Company Information
DATE POSTED: January 1995
LOS ANGELES, CA - Kaleidospace and the J. Paul Getty Center for Education in the Arts has unveiled a new Internet world wide web site, ArtEdNet, at the Getty's 5th national conference in Washington, DC ("Beyond the Three Rs: Transforming Education with the Arts"). During the conference, hundreds of participants from the art education community, many with no prior computer experience, explored the ArtEdNet site -- which ran on 14 PowerMacs on the convention floor.
The Getty site is designed to link art educators in elementary and secondary schools, as well as universities. ArtEdNet allows these educators to access the Getty's vast art education resources, provides for the continuing education of the teachers themselves, and fosters the creation of an online community. Books, videos and other material are also available through ArtEdNet, which can be accessed anywhere in the world that the Internet reaches -- over 100 countries at present.
In a break with tradition, Kaleidospace programmed the ArtEdNet site to run through Macintosh hardware instead of UNIX systems. Kaleidospace used a combination of CGI programming and Applescript to create online forms that ArtEdNet users could type comments into as well as contact information.
In addition to developing forms, Kaleidospace optimized the software to run on standalone systems not connected to the Internet. ArtEdNet would normally be accessed through the Internet, but necessary connections were not available at the time, so Kaleidospace modified the Macs to access themselves for information -- making them function as one-node Internet sites. The ArtEdNet demonstration is the first example of a major world wide web site running in standalone kiosk mode.
Using Macintoshes for ArtEdNet will allow Getty personnel to easily maintain and update the site, as well as allow information to be directly passed to standard Macintosh database programs such as Filemaker.
By developing ArtEdNet, Kaleidospace has helped to make the Mac a viable platform for the Internet.
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