Student Projects Using Hypertext
with Gateways to the Internet
A Paper Presented at the Florida Educational
Technology Conference
Orlando, Florida
March 5, 1995
(c)
John A. Scigliano, Jacques Levin, and Greg Horne
Nova Southeastern University
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
INTRODUCTION
Over the past five years education has been energized by the steady
increase in the extraordinary thing called the Internet. Other labels that
have been used to classify this marvel are the Information Super
Highway, the Iway, the Infobaun, and the Data Highway. Within the past
two years, the label World-Wide Web has been used to characterize the
array of electronic documents that dot the landscape like billboards on an
interstate highway (December and Randall, 1994). These billboards are
not exclusively the domain of commerce, but are testimony to the efforts
of educators world-wide to use the Web as a tool for learning, as well as
for marketing services and courses. Business is booming on the Internet
and its creating a wealth of opportunities for educators willing to invest
the time to explore it. The Web is especially fertile ground for those
teachers that wish to use electronic documents to enrich their courses.
Many teachers may have been introduced to the Internet through
workshops at conferences such as this one. Most have used gophers,
library catalogs, listservs, and electronic mail, but many may not be aware
of the opportunities for enhancing their courses that are now available on
the Web since the advent of HTML. If an individual's only exposure on
the Internet has been with gophers, library catalogs, electronic mail and
WAIS utilities, he or she may not have explored the full power of the
Internet in the form of hypertext. Most teachers have used hypertext at
one time or another in programs such as HYPERCARD on the MAC or
in online documentation on the PC and may have even written hypertext
scripts for their courses. The system described in this paper takes the
hypertext idea a step further by getting the student active in the process.
Hypertext became popular in the late 1980s when numerous journals
dedicated entire issues to it (Smith and Weiss, 1988; Frisse, 1988).
Through HTML and the Internet, hypertext has taken on new role as a
facilitator of navigation on the Web and as a tool for enhancing
communication (Lemay, 1995).
PURPOSE
The purpose of this paper is to describe our experiences at using the
Internet and the Hypertext Markup Language to create an interactive
teaching environment including the methods the faculty use to explore the
Internet and the hypertext design strategy for student projects. In order
to offer a high-quality interactive teaching environment, we provide a list
of requirements with explanations on how these
requirements are met. The Internet is widely known and provides a rich
set of information resources that is already becoming a mainstay in many
classrooms across the country. The hypertext features of HTML enable
students to link Internet information into their projects and term papers.
Term papers and student projects in this context are living documents that
are wired with hypertext buttons.
SYSTEM GOALS
In this paper the system we describe was designed to do several things.
First, it was designed to serve as a mechanism for improving
communication between faculty and students. This communication is
facilitated by a Unix environment that is linked to the Internet. Second,
the system attempts to empower students by giving them command over
the structure and content of what they present to the outside world over
the Internet. Through this process, the students become teachers
themselves and serve as providers of knowledge to all of those that access
the students' web pages. As Tim Berners Lee said in his Style Guide for
Hypertext:
A major difference between writing part of a serial text, and an
online document, is that your readers may have jumped in from
anywhere. Even though you have only made links to it from one
place, any other person may want to refer to that particular point,
and will so make a link to that particular part of your work from
their own.
(http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Style/IntoContext.html)
To a certain extent, by linking their projects and papers to the Web, the
students make their work become a part of the Web itself to live after
their course is over. The papers or projects they design are thereafter open
for all Web Surfers of the world to enjoy as long as the students let them.
Third, the hypertext system is designed to introduce the student to the
Internet in a focused, purposeful way, in the context of courses in the
field of management information and database management systems.
Other disciplines are also using these methods effectively at NSU in
educational systems and instructional design.
Fourth, the system was designed to provide a forum for sharing ideas and
for synergy. UNIX itself was designed with "sharing" in mind by
computer scientists at Bell Labs, but the hypertext features of HTML
coupled with the Web, enable the student to focus others' attention on
important aspects of their documents. As students exchange materials
about their projects and papers with other students in the course
expectations are that learning is enhanced; the whole becomes greater
than the sum of the parts. This sharing extends beyond the boundaries of
the course since other students and faculty within the School of Computer
and Information Sciences (SCIS) can view the final projects as well as the
external audience on the Web.
