In posts here on Special Education Today, I have mentioned earlier Web publications that I’ve provided. In this post I simply want to provide pointers—a list of some of those sites—and a “heads up” about how readers can find lots of historical sources from the Web.

Many older sites no longer exist in their original locations. The servers on which they “lived” have gone off line (i.e., “died”) or the organizations (including educational institutions such as universities) have discarded the files and the way to find them. Sad, in my view.

But there is the marvelous https://web.archive.org (a wonderful non-profit to which I contribute) that maintains what it calls, “The Wayback Machine.” The Web Archive provides a way to get to many of those lost or forgotten sites.

Here’s the idea: The clever engineers of Archive.org sent bots out to crawl over the Web early in it’s existence; the bots (AKA “spiders”) kept at it for years and are still keeping at it. They used the same technology that 1990s technology companies (you’d recognize the name of them: One starts with “Goo,” another with “Ya,” and another with “Micro”), but instead of using the results of their spiders’ crawls for economic gain, they used their results for the good of the Internet culture...saving a record of what had been published...saving clay tablets, creating a library, creating an accessible archive.

From Archive.org, one can find these sources of my earlier work:

1. EBDBlog.com from February 4, 2005 and April 26, 2017.

2. LDBlog.com February 3, 2005 and April 20, 2017.

3. Behaviormod.info March 4, 2008 and March 3, 2017.

4. Spedpro.org February 3, 2006 and May 10, 2017.

5. TeachEffectively.com February 6, 2005 and May 7, 2017.

And you can find a whole lot more, too. It’s not just my work. Do you want to know what (a) CEC’s Web site looked like in 1999? Check. (b) International Dyslexia Association? There you go. Association for Autism Treatment asatonline.org? Easy.

The Waybackmachine is a wonderful resource.

Share