Web Tools for Instructional Use

Glen Bull, Curry School of Education

1996 TTI Fellow

Project website: http://teach.virginia.edu/go/tti/

The World Wide Web promises to be as revolutionary a teaching tool as the book. But whereas books are familiar to us and easy to use, the technologies associated with creating and maintaining a web site are difficult to master. Because most web servers are Unix-based, to create a web site one must learn a whole series command-line programs, such as the Unix file system, Telnet, HTTP, HTML, CGI, and PERL. But as many web site developers come from the more user-friendly background of Windows and MacIntosh, the prospect of weaving even a simple web can be quite time-consuming.Professor Glen Bull, of the Curry School of Education, hopes to make life easier for those teachers who want to make the most the World Wide Web but who do not have degrees in computer science. His approach is to create a set of web site development tools that can be used from within a web browser, such as Netscape. Tools developed with a Web interface have the advantage of being cross-platform, so they can run on a PC, Mac, or Unix workstation. And they have graphical, point-and-click interfaces, which minimizes the need to interact with the Unix command line.Among the tools Bull is developing is a program to allow users to maintain the permission settings that give people read and write access to the directories on a web server. This tool will be useful to teachers who have students create web sites in collaboration. As students enter and leave a group, the tool will make it easier to given them, or take away from them, access rights to the web site. In addition, Bull is researching a number of existing applications for web site management.