RATIONALE
Why would a teacher want to use such a system, and for what purpose?
Any teacher that has access to the Internet and that wants to accomplish
the goals that we've set for the system could constructively use some or all
of the method we describe here. Wherever there is an appropriate body
of knowledge on the Internet that can be linked into student projects,
HTML and the system we describe, can be effective in helping reach the
goals described above. These are improving communication
among students and between students and teachers, providing
opportunities for students to explore the Internet and the Web within the
structure of a course, giving students control over their learning to a great
extent, and providing a vehicle for sharing their ideas with others in the
class and on the Web.
The Web-based hypertext system enables one student's project to become
a training opportunity for other students and even for people outside the
immediate course environment. The total of all class projects form a
body of knowledge about the subject that can serve as a national resource.
The significant thing about this is that many students for the first time
get an opportunity to take charge of their learning environment and
hopefully begin to harness a vast array of information resources and to
share these with others. The "hot" buttons or HTML anchors that
student create make it possible for them to design nested help screens,
make links to references or documents on the Internet, or branch to other
applications that may form important dimensions of their projects.
BACKGROUND
The Web page posting of student projects in courses must be understood
in a context of the culture of distance education and online programs at
NSU. Nova launched its first distance education doctoral programs in
1972 and soon thereafter enrolled over 2000 students in these programs in
over 30 states across the country. The delivery format for these early
programs was in "clusters". Professors were flown to these sites to give
lectures on weekends. The only technologies used then were the airplane,
telephone, and US Postal Service. These programs still operate today, but
many of them have added online technologies such as electronic mail for
communication, compressed video for delivery of lectures, online library
services, audio bridging, and FAX.
In 1983, NSU launched its first computer-based or online program with
the advent of the Doctor of Arts in Information Science program. This
program served a wide range of professionals, but most students enrolled
in the DAIS worked in library settings around the globe (Scigliano and
Centini, 1985). Other online programs soon followed at the masters and
doctoral level in computer education, training and learning, information
systems, and computer science. In 1995, the online programs in the
School of Computer & Information Sciences (SCIS) enroll over 700
students in all fifty states and several foreign countries and the cluster
programs maintain an enrollment of over 5,000 from the undergraduate
level through the doctorate.
Students in the online programs are required to attend on-campus
sessions either once or twice a year for a week at a time depending on the
program. However, most of the education of these students takes place in
an online environment that has been enhanced continually over the past
twelve years.
The types of activities that go on in the online courses include sessions in
the real-time electronic classroom, submission of assignments by
uploading to expert systems, computer conferences, electronic mail for
question and answer exchanges, and exploration on the World Wide Web.
Students receive hard copy materials that include: a course syllabus or
study guide, class assignments, project guidelines, and bibliographies.
The Electronic Classroom (ECR) is used for real-time sessions where the
following things are accomplished (mini lectures by the instructor,
questions about course material from the students, presentations of
student analyses of cases, and presentation of course projects by students
(Scigliano, Joslyn & Levin, 1989).
Delayed time communications takes place using computer conferences
and electronic mail. Computer conferencing is implemented using two
systems; one uses the Notesfiles software from the University of Illinois,
and the other was designed at NSU with the Lynx browser. Both systems
facilitate posting of questions and answers. In these computer conferences
students are required to address issues or questions raised by the
instructor as well as to carry on a dialogue with other students. Electronic
mail (e-mail) is used regularly for additional exchanges between students
and teachers. Teachers use the online environment day and night and can
field questions from students at any hour.
