It’s widely believed that Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century Scottish sailor who spent four years marooned on an island near Chile, was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. A new Web site, Chasing Crusoe, chronicles Selkirk’s voyages and draws comparisons between the real-life sailor and the fictional protagonist that he may well have influenced.
The site — an unusual collaboration between students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and visiting students from the University of the Andes, in Santiago, Chile — is a bilingual travelogue mixing maps, multimedia, and even a fairly lengthy game. In other words, it’s the kind of site professors may look toward when they plan multimedia Web projects of their own.
In that spirit, David Rothman of TeleRead offers a detailed review of the site: He wonders, for example, if it might be too reliant on Adobe Flash, and he argues that a couple of videos might have spruced the presentation up a bit. As online endeavors like Chasing Crusoe grow more influential, systematic reviews like Mr. Rothman’s could prove to be quite useful. In a still-evolving field like Web design, it’s important for educators to thrash out what works and what doesn’t. —Brock Read
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