Chapter Seven

Placement

Depending on how important research is to your class, this chapter can be a good resource for students early in the semester. If you plan to do a lot of on-line research, we suggest that you introduce the basics of finding materials on the Web during the first few weeks of the course. The skills we go over in Chapter Seven are not very complicated, especially for students who are used to doing searches on electronic library catalogs, but they will be extremely useful throughout the semester as students look for materials on the Web. Scheduling this chapter early in the semester is a good way to introduce your class to the kinds of resources available on-line while at the same time teaching them valuable research skills.

Downloading Web Browsers

When you teach Web research, and especially as you move into the chapters on Web design (Chapters Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen), it will be important for you and your students to have a current version of your Web browsing software. New versions come out with surprising frequency, so additional design options will be appearing over the next several years with each new release.

We'll be updating the links on the Resources node of the Connections Web site to give you the latest information about Web development and downloading new browsers. As of Summer 1997, Netscape is still the leader in Web development and has the lion's share of the market. To download the latest version of Netscape (including Navigator, Navigator Gold, Communicator, and several other Netscape products) you can go to their Download Software page (http://home.netscape.com/download/). To get information about any of the Netscape products, visit their home page (http://home.netscape.com/).

Because the Netscape Web site is often slowed by the volume of traffic you might want to use one of the Netscape FTP sites. Using an FTP client, go to ftp.netscape.com (you can actually go to any of the FTP sites from ftp1.netscape.com through ftp20.netscape.com and get the same materials). You'll have to move through the directories there to find the version you want, but it's usually fairly self explanatory (for instance, pub/navigator/mac/v.3.2/netscape.hqx).

For information about the latest versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, try the Microsoft home page (http://www.microsoft.com) or download the files from their software distribution page (http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload).

Authors' Suggestions

 Keyword Searches

When you're teaching students about keyword searches on the Web, there are a couple of things to really stress:

• Although it may initially seem time consuming to students, the process of trying the same search on multiple search engines can be surprisingly effective at uncovering different resources.
• Similarly, be sure that students try multiple synonyms and alternative phrases as they perform their keyword searches. Often searching with the most obvious words turns up very little, whereas rephrasing a query returns many hits.
• One other search technique that we mention in the chapter, but perhaps don't stress quite enough is the option on some engines to use quotation marks to find an exact phase. We probably end up using this method 80-90 percent of the time ourselves, just because it cuts down so dramatically on the number of tangentially applicable hits that come up on most searches. Again, try different phrases within the quotation marks to maximize your effectiveness.

Chapter Exercises

Exercise 7.1 Browsing Internet Directories

Time: This exercise can be done in a single class period or as homework.

Suggestions: Use this exercise not only as a way of teaching research skills, but also as a way of talking about the process of narrowing down a topic. In other words, think of ways to narrow the focus of these topics even further as students consider how they might utilize Internet resources in a paper.

You might also use this exercise as the first stage in researching a paper or coming up with a project topic.

Exercise 7.2 Narrowing a Keyword Search

Time: This exercise can be done in a single class period or as homework. If you are using the exercise as part of a paper assignment, it can be performed in stages over two or more class periods.

Suggestions: This exercise can also be modified to stress finding different searchable keywords and phrases. Work with students on the idea of coming up with synonyms and alternative phrases to make their research more effective.

It's also important to show students that going to different search engines will bring up different materials. One option is to go through the exercise in class focusing on only one search engine and have students report the results they find when searching on different engines as a homework assignment.

 

Exercise 7.3 Bookmarking and Saving Resources

Time: If done in conjunction with 7.1 or 7.2 this exercise might take a whole class period. If done on it's own it will probably only take ten to fifteen minutes.

Suggestions: The purpose of this exercise is simply to get students familiar with the process of bookmarking, saving and exporting bookmarks to a diskette. These are essential skills for students to know, but they can be taught in any number of ways. We suggest using this exercise in conjunction with another research exercise or as part of a larger written assignment.