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11.15.98
Woodworking used to be Eckilson's hobby. Now it's the Internet. "I now have a hobby where I don't get dirty doing it, and I'm no longer making a mess of the garage," he said. In early 1997, Eckilson, an insurance broker, and his wife, Michelle Martin-Eckilson, decided to buy a home computer system. Their oldest daughter, Jennie, was a second-grader, their son, Justin, a pre-schooler, and their youngest, Julie, a toddler. Eckilson said he was immediately intrigued by the computer's possibilities, especially when he used its modem to venture onto the Internet. He discovered that hundreds of American families had their very own Web sites. So he taught himself programming codes and bought some software to make graphics to decorate the page. The Eckilson Family Home Page was up and running by May. "I enjoy Web design. It's kind of like putting together a puzzle," Eckilson said. Often, he added, building a page is the easy part. "The challenge is to get people to visit it once it's there. It's not much fun to do all that work and have no one see it. Sometimes finding an interesting topic is as challenging as putting it together." In addition to information about the family and its interests, Eckilson decided to directly connect, or "link," his site to kids' sites such as Nickelodeon, the children's cable TV network, and Sesame Street, public broadcasting's preschool TV show. The ability to read is necessary for most computer use, but both parents have found that even younger children can be taught simple steps to use their favorite games and sites. `If you had ever told me just a few years ago that it would be commonplace to have my 18-month-old niece and my 3-year-old daughter arguing over who would get to use the Elmo CD (computer software program) first, I never would have believed it," Martin-Eckilson said. The family's telecommunication service to get to the Internet is Cox @Home, a division of the cable TV company Cox Communications. Through it, the home page is part of the Family Connections Web ring, which links the pages of several hundred families. Eckilson volunteers as the ringmaster for that connection, monitoring its operations each week. The volume of visitors to the Eckilsons' site varies throughout the year, but it gets particularly busy early in the year. Jennie, now a fourth-grader, wrote and illustrated a short biography of Harriet Tubman two years ago. Eckilson added it to the page. Somehow, he said, it made it into the Yahoo search engine, a vast index of Web page topics. "During February, which is Black History Month, Jennie's story gets hundreds of hits and too many E-mails to be able to answer them all individually," Eckilson said. Eckilson has also designed a page devoted to Woonsocket's historic mill architecture. Many of its visitors are former residents. City officials called to commend him, and then asked for his input for the city's site. His is now linked to related pages, such as ones belonging to the Chamber of Commerce and the downtown Stadium Theatre renovation project. Eckilson said he would definitely recommend families go on-line, but stresses that computing activity should be integrated into, not isolated from, family life. The Eckilsons' computer is in the family room. He uses it mostly in the evening, with his wife and the kids close by. "You want a computer in a central area, especially when your children are older, because you should know where they are going on the Internet," he added. Also, families shouldn't reveal too much about themselves, so that security is never compromised. Martin-Eckilson uses the computer mostly for her work as a PTA president, Girl Scout troop leader and a volunteer for other groups. She uses the Internet for research, not conversation. "It's a time issue for me," she said. The computer has been great for recordkeeping, she said, including making lists. "I've designed a shopping form by supermarket aisles," Martin-Eckilson said. "People see me with it in the store and ask where they can get one just like it."
WHEN DIANE CARBONE SCANLON was a little girl growing up in Providence, she used to watch her father, a TV repairman, pull sets apart and put them back together. Her mother, a housewife, had a flair for design. "I think I inherited his talent for tinkering, and I'm artistic, like my mother," she said. She says those attributes are needed for a successful Web page design, something Scanlon stumbled upon just a few years ago. She grew up, went to work in retail -- "The only computers there were the registers" -- and later married Ted Scanlon. When her son Joe was born in 1984, she decided to stay home full time. About a year later, she got a pocket-sized computer as a gift. She figured out how to program it for functions such as calculating mortgage payments, storing phone numbers and keeping grocery lists. Joe taught himself to read at age 3. Diane bought a Radio Shack computer, one that used the color TV as a monitor, so he could play games and use educational software. "That one also had to be programmed. I remember putting in this long program in order for him to be able to draw electronically. It didn't seem too difficult," she said. As technology changed, Scanlon eventually bought a new computer, one that used Windows, the most prevalent computer operating program. She tackled several different kinds of software, but said, "the graphics part was what I liked best about most programs." She signed up for the telecommunications service America Online and began using electronic mail and its other services. In 1995, Netscape was introduced. It's a program for easy browsing of the Internet and its graphics counterpart, the World Wide Web. "I downloaded Netscape from the Internet, and I was off," she said. Within months she had made her home page, The Scanlon Family Lifeline To The Net. About the same time, Joe entered middle school. "He was at the age where you're not supposed to be smart, and yet he's a highly intelligent kid. The peer pressure was enormous," she said. Nearly through the sixth grade, Joe confessed how much he disliked school and was bored to death by the curriculum. Scanlon decided to teach him herself. "I got angry that I felt I had no choice but to take him out of school, so I figured that the best way to get [the anger] out was to start talking to the world," she said. Via the Internet, Scanlon discovered that there were other parents like her, teaching middle school students at home for many of the same reasons. Joe met other kids who thought it was cool to be intelligent. "Going on-line has been wonderful for my son, " she said. "He found peers." She joined on-line home-school forums and associations devoted to gifted education. She has developed a network of psychologists, teachers and parents who correspond regularly. One friends dubbed her "DiRhody," because she types Rhode Island pronunciations into her conversations. Every month, she hears from parents who are experiencing many of the frustrations she faced. She tries to steer them toward reference sources and experts to solve their dilemmas. `I get lots of requests for help, but I don't mind," she said. Scanlon became a member of the Rhode Island Advisory Committee on Gifted & Talented Education, created by the state Department of Education. By then, she had also launched an Internet consulting business focusing on Web page design and maintenance. A Web site for the advisory group was her first paying job. Lack of Web page space recently threatened to curb her various activities. Each America Online subscriber is given a small amount of free space, but she had used her allotment. The solution: "I just got my mother on-line with AOL, so that I could use her Web space too," she said with a laugh. Joe, 14, and now a freshman at Bishop Hendricken High School, in Warwick, said the Internet has been a very helpful tool for learning. While being taught at home, he stumbled upon a page devoted to reference sites for homework assignments created by B.J. Pinchbeck, a student in Pennsylvania. It became the "main inspiration," Joe said, for his own creation, Joe's Homework Helpline, found on the Scanlon family home page. It's a jam-packed compendium of research sources for a wide variety of subjects including English, math and science, history and geography. There are direct links to places like the Shakespeare Library and homework help sites at colleges and universities. "The E-mail I get from all over has people telling me that it's very useful," he said. While Joe did the research, and planned much of the site, it was Scanlon who did "most of the technical stuff," to get it up and running, he said. "I understand the computer and know how to do some things, but not like my mother," he said. "I'm not as interested in it as she is." Eckilson Family Home Page: members.home.net/eckilson The Scanlon Family's Lifeline To The Net: members.aol.com/discanner/family.html
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