Weblets, CD-ROMS

Abstract

This chapter speaks to ways of dealing with Web traffic and controlling student access. When students access your materials from home or off-campus, they are at the mercy of Web traffic. Web traffic sometimes can become a problem on campus during busy periods. Also, on the WWW, students can surf wherever they please. In schools and on campuses, especially in precollege settings, you may prefer to control student access to the WWW. There are two reasons to impose control. In both precollege and college classrooms, you can put all of the materials of interest to you on a local server, hard drive, optical drive, or CD-ROM. The resulting weblet* is self-contained, and therefore can run as fast as your local network or drives permit. When you click a link, you are connected to another file on your network and not somewhere out on the Web. Also, the student cannot get into objectionable material on school premises starting out from your materials. This is a big issue with many parents, and therefore is of real importance in precollege settings. Remember, however, that what you are doing in creating a weblet is removing the most powerful feature of the WWW, namely, world wide connectivity.