My 1995 Web Site
Not my very first site, but made just after my first site, from July 20, 1995.
This was my first experiment in user-hostile design. Hidden in the various images were links to different parts of the site - the Klingon ship went to my Star Trek page, the star when to my logical fallacies page, my name to the 'about me' page...
Guide to the Logical Fallacies... which still has the same theme today!
My Star Trek pages...
Finally, my favorite page on the whole site...
You can see the whole thing on the Wayback Machine, but it will take a long time to load.
This was my first experiment in user-hostile design. Hidden in the various images were links to different parts of the site - the Klingon ship went to my Star Trek page, the star when to my logical fallacies page, my name to the 'about me' page...
Guide to the Logical Fallacies... which still has the same theme today!
My Star Trek pages...
Finally, my favorite page on the whole site...
You can see the whole thing on the Wayback Machine, but it will take a long time to load.
I love this kind of stuff, your archive of another time, and strangely, or maybe not that stranegly, the Star Trek analysis is really the framework for downes.ca philosophically.
ReplyDeleteAnd the first pages, at least how you have presented the order here, have the page read kind of like a digital story with arrows and links out to various subjects. Very wild stuff here, also I went to the Brandon page, which still kinda holds up by todays web standards and followed some links on the internet archive and found this idea/acronym: MAUD (Multi Academic User Domain). Wat was that? I love the name and acronym, I'm just wondering what this might have mean in instructional technology in 1995. In fact, I would love a kind of history of what were the pressing issues, ideas, and uses of instructional technology and the internet in 1995. I would love some of the quotidian jobs, stories, etc. to put it in perspective. How were you all using the internet for teaching and learning at Assiniboine Community College---it's obvious your logical fallacies guide is a great resource. Were you showing faculty how to build stuff like this? HTML? List-servs?
Wither way, thanks for this post, my favorite kind.
Star Trek utopianism is a beautiful thing, and the way you expressed it here is attractive and not at all 'user-hostile' - not to this user, anyway - although I understand the point about less-than-obvious links etc.
ReplyDeleteI thoroughly enjoyed reading this. The person of Stephen Downes was so much more present in this kind of writing than in your more recent stuff. I never had you pegged for someone so whimsical. Thanks for sharing.
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