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Is it a commercial Web site beaming banner ads for stereo speakers, software, and virtual pinball games into the eyes of thousands of schoolchildren, or is it a genuine online research center - and a boon for schools that don't have the wherewithal to rent space on a Web server?
Answer: It's both.
That's Homework Heaven, the latest "channel" at Jumbo.com, an archive of downloadable freeware and shareware. By offering over 150,000 links to educational resources on the Web - online dictionaries, maps, historical sites, tutorials, search engines, museum sites, and so on - Homework Heaven is positioning itself to become the one-stop bookmark for kids who'd rather boot up the PC than crack a book.
Homework Heaven is making a splash in the press this week with its announcement that it will donate 3 MB of space on its servers to any K-12 school in the United States that wants to put up a homepage. The question is, who's getting wet?
Peter Shankman, director of marketing and development for Homework Heaven, says the free site offer is a win-win. "About a month and a half ago, we realized there are 105,000 schools in the country, but only about 4,000 have Web pages. In many cases, it's lack of funds.... We figured it would take about 25 terabytes of disc space to get all those schools online, and we thought, 'Let's do it.' Think about what we'd be doing for the students - and what we'd be doing for Homework Heaven."
What will the offer do for Homework Heaven? "Look at the numbers coming from Jupiter," Shankman says, referring to a report released last summer by Jupiter Communications, which predicted that the number of teenagers and college students using the Net will snowball from 11.1 million to 28.7 million by 2002. "All of those students are going to be buying CDs online, getting sports scores online. We're capturing a killer demographic."
Besides, Shankman observes, "teenagers and college students associate the Web with coolness," and after putting their noses to the digital grindstone at a site like e-Calculus (featuring "verbose discussion of topics"), "they'll go to Jumbo and download a game."
Balls of Steel, perhaps - a pinball program, one of the many products advertised with rotating banner ads on the Homework Heaven site, along with used modems, video kits, and software. Young scholars surfing in for "lightning-fast" help with their trig and postmodern lit must wait while their browsers render a full-screen interstitial ad for The Learning Company. The free school homepages, the site's FAQ promises, will not have banners pasted onto them, but the existing homepages in the site's directory are served up in a frame bordered by ads.
It's that cheek-to-cheek tango of educational resources with commercial hype that is making some Net-watchers qualify their enthusiasm for Homework Heaven's "win-win."
Technology critic David Shenk, author of Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, appreciates the site's aggregation of useful links, chosen by senior editor Judy Breck, who once occupied a post on a White House educational advisory committee. He's less than enthusiastic about Homework Heaven's flashy, ad-filled format. "Teachers need to seriously beware, I think, of both commercialization of education and an excessively high-stim environment. This site is awash with both."
Jeff Hannah, spokesperson for 21st Century Teachers, a nonprofit support network for educators integrating technology into their classrooms, has similar reservations about the site's intentions. "They're using the increasing traffic of teachers on the Net as a market for commercial products. It's a fine line - and the educational community is very skeptical" of sites that wrap links to resources in layers of advertising, Hannah says.
Homework Heaven is predicting that the offer to put up free homepages will result in up to 15,000 requests for server space in the first three months. Shankman said every request to put up a homepage will be scrutinized "to avoid a student with a grudge putting up a not-nice page." Site requests are verified with school authorities by checking school fax numbers and email addresses, and then the content of each page will be examined for "vulgarity and pornography." Guidelines for allowable language and images will be set by each school.
With each school's webmaster having individual password-protected access to the directories, and only one full-time employee assigned to editorial - Breck - on staff at present, isn't that a lot of changing content to keep an eye on? "We're definitely going to be hiring more editors," Shankman promises, adding that the company employs "hundreds" of college and high-school age interns who will pitch in. For webmasters-in-training, the site offers a suite of downloadable HTML tools and tutorials at Jumbo.com.
Shankman says the offer to put up free homepages has resulted in a burst of traffic for the site, which was already logging 50,000 impressions a day.
"What we're doing," Shankman explains, "is saying, 'Here's some dirt, and here's some seeds. I hope you get some great vegetables out of it.'"
