CHAPTER 17

Weblets, CD-ROMs, Intranets

When students access your materials from home or off-campus, they are at the mercy of Web traffic. Web traffic sometimes can become a problem during busy periods. A weblet can run as fast as your local network or drives permit. When you click a link, you are connected to another file on your network, and not somewhere out on the Web.

On the Web, students can surf wherever they please. In schools and on campuses, especially in precollege settings, you may prefer to control student access to the Web. Because a weblet is self-contained, students cannot get into objectionable material. This is a big issue with many parents, and therefore is of real importance in precollege settings.

The good news about the Web is that it is dynamic. A search performed today may give very different results than one performed yesterday, or one that will be performed tomorrow. The bad news about the Web is that is dynamic. The teacher who plans tomorrow's lesson on today's Web findings may be out of luck. The constantly changing, dynamic nature of the Web is one other reason to consider building and using a weblet. Teachers invest significant amounts of time in creating instructional materials for their classes. Most plan on using the materials more than once, and during subsequent academic years. Linking to excellent resources on the Web is an efficient use of existing resources, but in doing so the instructor is committed to maintaining these links for as long as they use the instructional materials. The Web is not like a traditional library; there is no "Web archive," and there is no guarantee that the really great Web site you link to today and build course activities around will be available anywhere on the Web tomorrow.

The issues of speed, access, and the nonarchival nature of the materials used might start a teacher thinking about constructing and using a weblet for instruction. Remember, however, that what you are doing in creating a weblet is removing the most powerful feature of the Web, namely, world-wide connectivity. Creating a weblet for instruction might also require a large amount of storage space. You might consider using CD-ROMs for this purpose in addition to local hard drives or server storage.

A CD-ROM is a read-only storage medium with a large capacity. Today ROMs can hold 640 megabytes. Soon this capacity is expected to increase by a factor of ten or more. Rewritable CDs and the drives to create them are becoming ever more affordable. Currently, laptop devices often offer rewritable CD-ROM drives as an option.

CD-ROMs can be constructed with data accessible to both principal desktop computing worlds, Windows and Macintosh.

It's getting so that buying a computer without a built-in CD-ROM drive is becoming more and more difficult. Floppy drives, the meat and potatoes storage devices of a decade ago, are slowly becoming extinct. Software manufacturers use ROMs as a low-cost means for distributing software. CDs have fewer defects; more information of a peripheral nature can be provided at low cost; electronic manuals are commonplace, with printing costs transferred to the end user; and nearly all production costs go down. Teachers might well begin thinking about providing course materials for students on CD-ROMs. Making CD-ROMs one at a time has become both easy and inexpensive. The first CD-ROMs we burned cost $45 for the media. Today, $2 each is an upper-limit price for blank ROMs.

The CD-ROM, even for 50-100 students, is becoming an attractive alternative. As we noted earlier, our colleague Charles Ansorge provides CD-ROMs as an alternative to streaming video. The video quality on the ROM is noticeably higher than that of streaming video in nearly all cases. The principal reason for offering the CD-ROM is that download times to modem-based machines are reduced enormously.

Weblets of course materials can also be built on a "removable" drive medium instead of the permanent CD-ROM. Material is stored in a controlled area with the tools for copying. Students bring blank disks to this resource center and copy the materials on a Zip, Jaz, or similar medium.

The law about using Web materials created by others is evolving. Publishing on the Web seems to put everything up for grabs – including those materials you've created at great personal expense.

What about Web materials created by others that you want your students to access? Providing links to those materials or referencing them in some other way is generally acceptable. Capturing copies of those materials and incorporating them into a weblet has legal ramifications. Always request permission before you copy. If the material is copyrighted, ask the copyright owner. If not, ask the Webmaster of the site. If you are creating a weblet, you’ll need to decide how much "foreign" information you want to include, and then decide how you are going to go about obtaining that information with appropriate permissions.

WebWhacker and Web Grabber are programs that permit users to go to a site and copy much that is there. These are remarkable software packages not only in terms of what they accomplish but also in terms of the acceptance of that process. Creating weblets preserves your authoring rights in conventionally protected formats. After all, would you permit strangers to come into your offices at all hours to make photocopies of your paper files? Additional discussion of legal issues is covered in Chapter 19.

To make weblets you need something like a removable hard drive (e.g., optical, Zip, Jaz, Syquest) or a ROM maker.

Old CD-ROM drives limited throughput to something in the neighborhood of 125 kilobytes per second. In the world of video information, this rate is quite slow. At this writing, the marketplace is flooded with faster drives with speeds more than ten times the early ROMs.

