Using NCSA Mosaic

The release of NCSA Mosaic has given Sridhar and Hall an even better tool for constructing the modules, and they will eventually convert existing hypercard modules for display using NCSA Mosaic. In fact, Mohan Ramamurthy, UIUC professor of atmospheric sciences and head of the UIUC CoVis Group, says, "[NCSA Mosaic] solved a series of problems when it came out. We were doing interactive multimedia, but not across the network. We wanted to set up some sort of digital library that provides access to real and retrospective databases, to educational modules, and so on. In one shot, Mosaic allows us to do that."

NCSA Mosaic also allows users to integrate all of the multimedia features used in the hypercard modules, without taking up the space. "With hypercard, we had to send the entire package," said Hall. "In some cases, that would be 50 megabytes. Mosaic allows the teacher to pick and choose the parts of the module that are needed and get them over the network."

NCSA Mosaic enables students to link to different Gopher servers, FTP, and WWW sites, so that moving from UIUC's Weather Machine Server for up-to-the-minute weather data and then to the Exploratorium Server for meteorological demonstrations involves clicking on highlighted words.

Back to collaborative visualization in the classroom

access / Summer 1994 / NCSA