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When Two Worlds Meet – A Research on Books and Screens as Educational Tools - Summary I find the Web both very intriguing and hard to grasp. Especially when I use the Web for study purposes, I often struggle. I often feel flooded with an endless stream of information. At times, I feel as if the Web makes it very hard for me to stay focused on the matter at hand. Being interested in education, I wonder in which ways the Web can have an educational role, beside being an information tool. This paper is an attempt to better understand the characteristics of the Web, as well as how it impacts my behavior. The medium is the message. We are strongly affected by the media from which we obtain information. Our brains alter their structure according to the media we use, and therefore, alter the way we think. Important historic inventions such as the printing press caused a shift in the way people obtained, retained, and transmitted knowledge. The rise of the screen (and with it the Web) is causing an equally big shift. The Web has caused a shift from a linear way of thinking (related to the way books are commonly read) to a spatial one (more apt to the networked features of our screen-based devices). This way of thinking allows us to think outside the box and allows us to link ideas that were formerly isolated from one another. Attaining information has become incredibly fast and easy. This has enabled rapid progress. However, it has also caused people to feel overwhelmed and lost. Furthermore, it has altered the way we read and think. It has become much harder to stay concentrated on a single text for a longer time period. Noticing these shifts in the way we interact with our information, made me curious to find out how these new media play out in an educational setting. I notice that staying attentive is much harder in an online class than in a physical classroom, as the physical classroom setting is designed to keep students focused on the matter at hand. An online environment, on the other hand, allows for countless streams of information to demand our attention simultaneously. We are hyper attentive; we easily switch to different tasks and multiple information streams. This is in conflict with the deep attention required to study something. If we want to study something new, we need to stay focused on that topic for a long time, to ultimately develop a relationship with it. I noticed some similarities in my ability to focus between a printed text and a physical classroom on the one hand, and between a digital classroom and a screen on the other hand. I came to this conclusion after conducting some personal experiments on my behavior while studying from books and screens. When reading from a book, my body posture is calm, and my gaze is focused. When using a screen, I move more, and I constantly shift my gaze. When reading from a screen, time runs faster. I feel hyper stimulated, but I also feel distracted, lost, and overwhelmed. Study requires not only strong attention, but also the possibility to make unexpected discoveries. In this sense, the Web is an ideal study environment. The spatial hyperlink network enables us to roam freely through the Web, and allows us to lose track and stumble onto unexpected new topics. However, when conducting some personal experiments on how I attain information on screens, compared to books, I became aware of the pitfalls of this vast learning space. Analyzing the experiments, I saw that I wasn’t near