We discussed the history and importance of communicating information. We talked about the development of the Internet. This has made it possible for almost anyone with a computer to share in what is called the Information Age.

Research shows that the Internet's World Wide Web is especially popular with young people. As a result, colleges and universities are recognizing the learning gains that can be made with Web-based instructional technology. For example, George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia offers its professors training in instructional technology. G.M.U. teachers can learn how to use the latest Web tools to improve their classes.

Rick Reo is an instructional designer at the university. He says the education profession has entered the Web 2.0 period. He says Web 2.0 is a marketing term that defines a renewal of the Web since the start of the twenty-first century. Any kind of Web-driven tool that is interesting, useful, easy to learn and free is Web 2.0, says Rick Reo.

One such tool is a social networking service. This is a Web site that helps people find others like themselves, create personal identities, exchange resources and work together. Facebook and MySpace are two social networking Web sites popular in the United States and around the world.

Educause is a nonprofit organization that supports the use of information technology in education. The group says up to ninety percent of American college students have created Facebook Web sites. Social networking sites also provide teachers a way to reach their students outside of the classroom. Rick Reo says students use Facebook or MySpace as often as they check their university e-mail.

Social bookmarking is another Web 2.0 technology that has many educational uses. Professors can use the tool when doing personal research. It can also add to classroom learning. When you save the address of a Web site that you want to visit again on your computer, you are bookmarking it. Social bookmarking sites let people store collections of bookmarks. These can be shared with other people or made private.

When you bookmark a Web site, you also tag the site with descriptive words. For example, you might tag the voaspecialenglish.com Web site with the words: English, teaching, learning, news and information. Tags help users organize their bookmarks. Users can also see how many other people have used a tag. And they can search for all resources that have been given that tag.

Rick Reo says social bookmarking is especially useful when creating a collection of resources to be shared with others. A biology teacher, for example, might ask her students to bookmark Web sites about flowers and plants. The students work collectively to create the list. When it is finished, the students have a group of resources that will help them finish their project.

Podcasting is also a very popular instructional technology. The term was invented with the Apple company's iPod in mind. IPods are small digital audio players that permit users to download music from their computer directly to the device for listening later.

The term podcasting no longer relates only to the iPod. It involves any software and hardware combination that permits the user to download audio files and control when those files are heard. Anyone with a modern computer can create, make available and download a podcast from the Internet.

Podcasting also makes education transportable. Teachers can make their talks, or lectures, available to students who miss the class. Podcasts also let students hear what other experts have to say. Remember that biology teacher who asked her students to bookmark Web sites about flowers and plants? She might also ask her students to report about that collection of resources in a podcast.

Rick Reo says George Mason is one of many "iTunes universities" around the world. Apple has opened its iTunes store to universities. Podcasts created by the schools are stored on Apple's computer servers. Anyone can download the free educational material at Apple's iTunes store. Stanford, Yale, Duke, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are other universities offering audio and video downloads.

Podcasts are fed to computers using a technology called RSS. Many creators of information on the Internet offer it directly to people using RSS feeds. Our biology teacher example might ask her students to register for RSS feeds from five popular science Web sites. To receive those feeds, students need to register for a free RSS reader, or aggregator. Google and MyYahoo both offer RSS readers.

Once the students register for a free RSS reader, a connection has to be made between the reader and the student's favorite science Web sites. Establishing these connections is called subscribing. It is easy to do. Just look for an RSS sign on the site.

Using RSS technology helps people easily get new material from Web sites that interest them.

Wikis have also become a popular Web 2.0 technology in education. Let us go back to our biology class. Suppose the teacher decided to take her class on a camping trip to collect plants and flowers. The students would need to work collectively to decide what to bring on the trip. A wiki can help. A wiki is a Web site where anyone can create, edit or change information collected on the site. Audio, video and pictures can be added to a wiki as well.

The most popular wiki on the Internet is Wikipedia. It is a free encyclopedia of information about people, places, things, events and ideas that anyone can write, add to or edit. Wikipedia was launched in two thousand one. Today, it includes more than ten million articles in more than two hundred fifty languages. More than two million articles are in English. Each article offers links to other Wikipedia articles or to other Web resources.

Educause reports that Wikipedia is the eighth most visited Web site in the United States. College students use it as a main research tool. However many schools look at the tool with a critical eye. That is because a person can put incorrect information on Wikipedia. The history school at Middlebury College, for example, has banned Wikipedia in student research. The ban was ordered after several students repeated the same wrong information from a Wikipedia article.

Other universities are using Wikipedia to teach students how to write without expressing an opinion. At Columbia University in New York City, professors have had their students create or edit Wikipedia articles to learn how to write in a neutral way.

Perhaps the best known form of Web 2.0 activity is the Web log, or blog for short. There are reportedly more than one hundred million blogs around the world. A blog is an online collection of personal comments and links to other Web sites. Anyone can create a blog using sites like blogger.com or wordpress.com. Bloggers often work together in small communities. They read each other's posts, link to them or report what other bloggers say.

