The main backbone or network in the U.S. is the National Research and Education Network (NREN), a product of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, pushed through Congress by then-Senator Al Gore. It was designed to help the K12 and college communities become part of the Internet more easily.
Swarthmore College is directly on the Internet: there is an open live connection via a leased line (like a phone line, but open all the time) to a network provider in Philadelphia, which in turn is connected directly to the national network. This connection allows us to do 'live' interaction with computers all over the world.
There are several ways of getting and using information from the Internet:
Example: You can send a message around the world and the recipient can read it at leisure and write back. You could also send a message to someone asking for information about something you've read somewhere on the net. The Internet never closes.
Advantages: E-mail is an easy and efficient way to get a specific answer or share information with one person.
Examples: Anyone can mail to workshop@mathforum.org and the message will be sent to everyone who has attended one of our workshops at Swarthmore. Mathmagic is a set of mailing lists on which math problems are shared; these problems are then solved over the network with teams from other places.
Advantages: Mailing lists make it easy to share information with a larger but defined group of people.
Newsgroups are available on over 2,600 topics, ranging from cats to k12 education to Icelandic culture.
Example: The Geometry Forum has seven newsgroups that talk about geometry at all levels. One such group is geometry.pre-college, where you will find the geometry Problem of the Week and solutions students have sent in, and where there's been a discussion of the definition of a trapezoid, among many other such conversations.
Advantages: It's normal to receive several answers to your question within hours of posting it, as there's a large pool of readers and a community develops among the regular readers and posters on a group.
Example: The Forum's gopher server has pointers to many places, including the Princeton Regional Schools.
Advantages: There are massive amounts of great information available out there, and people are working hard to make it easier to find.
Examples: U.S. weather forecasts are available from the University of Michigan. Lbraries such as Dartmouth's make texts available, as well as their card catalogs.
Advantages: Access to databases and searching functions allows easy use of remote archives.
Example: From the Geometry Forum's home page at http://mathforum.org/ you could find and read the Problem of the Week, see static diagrams sent in by students, and, if you use the Geometer's Sketchpad, view dynamic sketches illustrating ways people have solved it.
Advantages: What makes the Web so powerful is that a link might go to any type of Internet resource: Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet and more are all in one place. Web pages are user-constructible; you can make your own to use as organizational tools, bringing together the Internet resources you access most frequently.
Example: If someone is logged in to a terminal, I can 'call' and ask a question. Advantages: Cheaper than phone calls, and often an easier way to explain things than by sending e-mail.