Nearly a decade ago the author wrote in one of the first widely-cited academic articles, Educational Researcher, about the educational role of the web. He argued that educators must be able to demonstrate that the web (1) can increase access to learning, (2) must not result in higher costs for learning, and (3) can lead to improved learning. These criteria seemed to make sense in 1996 when he wrote the article and the Web was new to most of the educational institutions. In this article, the author reviews the progress toward achieving these criteria highlighting some of his own research on web-based learning. Using this as a framework, he considers the question of whether the new generation of technologies--video and audio casting, blogs, games, Wikis, and social websites--are likely to improve student learning and engagement as many claim or whether they are just distractions to the learning process.