Mosaic Makes The Internet Accessible

At last--a driver's license for the Infobahn

By B.J. Novitski

B.J. Novitski (bjn@efn.org) writes about technology in Eugene, Ore.

If you're like me, you've been enthralled by tales of unlimited resources on the Information Superhighway but have been unwilling to confront a computer interface that requires you to type things like: ftp://ftp.cc.berkeley.edu/k12/CENet-Tech.ps.

For those of us spoiled by Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such arcane command language can be so distasteful as to discourage any experimentation with the otherwise alluring global network known as the Internet. But unless educators--and especially teachers--take part on a wide scale, the educational value of this resource is questionable.

Now our waiting is finally over. Once the exclusive province of computer scientists and other (dare I say it?) computer nerds, the Internet now has its own GUI, an interface for the rest of us. Mosaic is "browsing" software created at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Mosaic allows you to wander through a latticework of networks call the World Wide Web, also known as WWW, W3, or the Web. This "HyperCard of the Internet" allows users, with a simple point-and- click interface, to move around between interlinked documents without necessarily knowing where the material they're looking for is located and without having to type a single inscrutable address. Click on a keyword of interest in a written document maintained at a local university, for example, and you might find yourself, seconds later, examining related color photographs stored on a computer in Europe or listening to a sound bite recorded on a computer in Asia. From agriculture to zoology, whatever your interest, you'll find something about it on the Web. (To start your search, look for the index by interest area under Special Internet Connections, in Web sites to try.)

This improved accessibility has put into the hands of students a global library whose scope far exceeds anything civilization has ever known. One of the beauties of the Internet is the willingness of individuals and institutions, both public and private, to share freely their information resources. Popular examples include satellite weather photos from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's latest images of the comet Shoemaker-Levy. Seeing such material in living color before it's even had time to get into newspapers gives students a special connection to current events.

The World Wide Web

The key to the ease of use of this technology is hypertext, which is text containing embedded links to other documents. Clicking a mouse on a specially coded word or phrase will take you to another part of the document or to another document. This encourages nonlinear roaming through material and allows the reader to find his or her own way depending on special interests. Add graphics and sound to this technology, and you have hypermedia. Click on an icon, and you are shown a photograph, for example. Click on a keyword, and you see a video clip.

In 1991, to create a unified hypertext environment, researchers at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland developed the World Wide Web. They established standards for Web documents and invented an addressing system with a flexibility that enables virtually any kind of computer to "talk" to the Web through hypertext. But this was still relatively inaccessible until 1993, when NCSA software developers released Mosaic, a Web browser that gives us color, images, and a point-and-click interface. Other browsers exist, but Mosaic is the most popular. Since its release, activity on the Web has skyrocketed, outpacing even the phenomenal growth of the Internet as a whole.

The Web is well named. In contrast to services like America Online, CompuServe, or your local bulletin board, information on the Web does not originate in a single centralized computer system. Instead, it is a lattice of millions of interlinked documents.

Unfortunately, Mosaic and the Web have their limitations. You can cruise around the Web, indefinitely pursuing links others have created, but focused searches are more difficult. Internet search tools, such as Archie and Gopher, which are beyond the scope of this article, are more likely to locate specific information. The good news, however, is that there are an increasing number of Web links, via Mosaic, to FTP (File Transfer Protocol), Gopher, and other Internet sites. And the Mosaic software also supports Gopher and FTP protocols; so even if you can't go there via Mosaic, you take a ride on those other Internet tools. (For more information about these tools, refer to one of the popular guides on the Internet that are available and "The Executive Educator's Complete Guide to the Internet" in the April 1994 issue of The Executive Educator.)

Serve up the world

For educators, understanding the Web means appreciating its vast and possibly immeasurable potential for education. Students, for whom computers often are more appealing than newspapers or books, can find late-breaking news about comets, floods, and O.J. Simpson. They can send messages to "keypals" around the world and take an active role in their own education. Just as important, they can develop new communication skills that will be essential in their future work lives.

The technology enables anyone with a server--a computer running a program to fulfill information requests--to produce his or her own information to put onto the Web. Since the release of Mosaic, the response from schools has been overwhelming. Hundreds of schools around the country, including elementary schools, have produced pages for public consumption. They publish, for instance, school newspapers, student artwork, and environmental awareness projects in their communities. The technology also is helping youngsters develop collaboration skills. For example, MathMagic, based in El Paso, Texas, poses challenging mathematics problems that must be solved over the Internet by geographically dispersed teams.

