School: Clasical High School
Teacher: Adam Blumenthal
Audience: Grades 9-12
Project: The Multimedia Lab at Classical HS (CHS)
currently has four machines which access the Internet via a
dial-up connection. Within the next few months we will be
installing a full-time, high-speed (384K) connection to the
building with each machine in the Lab sitting on a 100-Base-T
Ethernet Network, and going out to the Internet through an NT
proxy server. The project is to develop a visually enticing,
media rich, Internet primer/tutorial which includes metaphoric
representations of Internet concepts, practices, networking, etc.
I imagine an interactive, navigable, 3D space consisting of a
universe of nodes and links representing such technologies as the
WWW, Telnet, FTP, AOL, a web page, a browser, a search engine, etc.
Each of these elements is represented within the metaphoric univere
that we create; selection of topics takes the user on a brief
fly-through animation to a section of the symbolic universe
where the concept is represented and explained. There should be
a "tour" mode, a serach mode, a browse mode, etc. Examples of what
CHS wants users to understand include: What is the Internet? What
does the global network look like (symbolically)?; How does AOL (or
ISPs in general) relate to, link to, differ from The Internet?;
What happens when I click send in my email client?; What is a file
download, and how does it work?; and how is a Web page set up and
how is it accessed? Blumenthal writes: "The Internet is a confusing,
abstract concept to most users at my school, and in general. I'd
like to bring the Internet down to Earth, and make it a tangible
entity." This software might be installed on all CHS computers, or
served using the school's Intranet. Possible tools might be
Hyperstudio, Authorware, or Java.