World Wide Web or WWW (what is universally meant when people now discuss “the Internet”), is a relatively late comer to the party—Tim Berners-Lee “invented” the WWW in 1991 (with apologies to former Vice President Al Gore). However, one could argue that the information age did not really begin—or at least begin in ear- nest—until the WWW arrived. Indeed, it was only after the early and exponential growth of the so-called “information superhighway” that ordinary citizens were truly ushered into the information age. The WWW (hereafter, the Internet)¹ has indeed become ubiquitous, to the point that a vast majority of American citizens utilize the Internet in some way on a daily basis: for gathering information, for participating in government, for engaging in commerce and, more recently, for forming and participat-