Toast Pro software makes formatting of the ROM straightforward. Many companies, such as APS, sell hardware to make single ROMs (Figure 17.01).

The investment by a school, department, or college in a ROM duplicator is reasonable if ROMs are used often and class sizes are small. However, for large classes (>50) you probably will do better by creating one master and having a commercial company reproduce your ROMs. When really large numbers are involved, the price of duplicated ROMs currently drops to about $0.50 each. (That's why software manufacturers love ROMs as a distribution medium! In large production runs, ROMs are stamped using glass. The cost of producing a glass master is high, but, when it is used thousands of times, it is recouped.) Disc manufacturers will compete for your business. The size of the production run determines costs. When just a few ROMs are involved, a mechanism of making several "one-offs" with the assistance of student workers on a fast ROM writing drive makes sense.

Getting the material ready to make the ROM can be both expensive and time consuming. The more material you have, the more costly the process can be. You need to keep this in mind – who pays for that time? If what you want to do is get 300 pages of material into your students' hands, ROMs start becoming attractive in terms of cost to students. As soon as you break into media such as movies, animations, and sounds, then ROMs become very attractive. Students may want and sometimes need print copies. When the instructor provides a CD-ROM, the task and costs of creating the print copy are transferred to the student. If text materials are provided in the .pdf format, excellent quality printing becomes possible for students.

Students appear to like printed material almost regardless of the cost. In 1980, when students were provided with microfiche copies of old exams they used the microfiche, but also made many print copies. At the time, copying from a microfiche was twice as expensive as ordinary paper copying. Most students were happy to have so much old exam material, but felt the need to have some in print. As more and more colleges require that students obtain personal computing devices, expect to see an increased use of CD-ROMs.

CD-ROMs afford a physical object in possession; a comforting mechanism for dealing with copyright issues. Objects such as books and magazines are in tune with our publishing past. Because CD-ROMs can be used off-line, they afford a solution to the access/bandwidth problem often encountered by teachers using the Web. Also, there is a sense of archival documentation in the use of a ROM. Unlike materials found on the Web, ROM materials will not vanish into hyperspace.

Copyright issues must be carefully handled. Copyright on the Web is a difficult issue, and seems to become cloudier over time. Using a CD-ROM provides hard copy that can stand as verification of good copyright practices.

When using a ROM, use file references instead of http: calls. An appropriate HTML file is shown in Figure 17.03.

Standing at a distance from an intranet, it looks like everything else on the Internet. Snipping just one or two connections, however, usually will leave it isolated. If a school were to provide computers with modems, then each modem would represent a potential leak from the intranet. Information could be moved through individual computers and telephone based ISPs (Internet service providers) to the outside world.

An intranet uses the very same software as is used on the Web. It gives all of your students, faculty, employees, and customers the same flexibility that Web users have in terms of platforms and software.

Application access may be the most important intranet feature. The creation of the desktop PC has led to software decentralization. Older users trained in a

different era are especially fond of the freedom from a central data processing center afforded by software decentralization to the desktop. The notion of recentralization of software with users accessing servers is a very interesting and important one, since it implies return of control to a central organization. Many companies prefer this control for other reasons. One reason is to prevent use of illegally copied software on company networks and hardware.

Schools can use intranets to deliver instruction. Every computing device on a TCP/IP network gets a unique IP address. Using these numbers, it is possible to control access to a server – to exclude those communicating from a computer with an unacceptable IP address. A school can, therefore, exclude outside users from its instructional resources.

Several K-12 schools in Nebraska have created intranets. Lincoln Public Schools in Lincoln, Nebraska has a remarkable intranet structure. From the administrative offices, it is possible to look at the same screen that any teacher or student in the system is looking at! This is especially effective for troubleshooting. It also affords a high degree of control.

Unfortunately, teachers must be concerned with some security and privacy issues related to students. College instructors that work with K-12 schools, as well as K-12 instructors, should consider the use of intranets to limit access to student works or images on the Web. Many K-12 school districts have established policies regarding the electronic publishing of student information or images. An intranet makes it possible for instructors to publish student material while restricting world access. Publishing K-12 student information or images should be carefully thought through before any type of online projects or exchanges are conducted. An innocent act of publishing a student's image with their name next to their work potentially can have severe consequences. Since the policies regarding Web publishing and K-12 students vary greatly in school districts, it is important to find out in advance of conducting any projects or exchanges.