First of all, where can I find some good multimedia stuff for a demo
of Mosaic to a local K-12 unified school district? I just got dragged
into this at the last minute, you know how these things are. There's
some good stuff in the Mosaic demo document, but I'm hoping to find
stuff for both teachers and kids elsewhere, preferably at least some
of it education related. Are there URL's for good GIF sites,
especially anything Space related? I would love JPL or shuttle
images, and sound files of astronaut stuff would go over really well.
We'll be doing this over a T1 link, and are assuming a T1 for this
particular site, so the more the merrier, and huge files are not a
problem!
A source for reading netnews via XMosaic would be good as well, I want
to test the news interface but got a "disallowed" message when I tried
to enter any of the groups in the netnews page. I want to demo the
"kids" and "sci" groups in particular to these folks; if the news
interface is like the rest of mosaic, I feel pretty confident that
K-12 can handle it trivially. This was in the demo doc, by the way--
the "Usenet" under the Documents menu doesn't even get me that far.
This brings me to another question-- a number of the most important
documents in the "Documents" menu seem to be inaccessible. The
"Information by Subject" "Data Sources by Service" and some other
"meta-lists" are refusing to serve the documents. Some sites may be
inaccesible, but (for instance) I am seeing plenty of other stuff from
info.cern.ch so why not these documents?
Has anyone prepared an initial document which has resources for K-12
teachers and students? How about for small businesses or independent
researchers? The Gopher interface is great, but you can't easily
distinguish between full-text documents, book reviews, and so on. The
folks who were looking over my shoulder this afternoon were quite
disappointed when much of "the good stuff" turned out to be course
descriptions, not documents.
With respect to WAIS, I keep getting these WAIS pages that say <big
type> foo.bar.baz is a WAIS server for some topic, but where do I go
from there? The "search keyword" is grayed out, even when the text
says "a WAIS server which supports keyword searches on such and so".
What might I be doing wrong? Clicking in the "Search Keyword" area or
actual box sometimes gets me a text prompt but it just beeps when I
type!
Given the cynicism of much of today's youth, you can understand why I
want to overcome some of these issues before the demo Friday morning!
Any help is much appreciated!
One more question-- the school system in question may decide that it
wants these (and other) tools but doesn't want to maintain their own
Unix hosts, just to connect via Xterms or somesuch. I have looked at
the Mosaic copyrights and it looks like it would be legal for one of
the commercial providers to put the binaries up or run a web server or
whatever for the school system. But what if the commercial provider
wanted to let their regular customers use it too? Would that still be
legit, as long as their customers are buying an account, not buying
Mosaic or any specific rights to use it? I don't want to install this
for some provider and then find out that I'm helping to violate UIUC's
copyright! Guidance on this would be appreciated....
Thanks for any help on any of these; probably best to send to me and
not the list. I'll be happy to summarize the URL info if I get any,
and will certainly pass on any K-12 demo-style document I end up
generating.
_Strata
M. Strata Rose
Unix & Network Consultant
strata@apple.com