How to Make the Web More Educational

The quantity of educational and other resources on the Web continues to increase very rapidly. Here we address the question of how we could help people to learn more from resources that are already available or likely to become so. We take "educational" to mean that we come to understand something better -- and understanding means knowing about context. But that requires ways to find appropriate resources to establish what the context is or was.

Drawing on papers in preparation and our project on "Contexts and Relationships", I will discuss this challenge using three lines of thought: The essence of the Web has to do with making links, so how do we make the kinds of links that would most facilitate learning?; the reference library has failed to make an effective transition from paper to a digital environment; and the role of spatial analogs in knowledge organization.