Infotopia World

 Have you ever heard of the Wayback Machine?  It's "almost" like the time travel machine from H.G. Wells' book, The Time Machine.  

 

Sorry, but you can't really take yourself back (or forwards) to the days of the Morlocks.  However, you or your students can go back in time and look at thousands of web sites from their earliest days.  

Just type in any web site's URL in the Wayback Machine and then click "Browse History."  Next, you will get a series of calendars showing all the dates that are available.  At the top is a listing of the years, and below are calendars showing the dates (in blue) that you can visit.

How might you use the Wayback Machine?
  
1) Go back and visit your own web site or blog from several years ago and see how it has changed.  Or have your students try to find one of their favorite web sites from the past. 
(We went back in time and saw the early renditions of Infotopia.info from 2009, and our first web site, the VirtualLRC.com from 2000. How quickly time flies!) 
(You might even go back to your school/school district web site and see how much it has changed. I was able to go back ten years in the past and browse through my school district's web site!)

2)If you have a web site or blog and you have accidentally erased an important article, go back in time via the Wayback Machine and find your article.  (Cross your fingers that it is available.) 

3) Have your students read the top current events on a major news web site for today, such as  CNN, ABC, or NBC, etc.   Then go back to that same date for the past several years via the Wayback Machine. 

• How has the design of the web site changed?
• Compare the headlines from several dates in the past.
• How has the focus of the news changed?
• Compare the amount of text versus graphics in the web sites.
• What countries are in the news?
• What celebrities are in the news?
• What is most startling about the old versus the new web sites?
• Send us your ideas below under Comments and we'll include them in the list.

 

The Wayback Machine, which has archived over 417 billion web pages, is part of the Internet Archive, a non-profit endeavor that has the goal of building a digital library of Internet sites, audio files, digital books, television news programs and more. 

Stay Tuned......Next Article............Video and Live Music from the Internet Archive