This academic year, Tory Fisher plans to finish the Web page he's making for the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Former schoolmate Ryan Jones runs a fledgling Web design business. Teacher Marcia Jeans hopes all of her pupils will have personal home pages up by Christmas. College kids? Guess again. Tory is 10, Ryan is 12, and their school—L'Ouverture Computer Technology Magnet in Wichita, Kans.—is one of the cybersavviest places in elementary ed. Beneath a rooftop weather station wired to the public school's Web site (http://www.louverture.com), 380 kindergartners through fifth-graders learn HTML, the language of the Web, along with their three R's.
While the littlest kids take surfing lessons and Jeans's second-and third-graders study Web design, L'Ouverture's older students maintain sites for such local groups as the Wichita Symphony Orchestra. The school's philosophy—"a few lessons, and then we let them loose," principal Howard Pitler puts it—has even inspired a few to tackle the hot new language Java.
Not that L'Ouverture turns out nothing but nerds. "With HTML, they learn to follow directions, reasoning and logic," says Jeans. "And they have to know how to write clearly." Students learned another real-world lesson in June, when the Wichita school board, deeming them unfair competition for grownups, asked the school to drop its sites for seven area businesses. Grumbles Pitler, whose proteges now work only with nonprofits: "If there are people who can't compete with a 10-year-old, they should hire the 10-year-old."
But there's no stopping Ryan, who hopes to program for Apple one day. He's creating a site for a local hospital and is in talks with a theater. "I wouldn't know what a computer was," he says, "unless I went to this school."
Fed up with the hipper-than-thou cynicism that blankets the Web? A sunnier outlook prevails at Al Roker's home page (http://www.roker. com), which the jolly Today weatherman updates daily with diary entries, trivia questions and his own cartoons (imagine a less neurotic Ziggy). "It's an extension of me, really," says the cyberproficient Roker, who uploads day-to-day changes from his laptop. An online Rokerabilia shop is in the forecast, but for now, Roker says, the three-month-old site is a chance to pursue "cartooning and animation—my first love."
>Tim Conway Jr.
A CHIP OFF THE OLD CUTUP
He's meaner than Letterman and as raunch-obsessed as Howard Stern. So what if Tim Conway Jr.'s Web talk show, Late Net (http://www. ifnet.com), isn't exactly a Nielsen challenger? At least he's got a gig. After stints in standup, sketch comedy (Nickelodeon's short-lived On the Television) and TV production, the 32-year-old son of veteran tube funnyman Tim Conway "was about to clean out my show business locker" when a friend asked him to host Late Net. Now fans tune in weeknights from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. EST for live audio and still photos of Conway's anything-goes chats with actors, comics and uninhibited women.
What does your dad think of what you're up to?
He thinks it's absolutely unbelievable. And he's never said that about anything I've ever done before. He watches every day and has helped me get guests. Of course he takes a tremendous finder's fee.
Did you learn comedy from him?
Going to the tapings of The Carol Burnett Show certainly wasn't a handicap. When I was 14 or 15, I used to write spec scripts for him. Sometimes he'd bring them in to his producer. I never sold any, though.
Did he give you any useful advice?
He always said that whatever I did I should be the best at. My response was that I was a jerk. He told me to be the best jerk I could be.
- Contributors:
- Marc Ballon,
- Samantha Miller.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