Through the Web, teachers have a wealth of resources at their disposal. They can track down information to share with their students, and they can learn from colleagues about how to set up computer networks and find pertinent educational materials.

Kathryn Keranen, a geoscience teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Va., first trained herself and now trains other Jefferson teachers about using the Internet. "It only takes an hour to train a computer-literate teacher on the Internet," Keranen says. "The hard part is integrating it into your curriculum. Surfing the Web is fun, but the kids need to do more than just wander around. You want their searches to be relevant to what you're teaching. For instance, when I'm doing earthquakes, I want [students] to get on-line and find seismic data from an earthquake that occurred that day."

Moreover, Keranen notes, the students need to do this research themselves. "They like having their learning in their own hands," she says.

"Despite the challenges," writes Internet expert Tracy LaQuey Parker, "the K-12 community is one of the fastest-growing groups involved in the Internet. This market is treading on the edges of technology and telecommunications; some schools have adopted technology for the classroom and distance-learning projects with open arms, while others are just now starting to think about long- range technology visions and plans." (For an excellent survey of K- 12 activities on the Internet, read Parker's article "The Internet and Schools".)

Software tools

When you first start up Mosaic (assuming you're properly connected-- but more on that later), you see an attractive screen, sized automatically to fit your monitor, with familiar pull-down menus and graphical icons. The software itself gives you a place to begin your wanderings. From the Navigate menu, you can select one of several Home Pages related to the ncsa or to your specific version of Mosaic. Each Home Page is like a home base for a specific server; it is a hypertext document with links to everything else that server has to offer on the Web.

When you select a Home Page from the menu, the software automatically initiates the commands necessary to link you to that document. Message bars on the screen will display the commands being executed, but you can ignore them unless you're curious. When the document appears, it might contain graphics, color photos, and introductory text. (To speed up the transmission, you can opt to suppress the graphics, then load them in later as needed.) Certain words and phrases in the text and certain graphics will be highlighted to indicate that they are links. Click on any such element, and you've initiated another search. To help you avoid getting lost as you follow your whim, the software maintains a list of where you've been. Selecting an item from this list returns you to that document. When you find material you want to keep, you can download it to your hard drive.

Undoubtedly the most frustrating aspect of the Web is the snail's pace at which material seems to move. Some Web servers are connected to the Internet by dedicated 56,000 bits-per-second (bps) lines or by higher-speed T1 lines (1.54 million bps). But others, especially at public schools, connect via relatively slow modems.

When you make a connection to a server, your connection speed is determined by the slowest link in the chain. So your Power Macintosh on a T1 line-fed Ethernet network might grind nearly to a halt while downloading images from a school sending them out with only a 14,400 bps modem. (Schools with only 1,200 bps or 2,400 bps modems needn't bother trying.) And the images, sound bites, and video clips that make the Web so attractive can be huge data files.

For now, we can only hope that faster hardware will become more affordable soon. In the meantime, the situation is somewhat alleviated by the fact that most material arrives in a compressed form. So-called "helper applications" automatically decompress these files as they download to your system. Your source for Mosaic should also be able to provide the necessary auxiliary applications. (See Software sources.)

The long, esoteric coded address that uniquely identifies every document on the Web is called a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. URLs look something like this: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html.

The first four letters, "http," for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, indicate that this is a Web document. The remaining codes indicate the document's address, directory, and file name. If you link to a document by clicking on another document, of course, you never need to type in this error-prone code. But if you read about a URL in print that you want to find, you have no choice.

Fortunately, Mosaic lets you store these URLs on your local machine in what are called HotLists, so that once you've been to a Web site and copied its URL, you never have to type it again.

Anyone can store hundreds of site names and share them with others. Tom Layton, who teaches computers and English at South Eugene High School in Eugene, Ore., has amassed an extensive collection of HotLists. He categorizes them by academic area and makes them available to his students on the school's local area network (LAN). This makes it easy for the students to find the latest on the crisis in Rwanda, take a tour of the White House, or (to lighten things up) make a detour to the Rolling Stones' Home Page.

These HotLists are known as Bookmarks in a new commercial Web browser called Netscape. This software is being developed commercially by the original creators of nsca's public-domain Mosaic. Faster and more robust than its predecessor, Netscape promises to make the Web still more accessible. (To find this and other Web browsers, see Software sources.)

To go beyond browsing--to create server documents of your own-- requires learning HTML, the HyperText Markup Language. In its simplest form, an HTML editor allows a user to create links through a point-and-click interface. The process is simple enough so that many elementary students use it to create their own Home Pages.

