USD Magazine, Winter 1998

Students Conquer the World Wide Web

BY }ILL WAGNER '91

The Internet is not housed on one giant

eySa Ely '97 is neither a computer science major nor a historian, but people from around the globe are logging onto her World Wide Web site seeking information about the island of Alcatraz. Equipped with some familiarity of the Internet and no experience in creating Web sites, Ely spent her final semester at USD working as a programmer, historian and graphic designer on Web pages that serve as a research paper and much more. Rather than writing the standard paper, binding it in a nice folder and handing it over to her professor - who essentially would be the only person to learn from her hours of research about the historic island - Ely published the work on the Internet. The vast computer network makes the facts, photos and interesting tidbits Ely uncovered about the famous "rock" jutting out of San Francisco Bay available to anyone with a computer and a modem. A grammar school student doing her own report on the famous Alcatraz prison might use Ely's site for background infor– mation. A Swiss couple planning to visit San Francisco may search out the site for a sneak preview of what they will encounter when taking a tour of Alcatraz. Or a fellow history buff may compare notes with what he knows about the prison where Al Capone was once incarcerated. Ely's work will live far beyond the life of the ordinary research paper, which after being graded is usually thrown in a box of college keepsakes and relegated to a dark corner of the garage. Her decision to turn in her final project for the 20th Century American History course via computer is one that pro– fessors across USD's campus are increasingly offering their students. It wasn't an easy decision for Ely, who had to teach herself the computer language used to create Web sites, conduct the historic research and design a look for her Internet pages. But it was a decision she's glad she made. "I'd rather do something creative," says Ely, a psychology undergraduate major now studying for her Ph.D. at Pacific Graduate School of Psychology. "I learned HTML through a lot of trial and error." Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is more of a code system than a programming language, and is straightforward enough that someone comfortable working on computers can learn it with little difficulty. Ely went to the Internet itself to find pages devoted to teaching HTML and also looked at the codes behind Web sites she thought attractive. Only months after diving into the project, Ely rattles off cyberspace jargon like an expert - she preferred not to use an

computer or controlled by one group of

people. It is thousands upon thousands

of pages of information .. photos and

uideo created by and auailable to anyone.

Some of those pages are created by USO

students who taught themselues the ins

and outs of Web site design. With a

click of amouse .. you can see that their

creations are just as diuerse as they are.

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