Students can access the online course syllabus for the course in which
they are enrolled. These syllabi are prepared in an HTML environment
with buttons to external Web pages, gophers and ftp locations appropriate
to the course. Students are expected to use Internet resources in their
assignments and final course projects. Assignments posted in the syllabi
contain material designed to guide the students work in each course:
required text references, objectives, tasks (readings, reading reviews and
case analyses), Internet activities, required computer conferences,
electronic classroom schedules, review questions, and embedded
evaluation items. Case analyses of real organizations are required either
from the text or from the Harvard Business School catalog of cases.
Students present their analyses in ECRs using a standard format.
METHODS AND CRITERIA FOR PROJECTS
Before students can launch their projects on the Internet, they learn first
how to build the environment by following a set of rules given by the
teacher. Many of these tools are already in the Unix system and within the
HTML language. Then they organize materials for their projects by
outlining the topic, writing brief paragraphs that describe the project, and
linking to external information resources from the WEB. These resources
are linked from any location on the web that has a URL, Uniform
Resource Locator address, any gopher or CWIS.
The foundation that makes this possible rests on five pillars: the online
interactive teaching environment on a local server within NSU that serves
as the teacher/student interface, the Internet, a set of tools for navigating
and viewing, an array of existing structures such as gophers or Web
pages, and a markup language that facilitates user interaction with the
Web. Each of these dimensions will be discussed in the following
sections extensive focus on the teaching environment, the most
significant "internal" aspect of the system.
THE INTERACTIVE TEACHING ENVIRONMENT:
At NSU, the teaching environment is a variant of the Unix operating
system called Ultrix. Students have accounts on this machine and can
access their files and programs through Tymnet, direct dialup to 14.4kbs
modems, telnet or ftp over the Internet, or from an on-campus ethernet
connection. The online programs in the SCIS began in the Fall of 1983,
and depend heavily on microcomputers, modems, and
telecommunication networks in conjunction with a DEC host computer
(Scigliano and Centini, 1985). Students from 26 different states,
including Alaska, conduct their online classwork in coordination with
lecturers that teach the seminars on campus. Students complete their
online work using the tools of Unix, and they do work offline using a
portable computer with its word processor and other utilities. In all these
online programs, students work extensively at home and with word
processors preparing assignments and projects for transmission online.
This section presents nine criteria that we have adopted to
design an interactive teaching environment on the Internet.
The nine criteria are:
1. Preparation of instructional materials
2. Mechanism for monitoring student progress: student projects
3. Rules and conventions that help raise the teacher's level
of awareness of student progress
4. Amount of support for learning: replication-assisted
5. Level of communication: posting class questions/ answers
sent via electronic mail (e-mail)
6. Timeliness of class involvement
7. Assessment of student readiness for class participation:
posting new ideas
8. Real-time interactive class sessions: the electronic
classroom
9. Evaluation of student assignments: the electronic student
CRITERION 1. Preparation of Instructional Materials:
Our first criterion for a high-quality teaching environment is, for the
teacher, to prepare a set of instructional materials, in the form of a course
syllabus (outline). The course syllabus serves as a master plan for
delivering a course. While authoring languages of the past required the
teacher to be a programmer - remember C-pilot? - the success of the
Internet has brought a wealth of user-friendly graphical
interfaces, including browsers (Lynx, Mosaic) and HTML editors. The
hypertext mark-up language (HTML), with its simple format for
representing and linking documents, is the ideal instrument to prepare the
plan of a course. In the following section, we present the structure of a
typical course in two phases, static and dynamic.
The first phase corresponds to the plan of the course. It is "static" in the
sense that it remains the same for the entire length of the course. We have
included below some of the "static" items that form the course plan:
* course title/schedule
* course objectives
* course textbooks
* course grading strategy
* course weekly assignments
* course tutorials
This phase of the course is usually developed and distributed to the
students before the course starts.
The second phase corresponds to the teaching activities. It is "dynamic"
in the sense that it evolves during the conduct of the course. We have
included below some of the "dynamic" items in that are displayed
regarding teaching activities:
* student projects
* student questions and teacher answers
* message of the day
* electronic classroom sessions
The hypertext mark-up language provides a superb environment to
prepare the plan of a course, through its linkage mechanism. Since this
mechanism is so important for an understanding of how a course can be
constructed in hypertext, we provide below explanations of this feature.
