Show Me the Way to Go HOMER
By Scott Somerville
Printed in PHS #4, 1993.
Scott Somerville is a lawyer who defends homeschooolers' rights. He works for Home School Legal Defense Association, P.O. Box 159, Paeonian Springs, VA 22129, tel: (703) 338-5600, fax: (703) 338-2733. HSLDA provides a clearly defined menu of legal protection for qualifying home school families for $100 per family per year. We strongly urge our readers to join HSLDA.
HOMER: The HOMe Education Resource Network
"How can you teach your older child geometry or biology, if you don't know the subject yourself?" This is one of the seven deadly questions of the home-school mother-in-law. For years, our family has relied on "We'll get a tutor," or "We'll take a community college course," or "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." Now, thanks to modern technology, we can respond, "We can always use 'distance learning.'"
"Distance learning" is not just a new buzzword. In an earlier article in this column, we explored how computers can be used with telephones to tap into the world of "telecomputing." This new technology opens up the possibility of "distance learning," where a student at his desk at home takes a course at a university on the other side of the city -- or the planet. In this article, we review HOMERª, the first service designed specifically to bring distance learning home.
HOMER, which stands for the HOMe Education Resource Network, is an information service offered by a company called IMSATT. For an hourly fee, students can take courses, chat with other students, send electronic mail, or even play games.
HOMER has a standard "user interface" for any curriculum on the network. The screens are an attractive mix of text and simple graphics. The student uses a mouse and a keyboard, clicking "buttons" on menus and typing in answers as needed.
HOMER is designed to run on the newer personal computers. You will need a 2400 baud modem and either a standard Apple Macintosh, or a PC compatible with a color VGA screen, a Microsoft-type mouse, a 40 MB hard drive, and at least 640K of memory, running MS-DOS 3.2 or better.
We loaded the HOMER application software on our PC-compatible system at HSLDA (with the early release version that we received, we had to call IMSAATT to figure out how to get it to work). When you run HOMER, a crisp, colorful logo screen comes up, followed by an initial panel which shows your communication settings. Menu buttons like those in most Windows programs allow you to change settings, or connect to HOMER. When you click the "Connect" button, HOMER dials up the Control Data Systems' mainframe computers, using a local access number.
Upon accessing the CDC computer, the first thing I saw was a colorful screen, complete with line graphics, which prompted me for my name. I gave my user name, group name, and password (all provided as part of my demo kit) and logged on. The main HOMER screen appeared, showing a map of the United States surrounded by bright blue menu buttons. This main menu let me pick electronic mail, check my bill, chat with other users, or see who else was logged on. The menu wasn't clear on how to get to the lessons, but there were four more buttons at the bottom of the screen which looked promising. I clicked one of them, an arrow button, and a new screen full of choices appeared. These included "Cybis Courses," "Calvert Online," "Test Preparation," "Games," "Bulletin Board Files," and "Software Library." I selected Cybis, and a new screen full of choices came up, including language arts, mathematics, and so on.
Cybis would not let me start right in with lessons -- I had to take a placement test first. I worked through the unit on high school geometry, answering questions like "How many planes can contain two intersecting lines?" Many of these questions referred to line drawings, which appeared on the screen along with the text. When I finished the pretest, I was assigned lessons on those units that I failed. The actual courseware was more interesting than the pretest. I was assigned the role of a rookie police officer, for example, in my "Deductive Reasoning" module. Lessons were clear, consisting of several screens making simple points, with an occasional question to ensure that I got the concepts being taught. After working through each module, I was allowed to go back and take the pretest again.
HOMER is intended to be an open forum for any and all accredited educational software. So far, HOMER carries "CYBIS" (a library of courseware from elementary to college level), and will soon have the Calvert program. In addition, Harcourt-Brace has signed a contract to bring material on-line. All of these are high-quality secular curricula. The Calvert program covers K-8; CYBIS, which requires at least third grade reading skills, has courses at the elementary, high school, and college level. Other curricula may soon be available, if publishers are willing to convert their courses into "courseware" for the distance learning market.
A trial kit is available, which allows families to try the system for several hours for a very modest price. Most families can access HOMER with a local telephone call. At present, there is an hourly $3.00 per hour fee to use HOMER, via the Internet, or $6.00 via CompuServe. You can call IMSATT at (703) 533-7500, or write to 105 West Broad St., Falls Church, VA 22046, for their brochure and/or their trial kit.
Goodies!
25 Percent Discount. Reasonable Solutions, a shareware company mentioned in Prides' Guide to Educational Software, has moved. Their new address: 1221 Disk Dr., Medford, OR 97501. Tel: 1-800-876-3475. Fax: (503) 773-7803. I have a letter from them saying, "We have entered a special code in our order entry system to accommodate your readers. Anyone who mentions that they heard about our company from Prides' Guide will receive a 25 percent discount on their first order. Just have them mention the code PRIDES."
Write Your Congressman. Christian-owned software publishing company Parsons Technology has done it again with their new $69 product Personal Advocate (seen in special direct-mail offers for as little as $29 plus $3 shipping). This DOS program provides a database of customized, attorney-designed letters, another database of addresses and phone numbers of over 2,600 people and agencies (including all your Congressmen and 700 major corporations), and an on-screen "Consumer Advisor." Now you can zap a letter to the Big Boys in Washington with fingertip ease. Your name and address automatically appear on every letter, and you can import the recipient's name and address with a single click. If you think the homeschool network was powerful before, just wait till people get their hands on this program! 30-day money-back guarantee. Parsons Technology, One Parsons Dr., PO Box 100, Hiawatha, IA 52233-0100, 1-800-223-6925.
For more resources on this article's topic, click the link(s) below.
Software Hall
Online Education Hall
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