Technotes: Back to the Future

BACK in 1997 when the Web was per haps three years old, the Council on Social Work Education's (CSWE) Annual Program Meeting (APM) Tech Commit tee printed paper bookmarks listing ma jor websites for social work educators. Those were exciting times. New resources were emerging daily and it was difficult to keep up. Early search engines such as Magellan and WebCrawler were arcane and often produced bizarre results— some still do. URLs were discovered by accident and informally circulated among friends and colleagues through emails and phone calls. The committee, the APM poster participants, the National Asso ciation of Social Workers Technology Center, and the Association of Baccalau reate Social Work Program Directors Technology Committee came up with a list of 73 resources for social work educa tion. Wow—seventy-three! These were printed onto canary card stock and 3,000 copies were distributed at the APM in Chicago. The little yellow bookmarks survived six hours. People were grabbing them by the handful. The contents of those early websites were often primitive. Contributors gen erally paid scant attention to substance in favor of interactivity in their rush to get something on the Web. It was the era of flashing stars pointing to few resources which were sometimes of questionable worth. Design conventions such as hav ing consistent background colors had not evolved, and surfers were often left wondering if they were still in the same website. Credibility was frequently a mat ter of blind faith.