CHAPTER 2: OPERATIONALISATION OF THE KEY CONCEPTS AND
2.2 DEFINITIONS AND CONTEXTUALISATION OF CONCEPTS AND CONSTRUCTS
2.2.1 Internet
The internet is a global system of connections between computers that allows instant access to and dissemination of information (Ruzgar, 2005). As a growing trend in the world, internet-based research has become so significant in media and communication and the internet use by students has increased over the years.
The internet is described as a global system of connections between millions of computers which permits immediate access to and distribution of information.
Currently, the internet has become so common because of the rapid development of technology and globalization (Adediran & Kehinde, 2014). The world is a global village, and dissemination of information through the internet has made it to be a trustworthy tool. The use of the internet as an educational tool at universities is rapidly increasing.
Nowadays, there is a proliferation in the development of educational course Web sites with enormous amounts of learning resources imbedded within them.
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The internet capacity to afford students rapid access to information sources and catalogues situated at different institutions makes it a valued information source for students (Leeder & Shah, 2016). There is no contradicting that the internet is beneficial for educational purposes. It is extensively used to collect information so as to conduct research or enhance to the knowledge of any sort of question students could have.
The incorporation of the internet as a teaching tool has grown rapidly (Arkorful &
Abaidoo, 2014; Bagarukayo & Kalema, 2015). Many institutions of higher learning are employing advanced technologies as a portion of present teaching backgrounds (Denny-Brown & Thomas, 2013). As viewed by Ruzgar (2005), new technologies are rapidly shifting people’s ways of communication, the method of teaching, as well as extending learning techniques.
Since its inception, the internet changed the lives of millions of people globally. For students and lecturers, the internet has become a significant part of the academic process. Viegas (2013) affirms that the internet can be used to supplement a lecture where the lecturer requests students to find specific Web sites to gain more profound knowledge about a specific subject. It can also be used to substitute the traditional classroom lecture where courses are presented by means of the internet. The lecturer may place course materials on Web pages or may make a video recording of a lecture for watching on the internet. Soegoto and Tjokroadiponto (2018) further stressed that students nowadays have carried the internet into their classrooms, and learning can never be limited to the precincts of a classroom.
The internet is a collection of computers around the world that are linked with each other. The internet is an intermediate that does not have the restraint of information on each user. Many people are dependent on the internet for education, as the internet has countless advantages that can simplify a great deal of work, the internet is useful for effectiveness and productivity (Puspita & Rohedi, 2018). The nature of the effectiveness and productivity of the internet is that it has numerous facilities for users and offers ease of use.
The internet is described as the major computer network in the world to connect all existing computer networks (Intranet, Wide Area Network, Metropolitan Area Network, Personal Area Network, etc.) along with all computers, connected technological devices (Smartphone, Tablet, Switches, routers, hubs, and other connecting devices),
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as well as the computer itself, into a single pot world's computer networks. The time spent using electronic mail (e-mail) and surfing online has improved significantly over the years. Many conclusions have been drawn that the use of the internet is one of the key aspects which affect academic performance and social life of students (Acheaw & Larson, 2015). Social media Web sites have grown to be common, giving people innovative ways to communicate with each other. Social networking became extensive between the years 2004 and 2006, after the establishment of Facebook and MySpace. Facebook, for example, had more than 500 million participants in 2015 and is still growing and approximately 85% of students use Facebook (Hong & Jo, 2017).
2.2.1.1 History of the internet
The internet is significant for teaching and learning, and it has changed the way students and academics alike search for information. It is, therefore, also important to look at the historical aspect of this phenomenon.
It is significant to highlight that the history of the internet, while developing in equivalent with the general development of personal computers and other devices for digital information processing and retrieval, is a history of the common networking protocols for transfer of digital information, and of systems for the publication, organisation and distribution of this information (Flew, 2008).
The internet was developed in 1969 by the United States of America (USA) Defense Department computer network by the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). The Pentagon (Headquarters of the US Department of Defense and military leaders) built the network primarily for military contractors and universities conducting military research to share information (Vivian, 2003:223). The second major development in the history of the internet was the development of a common set of networking protocols, which enabled researchers in the various Local Area Networks (LANs) to communicate with one another, through the interconnection of these LANs into a Wide Area Network (WAN). The major breakthrough came in 1974, with the proposal developed by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf to develop a common switching protocol that could meet the needs of an open-architecture network environment, which came to be known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
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In 1983, the National Science Foundation (NSF), whose accord was to promote science, took over (Leiner, Postel & Kahn, 2009). The new National Science Foundation network attracted additional institutional users, many of which had their own internal networks. For example, most of universities that joined the NSF network had intracampus computer networks. Later on, the NSF network then became a connector for thousands of other networks.
As a backbone system that interconnects networks, the internet was a name appropriate for it (Vivian, 2003). In fact, were it not for the Department of Defense’s organisation known as the Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA), the internet as it is known today could not exist. This organisation and its successors (among which is the National Science Foundation) were influential in contributing the funding, the encouragement, and the old-fashioned kind of networking that brings people together that made possible the newly developed and unfamiliar networking so necessary to the internet (Tittel & Robbins, 1995).