As an example, we have included below a link to a second document, that
will contain the structure of our course. A link has the following
structure:
<a href="file_name">named_anchor</a>
The link starts with the keywords: <a href=
followed, within quotes, by the document "file_name"
followed by the symbol: >
followed by the document: named_anchor
followed by the keyword: </a>
NOTE: All HTML documents use the extension: html
Assuming we want:
* to insert the anchor_name: "plan of a course"
* to a document stored in file: "plan.html"
we would simply encode our link as:
<a href="plan.html">plan of a course</a>
Assuming we called the file containing this very document:"main.html",
to reflect the fact that it will be used as our main menu page, we can now
use the following command:
lynx main.html
to display this document on our screen. The following words: "plan of a
course" will be highlighted, and if we click on these words, the
corresponding document, stored in file plan.html, will be displayed on the
screen.
Hypertext documents are constructed, like castles made of playing cards,
from simple items.
* A menu line item starts with the keyword: <li>
* A menu item is made of one or several menu line items, starts with the
keyword <menu>, and is terminated with the keyword </menu>
* To use bold face characters, start the sentence with the keyword <b>,
terminates the sentence with </b>
The following example consists of a menu with two-line items and a
header, "course outline". We will assume that this HTML document is
stored in a file called: "main.html".
FILE: main.html
</b>COURSE OUTLINE</b>
<menu>
<h>< href="plan.html">plan of a course</a>
<h><a href="teach.html">teaching activities</a>
</menu>
To access the hypertext document shown above, we simply use the
command:
lynx main.html
As a result, the following menu, with two highlighted entries, is
displayed:
COURSE OUTLINE
==> plan of course
teaching activities
Navigating through our course plan, like navigating the Internet, becomes
a simple process. We use:
* the down arrow to highlight the next menu entry
* the up arrow to highlight the previous entry
* the right arrow, or the return key, to move to the
document associated with the highlighted entry
* the left arrow to move to the previous document.
The selection "plan of a course" will give us access to the document file
called "plan.html", associated with this entry.
As a result, the following menu, with six highlighted entries, is displayed:
COURSE PLAN
==> * title/schedule
* objectives
* textbooks
* grading strategy
* weekly assignments
* tutorials
In this section, we introduce a feature that is unique to hypertext:
cooperative work between students and their teacher. This cooperative
work can be illustrated by the
following scenario:
* the teacher prepares weekly assignments
* the students work on their projects
* the students ask questions related to their projects,
and the teacher answers them
* the teacher posts new ideas to motivate the class, using
a "message-of-the-day" approach
* the teacher schedules a real-time conference
The selection "teaching activities" will give us access to the document
file, called teach.html, associated with this entry. To access this hypertext
document, we simply move our cursor until the words: "teaching activity"
are highlighted, and click on it. As a result, the following menu, with
four highlighted entries, is displayed:
TEACHING ACTIVITIES
==>* student projects
* student questions/answers
* message of the day
* electronic classes
CRITERION 2. Mechanism for Monitoring Student
Progress: Student Projects
Our second criterion of a quality teaching environment is a mechanism
that allows the teacher to monitor student progress, using a process
similar to the following
scenario:
a) A student presents his/her project to the class
b) The teacher critiques the project, in front of the
class
c) The teacher motivates all the students to participate in the class
discussion
The Computer-based learning environment of the past allowed each
student to communicate only via electronic mail with the teacher. This
way of communication, although a great improvement over US mail, is
still far from the experience of a face-to-face class environment: What is
missing in the electronic mail communication is the feeling on the part
of the student of being part of a group.
The hypertext mark-up language and its gateways to the Internet, on the
other hand, provides the opportunity to exploit the following scenario:
a) the teacher prepares a plan of the course, including daily or weekly
assignments taking the form of projects.
b) students work on their projects and post them in their account on a
daily or weekly basis.
c) the hypertext mark-up language (HTML) allows the teacher (as well as
all the students in the class) to review the other students' projects, in
real time, through a built- in mechanism of document representation
and linking.
d) all the students in the class follow exchanges between the teacher and
their classmates.
