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contribution of each group (e.g. Romans, Scribes, Phar<strong>is</strong>ees, Zealots) was <strong>to</strong> the ‘zeitge<strong>is</strong>t’ offirst century Palestine. D<strong>is</strong>affected <strong>and</strong> otherw<strong>is</strong>e alienated boys, soon bounced up <strong>to</strong> RElessons <strong>and</strong>, moreover, would come back <strong>to</strong> the classroom at lunch<strong>time</strong> <strong>to</strong> continue with theirgaming. I observed th<strong>is</strong> phenomenon, though regrettably now, not in an organized or structuredmanner.<strong>It</strong> was in a department meeting <strong>some</strong> <strong>time</strong> in Oc<strong>to</strong>ber 1997, that I posed the question of the team,how could we make better use of the network <strong>to</strong> deliver all th<strong>is</strong> pre-ex<strong>is</strong>ting material in a moreimaginative way. Bob said, “I think it’s called html.” By th<strong>is</strong>, he meant that t<strong>here</strong> was anemerging technology that would convert plain text in<strong>to</strong> ‘hypertext’ <strong>and</strong> thus enable us <strong>to</strong> deliver‘content’ across the network dynamically. <strong>It</strong> also meant we could make it colourful <strong>and</strong> addimages <strong>to</strong> it.Naugh<strong>to</strong>n (2000 p.215) records that Tim Berners-Lee was working on thedevelopment of html code – the programming language of the internet - between 1989 <strong>and</strong> 1991.Within six years, t<strong>here</strong>fore, Bob was pointing us <strong>to</strong> a potential pedagogical agent. He was awareof th<strong>is</strong> through h<strong>is</strong> brother who worked in the media.I had already seen the power of the internet as a learning <strong>to</strong>ol <strong>by</strong> gaining access <strong>to</strong> the alreadyproliferating websites associated with religion(s). T<strong>here</strong> was a joke circulating at the <strong>time</strong>, that“t<strong>here</strong> are more Bill Gates hate websites, than ones about religion.” Th<strong>is</strong> masks an importantpoint. Religion <strong>is</strong> a powerful force in human affairs. Religions are always proselytizing sincethey believe they contain the path <strong>to</strong> truth <strong>and</strong> salvation. Religions have always, t<strong>here</strong>fore, usedany available medium <strong>to</strong> communicate their message. <strong>It</strong> <strong>is</strong> not surpr<strong>is</strong>ing, t<strong>here</strong>fore, that theinternet was quickly adopted as a 20 th Century means of spreading the ‘message’. Around that<strong>time</strong>, from inside my classroom, simple searches using <strong>to</strong>ols like Alta V<strong>is</strong>ta, Web Crawler,Lycos, <strong>and</strong> Ask Jeeves, produced ‘bucketfuls’ of useful information. I realized very quickly that346Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thes<strong>is</strong> (Oc<strong>to</strong>ber 2012)

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