Mosaic: An Educator's Best Friend

Shortly after World War II, Vannevar Bush, science advisor to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, conceived of the memex, a device that would cross-reference and provide hyperlink access to information. The technology necessary to fulfill this vision is finally becoming available in the form of hypertext, and to a larger extent, through hypermedia implementations. And now this type of technology has come to users of the Internet. MOSAIC, software developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), is designed to provide access to hypermedia resources on the Internet through a graphical user interface. Availability of this software will be a boon to educators who wish to use the Internet as source of and as an aid in classroom instruction. This paper discusses the use of the NCSA's MOSAIC application to access Internet resources. A description of the software and its capabilities, along with details on how to obtain it, are presented. * Internet Overview The Internet has been described as the prototype of the information superhighway, providing access to sources and allowing users to communicate with each other around the world.(1) In its present form, however, there is no centralized control over resources and access. This makes searching for comparable to looking for a needle in a haystack. Efforts are currently underway to develop mechanisms, mostly in the form of software tools, to facilitate access. Most efforts to date have focused on cataloging Internet resources and making this public. The gamut of Internet data resources available ranges from access to library card catalogs to NASA's images of space. In addition, the Internet provides forums for groups of users with similar interests to carry on discussions. Some examples are: Arts & Entertainment; Computers & Software; Nature, Science & Technology; Schools, Reference & Higher Technology; and Telecommunications & Electronics.(2) Given the wealth of information, it is not surprising that about 40 million people from around the world are on the Internet, and that number is growing by 15% a year.(3) A number of commercial institutions--seeing possibilities for intelligence gathering, potential customers and marketing channels--have also connected themselves to the Internet.(1)(3) In brief, the resources available are vast and increase on a daily basis. * Current Internet Access Methods Until recently, the tools available to Internet users have been a collection of utility programs, which evolved from the UNIX environment, that are mainly concerned with connecting to remote computers using telnet and transferring files using ftp.(4) These tools require users to learn arcane command structures and provide little in the way of help. A newer generation of tools has extended the capabilities available to Internet users, by providing hierarchical menu structures that direct users to information. These newer tools take the form of client/server mechanisms, where the client computer connects to a server containing the data sought. An example of this type of tool is any of the various implementations of gopher.(5) Gopher is designed to connect to other computers on the Internet and provides a menu structure to ease navigation. By simply selecting items on a menu, users are connected to other Internet servers or allowed to read or download files. The major drawback to this approach is its hierarchical nature, which forces users to go through an extensive hierarchy of menus to reach desired data. Supplementing gopher are tools such as ARCHIE and VERONICA, which enable one to search Internet resources for specific information. Generally though, there is no one tool that combines these characteristics and breaks the hierarchical links inherent in menus. * MOSAIC Within the past year NCSA has released a new Internet navigation tool that provides exciting new capabilities. …