getting rid of the tilde

I wonder if somebody could help get rid of those ~ (tildes) I have set up the per-user webspace feature of Apache. Many of my young students have great difficulty finding and operating this key - is there a way of replacing it with something else or getting rid of it? It would be much nicer to have instead of: http://localhost/~user/index.html http://localhost/user/index.html - although I can see how this would be difficult..... cheers, Russell