We will see, in the next section, how this scenario is actually
implemented in a hypertext environment.
CRITERION 3. Rules and Conventions that Help Raise the
Teacher's Level of Awareness of Student
Progress
Our third criterion of a quality teaching environment is the level of
awareness of the teacher of his/her students' progress. This awareness is
automatically achieved, in a face-to-face class environment, when the
teacher and his/her students meet during scheduled periods, in a given
class. In an online environment, the rules for interaction are somewhat
different.
Computer-based awareness has its own rules. Using e-mail requires that
the teacher wait until the students mail their projects before he or she can
review students' work. Then the students wait for feedback from the
teacher. Teaching through e-mail produces a lot of waiting. Waiting
brings frustration, and frustration has a tendency to lower the quality of
teaching. Hypertext, when combined with rules and conventions adhered
to by all of those involved, can help overcome this threat to the quality of
teaching, by providing a vehicle for increasing teacher awareness. We
explain below how a teacher can provide a mechanism to assist his/her
students in becoming part of a global awareness raising network. To do
this, the teacher and the students follow rules as indicated below:
RULE #1: Build a standard directory structure: (student)
All students are asked to post their class projects in a sub-directory
labeled using their course prefix and number. In the following example,
we consider a masters level course on the structure of computer
information systems, called MCIS620. Each student is expected to create
a sub-directory in his/her user account, using Unix commands:
mkdir MCIS620 to create directory named MCIS620
chmod 755 MCIS620 to provide access to the directory
RULE #2: Create a personal home page: (student)
Students then create a home or front page menu, called "main.html"
Obviously, it is not the name that is important, but the fact that all
students are expected to use the same convention in naming their front
page menu. A student home page menu is similar to the table of contents
of a book; it is the listing all the work done by the student for each course.
RULE #3: Build the student network: (teacher)
It becomes then a straightforward exercise for the teacher to create a
student class list.
* First the home path of each student is found from the Unix finger
command.
* Then the complete path of the student home page menu is found.
CRITERION 4. Amount of Support for Learning
Our fourth criterion of a quality teaching environment is the amount of
teacher support given to the learning experiences of students. Traditional
campus-based education provides students with classrooms, textbooks,
language labs, photocopy machines to reproduce documents, and
laboratory PCs with a plethora of educational software. Students must
then learn how to optimize the benefit they will derive from this collection
of resources.
The hypertext environment is no different from any other technological
resource. Students and teachers should be well trained in the art of using
hypertext, and should learn all of its important features. A key feature is
the facility to replicate menus and documents, and modify them to suit
students' needs.
Lynx and Mosaic provide basic operations, besides moving around the
text. The most commonly used commands are:
BASIC HTML OPERATIONS
? - to access online help
o - to access an option menu
p - to save the current document to a file
\ - to access the current HTML document
CRITERION 5. Level of Communication: Posting
Questions/Answers Sent Via Electronic Mail
(e-mail)
Our fifth criterion for a high-quality teaching environment is the level of
communication between the teacher and his/her students. This
communication occurs when the teacher and students meet during
scheduled periods, at a given place.
Computer-based communication has traditionally been carried via e-mail,
providing a two-way communication link between teachers and students.
Although it is possible to copy the whole class on all communications,
experience has shown that this is an inefficient way to conduct a class.
Other methods are preferable.
Hypertext, when combined with e-mail, provides a solution, illustrated
below:
* the student sends a question via e-mail
* the teacher answers via e-mail, and posts in hypertext,
the student's question and his/her answer
* the student's classmates have access to all the posted
question/answer communications.
