Date: Sun, 5 May 1996 20:37:15 -0700 (PDT)
From: Gunter Krumme <krumme@u.washington.edu>
To:  [unnamed members of the Geography Department]
Subject: Re: WWW Competition -Reply (fwd)

Yes, we need to talk about the need to avoid making web pages merely
ephemeral newspapers. In our web site discussions in the department, we
have discussed various possibilities of preserving the academic,
project-oriented web-sites for graduating seniors and also for visiting
faculty. There is a lot of work involved in creating web sites, and we
absolutely have to make sure that students creating web products have some
more long-term incentives.  I have offered to my students that I would
take their web sites into my directory under their name (if they want
that; if the page is of sufficient quality) for a limited amount of time;
this will give them an opportunity to show off their pages to employers
for a while, and it gives me an opportunity to show the pages to other
undergraduates, to continue their projects with a new set of students
and/or to (slowly) integrate the students' resource finds into my own
resource pages. A major advantage of web page projects is exactly this
incentive of creating something which does not just disappear in a
professor's drawer!

I would hope that the department would take some pride in offering to an
awardee the privilege of being included (copied under the student's name)
into the departmental directory for a year as the Web Page Award Winner of
the Year. If the Department does not want to do that, maybe the faculty
sponsor could do it in his/her directory. If that fails, I will be more
than happy to do it. If the Department decides that Web Page projects
should not be preserved for the next generation of students to see, I have
lost interest in both the award and much of the undergraduate web page
effort -- for sure.

A similar opportunity should/would exist for visiting faculty (or Alan F.
and Delia R.) who have created web pages which I think are of value to the
department beyond the quarter of teaching. If we want to create a
departmental resource base ....

Enough said.					Gunter



On Sun, 5 May 1996, [noname] wrote:
> At the risk of adding more noise than substance, let me ask a question
> about the one year rule.  I have to confess that I had not noticed that
> rule before.  But it seems to me that it is impossible to impose this
> rule.  Seniors will graduate, and their accounts will be determinated.
> Those students who remain will likely want to change their home page long
> before a year is up.  So I don't think that having a home page around past
> the end of the year is either a reasonable or realistic requirement.