Oldies But Goodies

I got into a bit of reminiscing with Ferdi Serim, a new ISTE Board member, last evening. I'd first got to know Ferdi when he was the outstanding editor of MultiMedia Schools magazine. (He had a few lapses of good judgement like publishing my writing, but nobody's perfect.) Ferdi's continued to be a real leader in the field of educational technology and online learning and I try to keep up with his work.

This visit got me thinking about the first article I wrote for MultiMedia Schools. I believe it was  Captured by the Web: K-12 Schools and the World Wide Web, that appeared in Mar/April 1995 issue of the magazine. I've always been proud of this article since I still think it was one of the first about the web written for a general education magazine.

But when I tried to open my draft of the article, I was stymied since it was written in an older version of ClarisWorks. It took a couple steps to see the document which made me reassess my strategy of moving content to my new website. I'd been moving my latest articles, thinking they would be of most value to readers. But now I think I better try to get my oldest stuff out there - while I can still open the documents!

In the process I also discovered that it was sort of fun to do a little time travel and see what "life was like back then." A whole 13 years have passed since I wrote the thing. For the rest of you geezers, do you remember

• Linkway stacks
• "the World Wide Web is that it is a system over 3000 individuals and organizations"
• Cello, MacWeb, LineMode, Mosaic browsers
• Jpeg View (for graphics), Sound Machine (for basic audio), and Simple Player (for digital video) helper applications
• 9600 baud modem ("I turn off the Auto-Load Images command.")
• Web Crawler, World-Wide Web Worm, The World-Wide Web Virtual Library: Subject Catalogue search tools
• URouLette and Random Link from Yahoo random link generators. (Can you imagine making this recommendation today?

You get the idea. 

But I also like to think I was a bit prescient as well. This is how the article concludes: 

 ... be prepared, Educators! Graphic browsers like Mosaic will do for the Internet what the Macintosh and Windows interfaces did for operating systems: take complex and confusing tasks and make them simple. Even your most reluctant staff and youngest students will be able to access and create valuable Internet resources

As I wrote this article, I discovered almost daily new Web sites, utilities, or search tools. In view of how rapidly the Web is spreading (the number of sites is expected to double in 1995), this fantastic new resource for schools cannot be ignored.

 If interested, I am putting all my articles, old and new, in a blog format with an RSS feed. You can subscribe to <http://www.doug-johnson.com/dougwri/> to follow. Remember all my writing has approved by the FDA as a non-addictive sleep aid.