CRITERION 6. Timeliness of Class Involvement
Our sixth criterion of a quality teaching environment is the timeliness of
class participation. In a face-to-face environment, students are required to
attend class and participate in the class every time the class meets. In an
online environment, the above class requirements can be emulated as
follows where the process of participating is realized by:
a) posting all assignments through Lynx/Mosaic
b) timeliness of postings
c) student attendance at the ECR's
If some students post their assignments several weeks after the other
students, the class will be denied the opportunity to access that work and
the opportunities for synergy and sharing are lessened. We can,
alternatively, say that the highly motivated student will generally post his
or her work early, and this could result in less original thinking on the part
of the less motivated student. This situation can be avoided to some
extent by requiring all students to post their work through lynx for all to
see, and stay within one-to-two weeks of the planned schedule.
CRITERION 7. Assessment of Student Readiness for Class
Participation: Posting New Ideas
Our seventh criterion of a high-quality teaching environment is related to
the students' readiness for class participation. In a face-to-face classroom
environment, the class begins when the teacher and most of the students
have arrived. In an online environment, students come to class when they
log-in to the main server. Hypertext, when combined with log-in features,
can offer a solution.
In the following example, students are required to add, as the last line of
their Unix .login file, a command that gives them access to the teacher's
"message-of-the-day". We have implemented the "message-of-the-day"
mechanism as a two-level menu, to take advantage of the fact that some
students may take several classes.
The first menu, in our example, contains the following five classes:
MASTER'S CLASSES
* MCIS620...last updated 2/15/95
* MCTE610...last updated 2/15/95
* MMIS621...last updated 2/15/95
* MMIS610...last updated 2/15/95
* MCIS621...last updated 2/15/95
The next menu lists each "message-of-the-day", sorted by date, starting
with the most recent message:
MESSAGE OF THE DAY
* Wed Feb 15 PROJECT REVIEW IN PROGRESS
* Sat Feb 04 ECR REMINDER
* Tue Jan 31 LYNX RECOMMENDATIONS
The purpose of the "message-of-the-day" is to allow the teacher to post
new ideas to motivate the class. The "message-of-the-day" will have
achieved its goal if the teacher can quickly present his/her ideas to the
class without constraint of time-of-day, teacher's location or students'
locations. If the process is long and drawn out, both the teacher and
his/her students will become less vocal and communication may suffer.
CRITERION 8. Real-Time Interactive Class Sessions: the
Electronic Classroom
Our eighth criterion for a high-quality teaching environment is concerned
with real-time interactive class activities. Nova Southeastern University
is using a special software program called the electronic classroom
(ECR), that has been described earlier in this paper.
Two features of the ECR system have played an important role in our
online teaching activities:
a) ECR provides a meeting place, bringing the class together on a
regular basis
b) ECR recordings are posted via Lynx/Mosaic for future viewing by the
student.
CRITERION 9. Evaluation of Student Assignments: the
Electronic Student
Our ninth criterion for a high-quality teaching environment is concerned
with the accurate evaluation of students' work. Nova Southeastern
University is using an expert system to manage the faculty/student online
environment. This system is called the electronic student/electronic
teacher (ES/ET) and has been described elsewhere (Scigliano, Joslyn, and
Levin, 1988).
Two features of the ES/ET system have played an important role in our
online teaching activities:
a) The ES/ET system provides an archive system for all the assignments
requiring a grade
b) The ES/ET system provides an effective environment to allow a
teacher to review and grade the posted assignments.
The ES/ET software is a systematic mechanism for evaluation that
removes to a large extent the risk that student assignments will be lost or
that a teacher will forget to evaluate an assignment or project. Graded
assignments are compressed automatically and stored for future reference.
A tracking mechanism is also used to give the teacher a composite picture
of any students work or the work of an entire class.
THE INTERNET:
The Internet has made it possible for many computers to interoperate in
ways that was previously impossible. This is facilitated by a set of
protocols under the label of TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol). The TCP/IP suite consists of many protocols
that include telnet, tcp, and electronic mail. The Web depends on the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which provides an efficient
mechanism to deliver hypermedia documents to any Internet user. The
protocol utilizes a client-server approach where the user runs a browser
program which requests documents from an HTTP server program. The
server program accepts the requests and transfers the documents back to
the user. In this way, documents of every conceivable type can be
distributed to users everywhere. The Internet serves as the essence of
system we describe in this paper.
