Facilitating teaching and learning resources through the World Wide Web - case accounts of industrial design and living technology education in Taiwan

Designers have a key role to play in exploring the potential uses of technology, understanding and managing its impact on society, and ensuring that it is accessible, usable, and useful. There are a number of resources on the Internet aimed specially at students and faculties. The Internet provides access to the World Wide Web, Usenet, Ftp, and Telnet, which have tremendous educational potential. The World Wide Web has more appeal, because of its hypermedia foundation, its access to an immense volume of rapidly evolving information, and its access to the latest information. Because of all these characteristics, the World Wide Web becomes a potent tool for educational purposes. This paper discusses these features of the Internet and its application to teaching and learning, possible sophisticated pedagogical uses of the web, and notes web-based content for assisting both industrial design and living technology education in Taiwan. There are 18 universities offering Industrial Design at undergraduate and postgraduate level in Taiwan; Living Technology, the course title for technology education in Taiwan, is a requirement for secondary students. The bases of this research are archival study, on-line searching, and focus group panel discussions. Finally, the strategies of implementing web-based content are presented in brief case accounts.