Finding Information on the Web

No matter what topic you choose for your 596 final project, there are relevant resources available to you on the World Wide Web. With over 50 million documents out there already, finding what you need is a challenge. Fortunately, various search engines are being developed that make it easier to find things than ever before. This class session will introduce you to some of the better ones.

Steps

To begin this activity, please think about two different topics. One is a topic that is of personal interest to you: a hobby, a celebrity, your home town, a favorite movie, etc. The second is a professional interest: a topic you'll be teaching, an educational issue (e.g. learning styles, service learning, multiple intelligences, etc.).

Now that you have two topics, write down synonyms and other words and phrases related to each topic. These terms will come in handy as you use search engines to widen or narrow your search.

Next, you'll need a way to store the links that you'll be finding. Open up SimpleText and you'll have a blank page ready for you to paste your links into.

Now you're ready to go prowling the web in search of adventure!

Resources

If you want the most comprehensive search of both the Web and over 15,000 newsgroups, use Alta Vista, a search tool created by Digital Equipment. As an exercise, do a search for the term Truancy and see what comes up. Use AltaVista to find some sites related to the two topics that are of interest to you.

InfoSeek is another comprehensive search engine. Do you find anything here that you didn't find with AltaVista?

ERIC, of course, is a rich source of information to educators and trainers. There are several distinct categories of things to look for, and there's a search wizard that will help you find what you need.

To find short reviews of the education literature, search the database of ERIC Digests.

You can also comb through ERIC's collection of lesson plans.

The card catalog, ERIC, and several other bibliographic data bases are available by telnetting to the SDSU library. Type "LIBRARY" as your username. You'll then be asked for your student ID number. ERIC can be found under the heading of PAC Plus.

If you know the general category of information that you want to search, but don't know the specific terms to look for, you can use the hierarchies of categories at Yahoo.

To find the e-mail address of an individual, you might try the 411 service.

To locate a mail list on a specific topic, check Liszt.

To find resources for K-12 teachers within a specific discipline, check Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators, or Classroom Connect's list of educational links.

For local information, the San Diego Union-Tribune will let you search their archives, though you'll have to register your e-mail address with them to do so. Click on the "Register Now" button near the top of the page.

You might find materials you can adapt for use in your own classes by checking the World Lecture Hall collection of web pages created for use in university teaching.

There's a lot more to know about becoming adept at websearching. One recent article titled Conducting Research on the Internet provides a good source of additional reading and exploration.

Just for a chuckle, you might want to look at how other people are using the Web to find things by going to the Magellan Voyeur site. It's 40% hormone-driven, and 50% misspelled.

Results

To bring this exercise to a close, write a summary statement about the kinds and quality of the items you found and post it on the EDTEC 596 course forum. Within your statement, discuss which search tools proved most useful to you. Do this by the beginning of class on February 11.