Getting Personal
When Colby announced several months ago that its Internet server would be made available for students to create their own personal pages on the World Wide Web, some were skeptical about what it would spawn. Would it be drivel or something useful? Well, while there is plenty of what a curmudgeon might describe as nonsense, many student pages are intelligently crafted and interesting to read.
Michael Sabin '96 of Seattle, Wash., introduces his poetry--an anthology titled Purple Shadows--with a mysterious entryway surrounded by a magenta haze. Having "entered," readers may flip through the pages of the anthology, sampling Sabin's poems.
Multilingual Kori Heavner '96 (Lubbock, Texas) has created a home page with a strong international flavor. In addition to learning snippets of German, Swedish and Turkish, readers can travel to an Internet site for the Turkish Daily News and get the current exchange rate of the Turkish lira.
Emily Reith, a sophomore from Morgan Hill, Calif., has one of the more diverse student sites, featuring everything from a link to This Old House to the home page for NASA, the latter inspired, she says, by her experience at space camp in sixth grade. "The page is a way for my friends who don't know me all that well to find out what interests me and maybe know me better," Reith said.
Unlike some students who are dabbling with Web publishing for class assignments, Reith's foray into cyberspace was self-initiated. She concedes that her interest in information technology may be especially keen because her mother, Jacquie, is a Webmaster at IBM. In fact, Emily's page includes a link to her mother's Internet site. Nevertheless, Emily's Web site is decidedly personal. Her own artwork introduces the page, which includes several observations about living in Maine and about issues important to her.
"It's exciting to see my page up there and to know that I did it," Reith said.