With HTML+, expert programmers can add still more interactivity, by inviting browsing users to offer their feedback after reviewing a Web page. Readers type in their answers to questions, and the software communicates these responses back to the page creator. Although this aspect of html is new and still difficult to implement, it promises to get easier in the future and to add a new dimension of responsiveness to electronic information resources.

Hardware

One of the most appealing aspects of Web technology is that it works with most common types of computers. Mosaic and other browsers are available for Macintosh, Windows, and Unix machines. Their functionality is virtually identical, and they all operate on the same documents.

Unfortunately, connecting your schools to the Internet to use the Web in the first place can be complicated. Probably the most straightforward method is to put your school's computers on a high- speed (Ethernet) LAN and to obtain a high-speed connection to a local institution, such as a university, that already is on the Internet. In this situation, every machine on the LAN has high-speed access to the Web.

A less attractive option is to use a modem and obtain a dial-up connection from a public or commercial Internet provider. Many communities now have no-cost or low-cost public access networks. The prices charged by commercial providers are coming down, but if they don't offer a local-access telephone number or an 800 number, the long-distance charges can be prohibitive.

And not all providers who advertise Internet access offer the special connections needed for the heavily graphic Mosaic. (These connections are called Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP, and Serial Line Internet Protocol, or SLIP.) A single modem can't serve an entire LAN, however, so this solution is not viable when your goal is universal student access. (For more information, see For help getting connected.)

Not surprisingly, for many schools money--or rather the lack of it-- is a serious barrier to getting connected. Computers, networking hardware, and technical expertise are all expensive. To ease the burden on local school districts, statewide networks in Texas, Florida, California, and other states have connected teachers to the Internet at low cost either through the state's system of higher education or by providing dial-up access. Federal grants to schools are available from the National Science Foundation and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. (For information about these sources, see Tracy LaQuey Parker's article, "The Internet and Schools".)

The Clinton Administration has issued a challenge calling for all schools and libraries to be connected to the National Information Infrastructure by the year 2000. If this challenge inspires corporations, government agencies, and taxpayers to increase the financial and technical support of schools, then we reasonably can expect that the current difficulties of access are only temporary.

How schools use the Web

In the meantime, schools are finding a multitude of individual ways to use the World Wide Web. Geoscience students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology have been tapping resources from the U.S. Geological Survey and noaa. They retrieve large-scale land-use maps and satellite weather photos for analysis in their coursework.

Teacher Kathryn Keranen is excited about the Internet as a research tool. "I've been able to bring them material I couldn't get anywhere else," she says. "I can download weather images onto our network and get the students to predict the day's weather. We need to train future scientists to solve problems dealing with extremely large data sets. We're also teaching them how to use this new technology and to share their knowledge globally with the science community."

Sometimes when working with a technology so new, adult teachers must recognize that their students, who grew up surrounded by computers, might learn about them more easily. "I had one student," Keranen recalls, "who embarked on a landfill analysis project using sophisticated software none of us knew how to use. He was confident in his own abilities to figure it out but relied on me to give him the needed structure and adult support. That's what we teachers are trying to give each one of our students."

Students at South Eugene High School have taken a different approach to the Web. A student group called Asafo has assigned itself three tasks: to educate classmates and teachers about the Internet, to maintain the school's hardware and software systems, and to develop a presence for themselves and their community on the Web through the "Virtual Village."

Inspired by the African proverb "It takes a whole village to raise a child," the Virtual Village will contain a broad array of information of interest to young people, such as course guides, sports schedules, student poetry, and the youth column of the local newspaper. Asafo leader Aaron Glasgow predicts that over time, as students create hypermedia links to other student servers, the Virtual Village will extend to communities worldwide.

What's next?

Few who see the World Wide Web through Mosaic can avoid being excited by it. The technology gives teachers new power and reawakens television-doped children to the joy of learning--no matter what subject. And the technology is only going to get better, faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous.

If you haven't jumped in yet, where's the best place to start?

Kathryn Keranen observes: "At first everybody wants to do electronic mail. Then they see the other resources, and their interest expands. The only way you can go wrong with the Internet is to ignore it."

But as Tracy LaQuey Parker points out, "the Internet by itself won't bring about educational reform"--as motivational, enabling, and empowering a tool as it is for education. The Internet, Parker says, "can enhance classroom activities and professional development by creating global awareness, providing access to the latest information, and enabling communication on a large scale, but you cannot just œthrow' the Internet into a school and expect projects to magically occur. Most successful projects are carefully planned, and many of them occur mostly outside of the Internet."

In other words, as exciting as this new technology is, the Web will never replace good old-fashioned teaching.