Gramercy
Pictures
At Polygram's Gramercy Pictures page, you'll find a menu of current releases,
coming attractions, and recent releases. Mostly the films listed link to
a page of short synopses and not much more. "The Mall Rats" link
is substantial, but I'm not sure that's a good thing. Gramercy films must
have gone over budget and they couldn't afford to do much more.
-KB
C-
AcademicNet Home Page
AcademicNet looks promising: nicely rendered image maps, plenty of places
to click, a fancy registration system, and a statement that it is *the*
resource for "educators interested in technology-mediated instruction
and learning in higher education." Unfortunately, there's very little
to see until you register, and not much after that. Many of the internal
links were broken, and the stuff that was present was self-serving and written
in a dry, uninformative tone. Some of the collections of external links
are worthwhile, though - if you can find them among the chaff.-TG
D+
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon has long bragged of its strong computer sciences department,
and from this site's depth, it's clear that its pride is deserved. Interested
in studying drama at CMU? Check out course descriptions, and even see when
classes are meeting, thanks to some clever links to the registrar's office.
Some improperly linked image maps marred the site's effectiveness, however.
Whatever faults it has, though, Carnegie Mellon gets my praise for its Lycos
program, one of the better free Web search tools. You can reach it through
these pages or directly at http://lycos.com/.-TG
B
Classroom
Connect Educational Links
This is primarily a site full of links, which can be useful, but if every
site just had links to other sites, the Web would be pretty empty. O.K.,
as a site focusing on educational links, Classroom Connect is pretty good,
since it's packed, although some of the choices are a little bit odd. This
may be due to a lack of focus. Is this a site for K12 students, educators,
or parents? A link to "Pooh Corner" on the same page as a link
to "British Poetry: 1780 to 1910" is a little bit questionable.-WKC
B-
Harvard University WWW
Home Page
At first, the Harvard University site looks pretty drab: a few choices linking
you to ugly, text-only Gopher sites, phone numbers, historical information,
rah rah rah. But underneath some of those links are profound pools. Take
a gander at the map of Harvard, for example, which zooms in on any building
in the university's expansive campus. Similarly, there's gold under some
other links, including admissions and registration information. And Harvard's
not too proud to include several links to one of its local competitors,
M.I.T., in its "resources."-TG
B-
Journal
of Distance Education
Although only a Gopher site, the Journal of Distance Education is an example
of some of the great, free resources available on the Internet. For this
particular site, it helps if you have some kind of administrative or theoretical
interest in distance education. The journal is published twice a year, and
covers a topic that is shifting into high-gear because the Internet is making
long-distance learning a lot more practical.-WKC
A-
LearnWorld
Welcome Page
LearnWorld is a great idea. Anybody who wants to can set up a course on
a topic by outlining a series of texts to read, and including their own
notes on their position on the topic. Anyone who would like to learn about
the topic can use this as a course outline. Unfortunately, the LearnWorld
pages focus too much on the list of texts, and don't have a structure for
the course creator to guide the students through the texts.-WKC
C-
Middle
of Nowhere
Middle of Nowhere is an experiment by Professor Brad Cox in building a site
with depth on the Web, something he claims is an impossible task. Various
thematically oriented sets of articles in the warehouse section of this
site seem to prove him wrong. The themes focus on the Internet and current
social issues. The site also has the online portions of classes Professor
Cox teaches, so the unenrolled can follow along at home. The organization
of the site leaves something to be desired.-WKC
A-
PUBLIC TEACH
IN
Missed New York's International Forum on Globalization last November? Well,
you can still take a trip to its Internet audio archives, which has four
speeches given at that event. Unfortunately, that's it! There's no information
about the teach-in itself or about the one coming up, nor are there links
to groups and events with a similar weltanschauung. Make up for some of
these lacks by visiting the site's parent directory, at http://www.peacenet.org/.
Note: If you don't have the free RealAudio player, this site is completely
pointless; download it at http://www.realaudio.com/.-TG
C-
Stanford University
Home Page
Stanford University was one of the first sites on the Internet. Though it's
no longer a leader in Internet connectivity, its WWW pages show it's kept
abreast of the net's dynamic changes. The site's centerpiece is "Portfolio,"which links Stanford's extensive but old-fashioned Gopher and FTP sites
with a snazzy new Web interface - pretty clever! (This mixture of sources
tends to make the content a bit uneven, however.) As with most university
servers, there's a directory of student Web pages. Also find good links
to info on getting around the South Bay/Silicon Valley area.-TG
B
The
EdWeb Home Room
EdWeb comes off as uninspired. Most of the subject matter has to do with
the use of technology in K12 education, which doesn't have to be such a
dry subject. The articles on EdWeb have some good statistics you can throw
around at cocktail parties, but they're so buried by banal design and endless
text that most people will fall asleep before reaching them. This site is
probably best suited to parents who know nothing about the Internet and
want to know whether it would be a good thing for their kids to learn to
use.-WKC
B
The MIT Home Page
To me, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will always be known primarily
for the witty pranks of technically minded students, but you'll have to
dig hard to find that info here (try http://fishwrap.mit.edu/Hacks/Gallery.html
instead). You will find just about everything else about MIT. For a bunch
of geeks, though, it's rather pedestrian: no image maps or search engines
worth mentioning, cryptic icons, and mostly just text. Be sure to check
out the "fun stuff" area, which includes tips for hacking the
campus security cards. Cool! Let's get user-friendly, folks!-TG
C
The University of Michigan
The University of Michigan has long been famous in the Internet community
for its vast file archive site (find more info about this by going to http://www.umich.edu/~archive/).
