April
2000
Online
Newsletter for Greater Essex County Computer Using
Professionals
I had a
very interesting question put to me by a good
friend this month. "Do you
have a personal web page?" followed by "Why
would anyone want to have their own web
page?" The
answer, in my case, is no. All of my spare
time is spent doing this monthly newsletter.
I figure it's about as close to a personal image as
I care to publish. I suppose I could liven it
up with pictures of Beauregard the dog or Hiccup
the hedgehog. It did get me thinking and I
did post a message in the Computers in Education
conference on the First Class Conferencing system.
I received quite a number of replies from people
who had personal home pages. There was a
second element to it as well. Many of the
replies showed web pages for hobbies or
evening/weekend sidelines such as bands, handyman
services, knitting/quilting, and the list goes
on. So, it
appears that there are lots of people with personal
web pages. Another fair question would be why
do you keep working at it? To get a sense of
how popular a web page can be, people often place a
hit counter on the page. Each time the page
is visited, the counter is incremented by
one. So, I turned to the numbers from the
board's website: That's a
lot of hits (assuming that everyone started at
0...). For varying reasons, these web pages
are visited very frequently. Now, you do have
to realize that some of the hits are
artificial. After all, once you put a counter
on your page, you want to visit it a couple of
times just to see if it's working... It's a
sign of the times. Where else can you publish
with the potential of being visited by people from
anywhere there's an Internet connection? As
we moved from the various methods for printing to
paper, to publishing to the desktop, to publishing
to multimedia, we now see web publishing as the
next way to publish with expression. The
Internet features the full potential of media with
colour, graphics, movies and animations. The
finishing touch is the fact that it can be done
with very low costs. While it's
possible, is it desirable for everyone? That
needs to be thought through very carefully.
CAIT Steve Cox attended Fred D'Ignazio's session at
Symposium '99 and was inspired to do some web
publishing with his schools. He has created a
web page devoted to this concept and it appears
later in this issue of GEC Computers in the
Classroom. Steve loves to receive
email. If you have an questions or comments
about the process, read his page and drop him a
line. Back to
the original premise, there definitely are some
good reasons for creating your own web pages.
If you're interested in learning how it's done,
there are lots of opportunities available listed in
the Computer Professional Development
calendar.
January-June
Computer
PD Calendar
GECDSB
Home page - 132000 hits
Director's Weekly Memos - 500 hits
GEC Computers in the Classroom March - 450
hits
GECDSB Announcements Page - 1600 hits
Coronation Public School - 225 hits
East Mersea Public School - 970
hits
Eastwood Public School - 490 hits
General Amherst High School - 160 hits
J.L. Forster Secondary School -6400 hits
Malden Central Public School - 620 hits
M.D. Bennie Public School - 1500 hits
Percy McCallum Public School - 1800 hits
Sandwich Secondary School - 400
hits