Internet's web to get wider and wider

Here is an interesting extract from the Sydney Morning herald dated 23rd April, 2009:

While the internet has dramatically changed lives around the world, its full impact will only be realised when far more people and information go online, its founders said on Wednesday.

"The web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past," said Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, at a seminar on its future....

Just 23% of the globe's population currently uses the internet, according to the United Nation's International Telecommunications Union. By contrast, just 5% of Africans surf the web, reported in March.....But that level is expected to rise, said internet co-founder Vinton Cerf.....

The number of websites has since ballooned from just 500 as recently as 1994 to over 80 million currently, with growing numbers of sites consisting of user-generated content like blogs.

…..So what does this mean for Teacher Librarians?

Even more information available at our fingertips?

I believe that this will mean an “explosion” of information available and even more need than ever before for students to learn skills that teach them how to locate and decipher the dependability and reliability of a web source. A little different to when I was a child and the Librarian would show us how to use a microfiche, how to use the index in an Encyclopaedia and how to find a good book to read.

It is an exciting time for us all and we as: TL’s in training, are the future.

The world truly is an “Oyster – shell” with a pearl inside, waiting to be discovered.