Fathom

It’s sad to receive email like this:

Dear Fathom member,

We’re sorry to announce that Fathom will be ceasing business
operations at the end of March. We do appreciate the support
we’ve received from you and from our partner institutions since
we launched the site in November 2000.

As of March 3, Fathom will no longer take enrollments in online
courses, and we will modify the look of the site to reflect that
change. We encourage you to make use of the free content on
Fathom through the end of March, and to contact Fathom Customer
Support should you have any questions or problems with the site.

Not that I ever bought anything from Fathom. Give me small chunks, not courses. Still, I wanted to look things over before the site went dark, so I spent a couple of hours tooling around Fathom last night.

I started out by poking links from the front page:

Not much new there. Then I clicked over to Fathom’s topic tree:

Wow. Everything seems to be within my reach. It was easy to pull the tree around, opening up the topics I wanted to look at:

I wanted to keep pursuing the branches but they ran out on me. Also, I was waylaid by a lengthly piece on Jimmy Swaggart. (See the last paragraphs of this article in LineZine so understand my bond to Jimmy.) Then I got into chaos theory, always a mind bender, and other science topics, finally crawling into bed around 1:30 am. I’ll probably be back to night. The urgency of Fathom’s emal hit me.

Posted by Jay Cross at February 28, 2003 06:17 PM | TrackBack