SET OF TOOLS:
The set of tools that are used by teachers and students in creating Web
environments in their courses consists of several existing programs that
run in the Unix environment. These tools include Lynx (an ASCII
browser), text editors, HTML editors, Unix shell scripts, and a
hierarchical directory structure. Other Unix tools such as the vi editor,
pico, emacs, etc. are blended with a set of personal computer tools to
form a seamless environment for student projects. PC tools include
HTML editors such as HTML Assistant, vt100 terminal emulation
software, and file transfer software such as kermit. These enable the
student to format text for use with the Web and transfer files to the Unix
host. There are many other HTML editors including a wide range for the
PC and for the MAC. Microsoft is now bundling an HTML feature in
Word as is Word Perfect.
So often we think of the set of resources for learning being limited to
the college, school, laboratory, local library, or even the classroom.
The Internet and the Web open the universe of resources that vastly
expand the students horizons and the opportunities for learning. Through
use of other tools such as graphics browsers like MOSAIC it is possible
for the student to include multimedia events in his or her projects. The
project could be a term paper, something that is developed by the student
such as a model or scheme.
An essential tool for designing the project environment described in this
paper is Lynx. Lynx is a text browser for the World Wide Web. It works
with HTML in both Unix and VMS. Lynx can display hypertext links in
highlighted form. Movement around a lynx screen is through use of the
arrow keys on the keyboard. When lynx is started on a PC or terminal the
user must indicate the address of the file to be displayed. The address is
called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and is the standard method of
accessing resources on the Web. The files that are accessed are ASCII
text files. One of the most useful features of Lynx is that it works with
ASCII terminals using VT100 emulation as well as any terminal
emulation packages such as Kermit or Procomm.
At NSU, the Lynx environment has been enhanced to give students and
teachers hypertext access to research gateways and commonly used utility
programs. By pressing a single key, students gain instant access to an
index page which contains links to other hypertext systems, such as the
NSU electronic library, the Campus-Wide Information System (CWIS)
and Inter-Links Internet Navigator. Also present are links to electronic
mail, USENET news, file management services, interactive
communication tools and even the telephone directory. The index page
provides the student an easy way to jump out of the current activity,
access these services and then jump back in without getting lost in the
Web.
The types of resources that can be accessed by Lynx are HTTP -for
documents delivered by a local or remote server; TELNET -for interactive
login service on a remote computer; WAIS -for sending search criteria to
a WAIS server; gopher -for accessing a remote GOPHER server; FTP
-for accessing a remote FTP site; MAILTO -for sending electronic mail;
and NEWS -for accessing a USENET news server. In addition to these
resource types, the lynxexec resource type allows execution of programs
residing on the local computer while retaining the identity of the student
accessing the link. Other specialty links have been incorporated to allow
for hypertext documents generated on the fly and for self-modifying
documents.
EXISTING STRUCTURES ON THE INTERNET:
The content of the servers linked to the Internet serves as a store of
knowledge that is "pulled into" student projects to highlight certain points
or to provide additional information for the viewer. The utilities that make
this knowledge accessible to an HTML link have been the staples of the
Internet for many years. These include gophers with their search tools
such as VERONICA, ftp sites searchable with ARCHIE, Wide Area
Information Servers (WAIS), library catalogs, and numerous Web home
pages that can be made part of a student's term paper or project by linking
to the Uniform Resource Locator or HTTP address. HTML is the engine
that makes the links possible and is described in the next section.
Many of the research resources available to students are delivered by an
HTTP server which runs specialized programs to produce and return
results based on the student's input. For example, the NSU Inter-Links
Internet Navigator provides many easy ways for students to search for any
topic covered in the system and receive the results as a hypertext
document. The results will often point students at other Web sites that
contain information they can incorporate directly into their own projects.
The background programs that provide the search capabilities are a
combination of C programs, Perl scripts, and WAIS or SWISH indexes.