The internet is not a new system. One may therefore have been amazed to pay attention to the existence of this massive resource in a computer media over recent years. This has been due to a combination of factors. Becoming part of the network was, until a moment ago, very difficult. The internet has always been feared in many respects: the network being perceived as exclusively an environment for technical people and academics (Manger, 1995). However, it can be argued that many different people use the internet for various reasons.
The internet has undergone a technical progression. It does tend to appeal to the more established computer user, in whatever capacity. The internet has developed very quickly because of the interest and input generated by other computer users. This being stated, nevertheless, the newly established Home Computer User (HCU) can get up-and-running without any extensive knowledge of computers, or indeed of the internet (Manger, 1995: 80; Naughton, 1999).
a) The development of the internet in South Africa
The internet access became commercially obtainable in South Africa in 1993 with the evolving of the Internet Services Providers (ISPs) – The Internet Company of South Africa and Internet Solutions (Lesame et al., 2012:41). During their initial operation, ISPs provided dial-up internet connectivity, but in the mid-1990s they started offering
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web site development, routers, firewalls, electronic-commerce (e-commerce) and managed networks and security services. Some then extended into designing and building Local Area Networks (LANs) and providing companies with secure communication.
There are various ways in which one can connect to the internet such as through a high-bandwidth (available space in a medium, such as cable to carry messages), satellite technology, or a direct link to the telephone network through a leased line (Lesame, 2001; Pather & Rey-Moreno, 2018). A cable modem offers a two-ways data communication through radio frequency channels on a Cable Television (CATV) infrastructure. Cable modems are commonly developed in countries in Australia, Europe and America (i.e., developed countries) and they provide high-speed broadband internet facilities, of which South Africa (still a developing country) does not have much of at present.
The Internet Service Provider Association (ISPA) was established in 1996, starting with nine members, and played a critical role in driving the progress of the internet connectivity in South Africa, including lobbying government on liberalisation, regulation and other matters. In the early days of ISP operation, there was not much cooperation between the users the ISPs and when electronic-mails (e-mails) passed between users connected to different ISP networks. These messages had to cross the Atlantic and come back, even if the sender and receiver were in the same building (Lesame et al., 2012:41). This made internet connectivity very slow and expensive, because international bandwidth has always been a major cost component.
However, the newly formed ISPA set up the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (Jinx) in 1996, which provided a peering point, allowing ISPs to inter-connect with each other across the country. A peering point is an agreement between two or more networks to accept each other’s data packets and forward them (Lesame, et al., 2011). The internet is a combination of public and private peering. This made it much faster to communicate by e-mail and visit local web sites. The peering point was a key to the fast take-up of the internet banking.
Internet service providers (ISPs) were challenged by interconnection problems with the company owing the telecommunications backbone they use and rent, viz., Telkom South Africa, and they have fought anti-competitive practices by Telkom aimed at
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slowing down the ISP business. The ISPs experienced legal battles fighting Telkom’s anti-competitive practices in court. Some of the bigger ISPs have started offering wholesale services to smaller ISPs, permitting them to connect to their infrastructure and put their services on top, such as e-mail, Web site hosting and customer support.
Wireless ISPs install one or more fixed-line Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) or leased lines and a Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) router that has a reach of a few kilometres. In 2009, there were 500 to 600 conventional ISPs in South Africa, but if the other hundreds of internet cafes and Wi-Fi spots are included in the list, there are more than thousands of ISPs in South Africa (Lesame et al., 2012:42).
b) The World Wide Web: Accessing information
The development of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the 1990s was the third key development that has made the internet what it is today. Though developments such as TCP/IP and packet switching provided the means by which networks and computers could connect with computers, the question of how people could connect with other people through such electronic networks had not received as much consideration.
The WWW is a global hypertext system implemented on the internet. Hypertext provides a spontaneous way of browsing through information. In a hypertext document, certain words, called ‘hyperlinks’ are underlined or otherwise highlighted.
When one clicks a hyperlink with a mouse, a Web client, called a browser, retrieves and displays the document associated with that hyperlink. This retrieval is possible because every Web page has its own unique address called Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which specifies where it is located in the internet (Pavon & Brown, 2010:
2).
Microsoft rapidly followed suit in 1995 with its internet explorer browser, released as part of its Windows 95 software suite to much fanfare and to the sounds of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Start me up’. The World Wide Web was associated with the development of both the common Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which provided a platform- independent means of interconnection between web sites, and HTML as a relatively straight forward means of writing source code for the World Wide Web (Naughton, 2016).
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Jenkins (2002) as cited in Phillips (2013) states that the World Wide Web has the potential to be the most “powerful distribution channel” as almost wherever the user is in the world, one is able to log on and access information. The mobility of the internet has increased even further, as internet access may be achieved through desktop computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet gadget to name a few, this make evident the growing use and usefulness of mobile technologies. Due to universal nature of the internet, users are able to access the diverse and informative sites globally.