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I don't mean to rip all the people selling fancy hardware, software 
and services, but I thought it might be interesting to share the 
results of a little experiment I conducted this week:

I handed a class I teach at Marquette University a one-page summary 
of HTML I had prepared, talked for about half an hour about 
heirarchical organization of news, reviewed the handout for 10
minutes (mostly consumed with explaining URLs), gave them a five minute 
introduction to Mosaic, told them to fire up their text editors and
gave them exactly 60 minutes to take go through the AP wires, 
select and edit the news they desired, and assemble it into an on-line
newspaper page. The only pre-arranged thing was that I created a 
nameplate for them in Photoshop.

An hour later, from a dozen students never before exposed to HTML or
any of the issues of how to design an effective on-line newspaper,
came back a dozen very acceptable newspapers -- three or four of them
much more than acceptable, in some cases almost as good as any that I see 
on-line.

All they would have had to do to actually publish these papers 
would have been to have a directory on some Web server somewhere and
transfer their files there.

Did my students become experts? Hardly. This was just a sidelight in 
a class mostly focused on information graphics. But if they, coming 
in completely cold, could produce a complete national and international 
summary page in 60 minutes, do we really have to worry about 
mega-expenditures in people and equipment?
____________________________________________________

ERIC K. MEYER                    meyer@newslink.org 
WWW NewsLink       http://www.newslink.org/newslink/
____________________________________________________

From owner-online-news@marketplace.com Mon May  1 04:07:52 1995
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