Guenter Hilmer - Phd Thesis - Glamorgan Dspace - University of ...

2.1 Definition and history of e-learning 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
Furthermore, the term educational hypermedia will be used in this work as fol-
lows:
Educational hypermedia is all kind of hypermedia that is used for
educational purposes and therefore the combination of e-learning and
hypermedia in which the grade of integration of those two domains
can vary.
The World Wide Web would be an example of hypermedia, whereas a non-interactive
television presentation is an example of standard multimedia.
2.1.2 History
The development of e-learning based on the definition given in 2.1.1 started in
1588 with one of the first applications, Agostino Ramelli’s “Book Wheel” [5].
This “Book Wheel” allowed the user to access several books at the same time
without having to close and store them. The books were attached and secured to
a wheel that could be rotated by the reader. This could be seen as a first example
of allowing a user to navigate between different contents of learning material.
In 1945, Vanebar Bush introduced a theoretical device called the Memex for Mem-
ory Extender. The Memex was described by Bush as a device that allowed the user
to create links between different media types (books, films), to navigate between
them and therefore to extend his or her 1 memory [6].
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee extended the idea even further and created the World
Wide Web (WWW), which is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval ini-
tiative that aims at giving universal access to a large universe of documents [7].
This idea finally resulted in the now existing World Wide Web which forms the
technical basis for e-learning in most of the ongoing projects in this area.
E-learning projects have always been existing throughout the years, but have
gained a lot of importance especially from the 1990s until today [8][9]. In 1994
1 From this point forward all gender specific expressions should be considered to be gender
neutral.
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