Welcome to the world wide web of educational online sources. We want to make this a space where everyone can contribute, where everyone together can build a clearinghouse for educational information.
As you know, the Internet now grows explosively, with new resources
coming online literally daily. Moreover, the majority of new users
have far less computer skill than the 'old-timers', and we expect
the next mass immigration onto the Internet to come from high school
teachers and their students. However, there is still no unified
collection of educational online sources, no first-stop for teachers
just joining the Internet, no display of the education-oriented
potential of the online community.
We view this consolidated collection of educational online
sources as critically important for the next several years,
as high school teachers and students join us online: if these
teachers and students are to succeed in their futures,
they need our help now.
We believe that we're all in this together.
Keeping information parcelled away, hidden or obscured by long twisty mazes of Internet navigation, hurts all of our causes. We'd like to offer EOS as the central meeting place, as the clearinghouse where things are at least semi-organized-- but no one group could possibly keep up with finding, documenting, and including all the changes on the Internet and beyond. A community clearinghouse will only succeed if the community, as a whole, supports it. This includes you.
We believe in free speech.
Some groups here may have opposing views, and we hope this doesn't discourage anyone from participating. We believe that free flows of information are essential to well-informed decisions, and to an intelligent public debate. We expect groups on EOS to honor these freedoms.
We believe that information should reach people.
If you have something to contribute, please send it on, and we'll include it. For those educational groups that are well established on the nets, we'd appreciate it if we could include pointers to your archives, lists, gophers, and webs.
Perhaps more importantly, we want to start connecting the educational groups who don't have information out on the net. Most of them can't afford the time or the money to set up their own Internet computer system. We'd like to help these groups: if you can get us their information in some kind of electronic format, we'll include it.
We're just getting started; we frankly don't have a lot to show yet. Someone's got to do this community space, though, or thousands upon thousands of teachers and students will have their first Internet experiences end in frustration, and so much valuable information will slip through the network cracks, unused. The Internet is about to grow up, whether we like it or not; we need to take the time now to help it grow in the right directions.
Specifically, here's what we think could help:
Introductory lessons on FTP, WAIS, the World Wide Web Worm, etc.
Pointers to the major educational services, along with annotations of what a user might find, any specialities, searching instructions, and the like.
A list of educational email lists, including annotations, subscription instructions, and so on. Perhaps we could include the Frequently Asked Questions from these email lists?
A compilation of universities who might be willing to contribute Internet accounts to interested K-12 teachers and perhaps students as well.
The involvement of non-school-based educational centers. We can recruit information from children's museums, zoos, libraries, and youth programs.
Reviews of software, videos, CDs, books, and magazines, written by people who actually use the product. Like you.
A presentation packet on "Welcome to the Internet" for people who don't know the first thing about this electronic world. Imagine a teacher calling up, and saying "I know so little about the Internet, but I have a presentation to the PTA next month and they're willing to listen to a funding request." Now imagine if we could send that teacher a booklet, handouts, slides, and our technical and moral support.
World Wide Webs for education and kids. Information archives, research projects, museums, and even high schools are joining the world wide web!
The EOS Gopher: connect to our gopher, which accesses all our files (same as the filelist, below) and also provides gopher links to dozens of other educational gophers.
The EOS filelist: dozens of helpful "frequently asked questions", descriptions of projects and groups culled from the net, lots of info about non-World Wide Web sources (books, electronic magazines, software & hardware, etc).
Gophers elsewhere: connections to loads of other education-oriented computers across the country and around the world.
USENet newsgroups having to do with education. This file is fairly large, so be prepared for a wait. If you have lots of time on your hands, there's a version with graphics. If we can raise enough money to get a decent computer, these speeds will improve dramatically. :-)
Guides to the Internet, including introductory-level books, a variety of ways to find information in virtual libraries and across the Internet, and lessons on specific network tools.
Subject-oriented resources. If you have information on a particular subject area, particularly lists of resources (both online and offline), we could really use your information!
Photo of Educational Online Sources president and our major sponsor.
FTP & Gopher
Everything here is also available by anonymous ftp and gopher! Sure,
Mosaic's prettier, but if you want to help a school that only has a Mac
Plus connection, for example, then ftp or gopher to:
netspace.org
Thanks for mailing eos@brown.edu with your comments and additions!
World Wide Webs for education and kids. Information archives, research projects, museums, and even high schools are joining the world wide web!