Yup. You read that right. This isn't a web page. Or, to paraphrois in French... "Ceci N'est Pas une Web Page." (see picture on the right, or this link.)

Surrealist artist Rene Magritte did this painting, provoking raised eyebrows everywhere and solipsistic arguments and flights of fancy. So what does this have to do with the Advanced Internet Classroom, you say?

Good (if obvious) question. ;-) (And leading, on my part. But that's my role, as your teacher/fellow learner, this summer at ATDP.) It has been both entertaining and disconcerting for me to realize that the first reactions students have when they first encounter Manila is to create (or recreate) a website... either some page they've done before, or a new one entire. I can understand this. Most everything on the web up until very recently HAS been a web page or website. It's hard to break visual and intellectual habits, as far as one's experience of the Internet and the web goes.

But here we are, some 10 years after the Web began, and I think some very interesting new dynamics are happening on the Internet. Put aside for the moment how business and e-commerce is fueling a lot of the breathtaking developments on the web. What I find intriguing is how regular people, individuals like you and I, are now using the web as a regular gathering place; and more importantly, using the web as a means of expressing themselves--and not via static web pages--but through dynamic weblogs such as this. And this is happening at an accelerating rate now, because the technology behind various weblog engines (and Manila's is very, very good) has improved to the point where expression and content-generation is made much simpler thanks to the removal of the usual technical barriers, like an HTML editor or an FTP client.

This summer's Advanced Internet Classroom will continue to be on the cutting edge of things, by incorporating a weblog interface as the backbone of the course. XML, one of the cutting-edge technologies we will explore in AIC, is put to significant use within Manila itself, and we will learn XML by doing XML, in our weblog tweaking adventures.

So yes, boys and girls, what you're looking at here is NOT a web page. This now goes much beyond that. So start letting go of your notions of what you can do with the web, and start thinking of what you can do with a web of interconnected lives and minds: the next millennium is just starting, and in your dotage in a far distant future, you'll look back at this time and marvel how you were at the beginning of something incredible in the story of human civilization.

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