Each individual post on a blog can become a discussion through comments left by readers. There are personal blogs, political blogs and entertainment blogs, just to name a few. In higher education, professors use blogs to communicate their opinions or to create a discussion with other educators. Students are also using blogs for personal expression or as part of their classes.

There are many other ways that information technology can be used in education. We have only reported about a few of them. For example, there are virtual worlds and gaming, Web-based self-publishing and photo-sharing. When it comes to information technology in higher education, Rick Reo at George Mason University says the sky is the limit.

We tell how computers are linking people around the world.

We described how the telegraph was the first important device that could move information quickly from one place to another. And we discussed early radio and television broadcasts and the beginning of satellite communications.

In the early nineteen seventies, the American Department of Defense began developing a new project. It began linking major research universities across the United States.

Professors at many American universities do research work for the United States government. The Department of Defense wanted to link the universities together to help the professors cooperate in their work. Department of Defense officials decided to try to link these universities by computer.

The officials believed the computer would make it easier for researchers to send large amounts of information from research center to research center. They believed they could link computers at these universities by telephone.They were right. It became very easy to send information from one university to another. University researchers working on the same project could share large amounts of information very quickly. They no longer had to wait several days for the mail to bring a copy of the research reports.

This is how the system works. The computer is linked to a telephone by a device called a modem. The modem changes computer information into electronic messages that are sounds. These messages pass through the telephone equipment to the modem at the other end of the telephone line. This receiving modem changes the sound messages back into information the computer can use.

The first modern electronic communication device, the telegraph, sent only one letter of the alphabet at a time. A computer can send thousands of words within seconds.

The link between universities quickly grew to include most research centers and colleges in the United States. These links became a major network. Two or more computers that are linked together form a small network. They may be linked by a wire from one computer to another, or by telephone. A network can grow to almost any size.

For example, let us start with two computers in the same room at a university. A wire links them to each other. In another part of the university, two other computers also are linked using the same method. Then the four are connected with modems and a telephone line used only by computers. This represents a small local network of four computers.

Now, suppose this local network is linked by its modem through telephone lines to another university that has four computers. Then you have a network of eight computers. The other university can be anywhere, even thousands of kilometers away. These computers can now send any kind of information that can be received by a computer - messages, reports, drawings, pictures, sound recordings. And, the information is exchanged immediately.

Since it began, this system of computer networks has had several different names. It is now called the Internet. In nineteen eighty-one, this communication system linked two hundred thirteen computers. Only nine years later, it linked more than three hundred fifty thousand computers. Today, experts say more than one billion people around the world are linked by computers to the Internet. And, they say, this number will continue to grow.

Almost every major university in the world is part of the Internet. So are smaller colleges and many public and private schools. Magazines, newspapers, libraries, businesses, government agencies, and people in their homes also are part of the Internet.

Computer experts began to greatly expand the Internet system in the last years of the nineteen eighties. This expansion was called the World Wide Web. It permits computer users to easily search for information using software called a browser.

How fast is the World Wide Web part of the Internet system? Here is an example. A computer user in London, England is seeking information about volcanoes in the American state of Hawaii. She types in the words "Hawaii" and "volcano" in a search engine, such as Google.

The computer produces a list within seconds. She chooses to examine information from the National Park Service's headquarters at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The Park Service computer in Hawaii provides information about the huge volcanoes there, and how they were formed. It also has other useful information.

The researcher in London looks at the information on her computer. Then she prints a copy of it. Within seconds she has a copy of the National Park information including pictures. It has taken her less than five minutes to complete this research.

Who pays for the Internet? That is not easy to explain. Each network, small or large, pays for itself. Networks decide how much their members will pay for their part of the cost of the local service connecting time. Then all of the large networks decide how much each will pay to be part of the larger network that covers a major area of the country. The area network in turn pays the national network for the service it needs.

Each person who has a computer at home pays a company that lets the computer connect to the Internet. These companies are called Internet service providers.

ISP's charge about twenty dollars a month for a slow dial-up connection to the Internet. A computer user with a high-speed wireless connection pays at least forty dollars a month. Wireless connections generally link computers to the Internet with a special technological device called a router.

The United States used to have the largest number of Internet users in the world. However, in April, the USA Today newspaper reported that China now has the largest number of people using the Internet. Estimates from a Chinese research group said more than two hundred twenty million people in China were using the Internet as of February. That is about seventeen percent of the Chinese population.

The newspaper said the United States had two hundred sixteen million Internet users at the end of last year. That is seventy-one percent of the population. The Internet World Statistics Web site notes several other countries where more than sixty percent of the people use the Internet. They include Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and South Korea.

Studies have shown that people use the Internet for communication and for research. Much of that research leads to buying products on the Internet. More people than ever are now using the computer for e-commerce – to buy and sell products electronically.

Some governments, private groups and individuals have criticized the Internet. Some governments do not trust the Internet because they say it is difficult to control the information that is placed there. Some government officials say extremist groups place harmful information on the Internet. They say dangerous political information should be banned. Other groups say it is difficult to protect children from sexual information and pictures placed on the Internet. They say this kind of information should be banned.

