You’ve probably all heard the now famous adage from Marshall McLuhan – the Medium is the Message. Recently one of my colleagues called me up and asked me exactly what that meant. One of the beautiful things about McLuhan’s penchant to coin phrases is that they are almost never easy to explain, even though you know precisely what they mean (yeah.).

Well, my colleague confessed the phrase came up in a seminar she was taking on web courses. "AHA!" I said – that makes it easier to explain. Although it’s not exactly what McLuhan meant by his phrase, it does apply to web teaching. Every medium, whether it is the spoken word, the book, television, or the Internet tends to shape and structure messages in it’s own unique way. The experience of reading a novel and watching the film of the same novel will always be different, because the media of book and film MASSAGE the message in peculiar ways. In fact, McLuhan later revised his famous adage to the medium is the MASSAGE.

So too, with the Web. The web is good for certain things and not as good for others, communicatively speaking. Long, extended tracts of text don’t play well in a world where the ability to jump somewhere, anywhere else in an instant reigns supreme. The web is not linear, it’s not textual – it’s hypertextual and non-linear and visual. Don’t try to apply our instincts derived from the traditions of writing and orality to the web – learn what it is the web does best, then ADAPT what you do to what the web does best.

In practical terms – get out your web browser and spend some quality surf time. Explore the web and learns its secrets and its ways. Think about what is presented well on your digital screen and what is not. This doesn’t mean we must all become whiz-bang web designers. It simply means we cannot take what we do in a traditional class and simply translate it to the web. We have to ADAPT it, or as McLuhan says MASSAGE it.

Most importantly, we should be attuned to the possibilities and recognize that the web ultimately massages not only what we teach, but how we teach it too.