HYPERTEXT AND THE HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE (HTML):
Ever since the conference Hypertext 87, and the articles that followed it in
1988 about the phenomenon of hypertext, the method has received steady
coverage in the literature (Conklin, 1987; Frisse, 1988; Smith and Weiss,
1988). With the advent of the World-Wide Web in 1993, the interest in
hypertext has exploded. The projects that students design for their
courses at NSU use HTML, a hypertext language that enables them to
embed gophers, telnet links, ftp file transfers, and all of the immense
power of the Internet. The hypertext capability enables students to
highlight important sections of their documents and provide nested help
screens and definitions that enhance their projects. In designing projects,
students create environments on UNIX and link resources through
hypertext buttons. In this paper we have provided examples of HTML
commands and how they are used to build the teaching environment. The
HTML commands can be activated in Lynx and be displayed with vt100
emulation on either PCs or Macs. The technique should be widely
applicable to other disciplines.
HTML has many useful features which make it possible to display
hypertext documents in a variety of attractive formats. Many types of
titles, headings, lists, tags, data entry forms, and even maps are available
for use. The language is evolving and will continue to improve its look
and feel. One of the best features of HTML is that it was designed as an
extensible language that can easily manage new forms of media. This is
due in part to the use of MIME types which define how different
documents should be viewed. The hypertext "document" can be just
about any type of entity that developers care to define. HTTP can transfer
any data type that both client and server support. Currently, formats exist
for sound files, graphics files, video files, etc. Future incarnations of
HTML will definitely support complex media types that we can now only
imagine.
PROBLEMS
Interfacing student projects to the external world of the Internet has its
problems. Getting a group of students ready to pursue HTML projects
over the Internet can be very demanding on the teacher. The process
requires a lot of rules that each student must follow. The rules are
necessary in order to make the "integrated" set of projects work as a
whole.
Some things with which students try to link may change over time
when modifications occur in web links. When users try to access a "dead"
link, those users will get an error message indicating that the document is
unavailable. This can be frustrating for the users and may cause them to
avoid future projects in this environment.
THE FUTURE
Things never stay the same on the Internet or the Web. Change is a given.
Significant changes are occurring now at the Web interfaces with the
proliferation of Web browsers, HTML editors, and Internet access
providers. All of these tools will make Web work for teachers and
students a lot easier and a lot more fun. Within the month, Microsoft will
deploy its Internet Assistant that will come bundled with Microsoft Word.
This product will make it easy for users to write HTML code. Word
Perfect will also come out with its entries in the Internet
support area that include a free product called the Internet Publisher,
Internet Publisher Pro ($49.00), and an SGML editor ($595) to come out
with the standard copy of Word Perfect (Booker, 1995).
On the Internet access provider front, change is as rapid as it is in the
Web tool department. A host of providers are providing full connectivity
to the Internet for under $1.00 per connect hour. This includes modem
access at 14.4 kbs and the full TCP/IP suite (telnet, ftp, mail, etc.). Most
providers have free trial kits such as the one made available by
Performance Systems International (PSI). The future holds the promise
of a lot more change with most of it for the users' betterment.
REFERENCES
Booker, E. (1995) Word Perfect to Roll Out Internet Toolkit.
Computerworld, 29(6), 12.
Conklin, E.J. (1987). Hypertext: An Introduction and Survey. IEEE
Computer, 2 (9), 17-41
December, J. and Randall, N. (1994). The World Wide Web Unleashed.
Indianapolis, Indiana: Sams Publishing.
Frisse, M. (1988). From Text to Hypertext. BYTE, 13(10), 247-253).
Lemay, L. (1995). Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week.
Indianapolis, Indiana: Sams Publishing.
Scigliano, J. A. and Centini, B. A. (1985). Unix in a Community of
Scholars Paper Presented to the Mid-Year Conference of the American
Association of Information Science, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Scigliano, J. A., Joslyn, D. L, and Levin, J. (1988). Expert System
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Scigliano, J. A., Joslyn, D. L. and Levin, J. (1989). The Non-School
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Smith, J. B. and Weiss, S. F. (1988). Hypertext. Communications
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