But there's more to U. Michigan than free software. Like, a top-ranked university!
The site gives the usual information about its academic programs and such,
beautifully linked and annotated via search engines, tables of contents,
and clickable image maps. One coincidence makes the site aesthetically pleasing:
U.M.'s logo blue matches the "unfollowed link" blue in Netscape's
browser. Not to mention my eyes.-TG
A-
The
World Lecture Hall
This is the ultimate Web resource for the independent student. Providing
links to online course materials posted by universities all over America
in subjects ranging from "accounting" to "zoology,"the site lets students interested in self-study but not in relying on local
college schedules get guidance on just about anything. Of course, lab work
will be kind of difficult for the science courses, unless you happen to
have a particularly well-equipped kitchen.-WKC
A
UC Berkeley Home Page
In a region known for compromise and reason, the University of California
at Berkeley's Web pages are elegantly reasoned and make compromises so they're
both user-friendly and fast. The contents can be access via nicely arranged
text choices rather than by image maps, so the site is as useful to someone
on a Unix box as on a Mac. The content is deep and varied, from the Naval
Architecture school to the click-to-zoom-in campus map. If you're into general
Web search engines, be sure to add Berkeley's "Inktomi" (http://inktomi.berkeley.edu/)
to your list.-TG
B+
VLC.Homepage
The Village Learning Center bills itself as a new type of school that will
"preserve and nurture the yearning for learning that everyone is born
with." This doesn't explain why it became an online school, but the
lack of accreditation might have something to do with it. A mere $1,195
buys a semester of work at home - e-mail assignments in course work for
the seventh to ninth grade set. Use at your own risk.-WKC
D
Washington University
in St Louis
Washington University's Web pages have a clean, crisp organization and some
useful features lacking at some of the larger sites. Want to check your
e-mail? Click here. Want to do an Infoseek search without leaving university
property? No problem. Add a bit of surreality to your visit by clicking
on the "What's This?" button, which leads to a page of basic information
about using the Web, site statistics, etc. So, even if they've never been
to W.U., first-time users are already getting an education. Still, this
handsome site lacks the content depth found at some other universities.-TG
B
Web 66
The mission of Web 66 is to provide resources to help K12 schools get on
the Web. This may seem a questionable goal with all the hype about whether
the Internet is a safe place for kids, but the Web master clears that right
up by quoting headlines in his personal rants section that indicate how
much more dangerous the outside world is for kids. Web 66 has instructions
for educators to set up Web servers, and a very impressive list of K12 schools
from around the world that are online.-WKC
B+
Welcome to CNU ONLINE
Christopher Newport University, located in Virginia, is trying to push the
envelope of modern education practice by offering a substantive number of
classes online. It's even offering a degree in governmental administration
through online course work. Unfortunately, the Web site is just a front
for a Telnet gateway, and at least one of the Telnet addresses given on
the Web site is wrong, which made it impossible to get course information.
The Telnet gateway that I could get to run was so slow, it could turn a
four-year degree into a six-year degree.-WKC
C-
World Association
for Family and Education WAFE
WAFE's Web site is primarily a resource for the group to disseminate information
on its conferences. Because WAFE is international, the Internet is probably
a pretty good medium for it, saving substantial amounts of money on printing
and mailing costs. WAFE's mission statement, which is published on the site,
is a little bit spacy, and seems pretty narrow-minded with its emphasis
that "Marriage, the only proper context for full expression of the
love between one man and one woman, is the rock upon which the family rests."
-WKC
C+
Yale University
World Wide Web Front Door
The Yale University site is everything the Harvard site isn't. Just kidding!
Though, quite honestly, Yale's Web set-up beats its historical nemesis'.
At the top level are listings for P.R. information, search engines, maps,
academic department pages, student activities... Lots of stuff here. Thank
god it's so well-organized! Running a search shows just how much there is:
the word "racquetball" returned 10 pages, including news of the
sports team, a description of the athletic facilities, and someone's experiments
with the Connectix QuickCam, a video input device "about the size of
a racquetball." Pretty good search engine, that!-TG
A-