Other critics say that it is becoming extremely difficult to know if you can trust the information that is found on the Internet. They wonder if the information is correct. Still other critics say the Internet is no longer a free exchange of information and ideas. They say it has become a big business that sells products, services and information. They want the Internet to be used only for research and education.

Communicating information always has been extremely important. Throughout history, some information has had value beyond measure. The lack of information often costs huge amounts of money and, sometimes, many lives.

One example of this took place near New Orleans, Louisiana. Britain and the United States were fighting the War of Eighteen Twelve. The Battle of New Orleans is a famous battle. As in all large battles, hundreds of troops were killed or wounded.

After the battle, the Americans and the British learned there had been no need to fight. Negotiators for the United States and Britain had signed a peace treaty in the city of Ghent, Belgium, two weeks earlier. Yet news of the treaty had not reached the United States before the opposing troops met in New Orleans. The battle had been a terrible waste. People died because information about the peace treaty traveled so slowly.

From the beginning of human history, information traveled only as fast as a ship could sail. Or a horse could run. Or a person could walk.

People experimented with other ways to send messages. Some people tried using birds to carry messages. Then they discovered it was not always a safe way to send or receive information.

A faster method finally arrived with the invention of the telegraph. The first useful telegraphs were developed in Britain and the United States in the eighteen thirties.

The telegraph was the first instrument used to send information using wires and electricity. The telegraph sent messages between two places that were connected by telegraph wires. The person at one end would send the information. The second person would receive it.

Each letter of the alphabet and each number had to be sent separately by a device called a telegraph key. The second person would write each letter on a piece of paper as it was received.

In the eighteen fifties, an expert with a telegraph key could send about thirty-five to forty words in a minute. It took several hours to send a lot of information. Still, the telegraph permitted people who lived in cities to communicate much faster. Telegraph lines linked large city centers. The telegraph soon had a major influence on daily life.

The telegraph provided information about everything. Governments, businesses and individuals used the telegraph to send information. At the same time, newspapers used the telegraph to get information needed to tell readers what was happening in the world. Newspapers often were printed four or five times a day as new information about important stories was received over the telegraph. The telegraph was the quickest method of sending news from one place to another.

On August fifth, eighteen fifty-eight, the first message was transmitted by a wire cable under the Atlantic Ocean. The wire linked the United States and Europe by telegraph. This meant that a terrible mistake like the battle of New Orleans would not happen again.

Reports of daily news events in Europe began to appear in American newspapers. And news of the United States appeared in European newspapers. Information now took only a matter of hours to reach most large cities in the world. This was true for the big cities linked by the telegraph. However, it was different if you lived in a small farming town, kilometers away from a large city. The news you got might be a day or two late. It took that long for you to receive your newspaper.

On November second, nineteen twenty, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania broadcast the first radio program. That broadcast gave the results of a presidential election.

Within a few short years, news and information could be heard anywhere a radio broadcast could reach. Radios did not cost much. So most people owned at least one radio. Radio reporters began to speak to the public from cities where important events were taking place.

Political leaders also discovered that radio was a valuable political tool. It permitted them to talk directly to the public. If you had a radio, you did not have to wait until your newspaper arrived. You could often hear important events as they happened.

Some people learned quickly that information meant power. In the nineteen thirties, many countries began controlling information. The government of Nazi Germany is a good example.

Before and during World War Two, the government of Nazi Germany controlled all information the German people received. The government controlled all radio broadcasts and newspapers. The people of Germany only heard or read what the government wanted them to hear or read. It was illegal for them to listen to a foreign broadcast.

After World War Two, a new invention appeared -- television. In industrial nations, television quickly became common in most homes. Large companies were formed to produce television programs. These companies were called networks. Networks include many television stations linked together that could broadcast the same program at the same time.

Most programs were designed to entertain people. There were movies, music programs and game programs. However, television also broadcast news and important information about world events. It broadcast some education programs, too. The number of radio and television stations around the world increased. It became harder for a dictator to control information.

In the nineteen fifties, two important events took place that greatly affected the communication of information. The first was a television broadcast that showed the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States at the same time. A cable that carried the pictures linked the two coasts. So people watching the program saw the Pacific Ocean on the left side of the screen. They saw the Atlantic Ocean on the right side of the screen.

It was not a film. People could see two reporters talk to each other even though a continent separated them. Modern technology made this possible.

The other event happened on September twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty-six. That was when the first telephone cable under the Atlantic Ocean made it possible to make direct telephone calls from the United States to Europe. Less than six years later, in July, nineteen sixty-two, the first communications satellite was placed in orbit around the Earth. The speed of information greatly increased again.

By the year nineteen hundred, big city newspapers could provide people with information that was only hours old. Now, both radio and television, with the aid of satellite communications, could provide information immediately. People who lived in a small village could listen to or watch world events as they happened.

A good example is when American astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. Millions of people around the world watched as he carefully stepped onto the moon on July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine.

People in large cities, small towns and villages saw the event as it was happening. There was no delay in communicating this important information.

A few years after Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, the United States Department of Defense began an experiment. That experiment led to a system that could send huge amounts of information around the world in seconds. Experts called it the beginning of the Information Age.