iweb

I've experimented with a number of WYSIWYG website programs in the past; when I was a kid I used to goof around with Front Page, Angel Fire and Geocities. Like iweb these were great, intuitive programs that allow you to publish material on-line without requiring a great deal of technical know-how.

This is something more students should be made to do; the fact that it wasn't a part of my highschool education indicates that my education was already obsolete. Being able to publish directly to the web gives students the satisfaction of seeing a piece of their own work presented to the world, with the added benefit that their work can then interact and participate with the rest of the massive conversation we call the internet.

Finally, I think programs like this are going to be appealing to contemporary students who are already using applications like Facebook, twitter, etc. to create personalized webspaces for themselves. Encouraging students to use a more free-form web publishing tool allows them more opportunity to express themselves in terms of web design, lay out and the kind of information they wish to provide. It can also free students from the financial structure of sites like Facebook, which by design suck them into a web of targeted advertising, information-mining and privacy violation.