The Teaching Resources Center's Instructional
Design Studio #3
Effective Use of the Internet
as a Teaching Tool
Hosted by Andy Jones, English Department, April 28, 2000
Topics:
The LEAD Project
According to surveys conducted as part of the Learning Environment Architecture Development (LEAD) Project, the following represent the needs of U.C. Davis Instructors working with instructional technology:
Search Engines
Start with "Searchenginewatch.com" at http://searchenginewatch.com/
Searchenginewatch lists and reviews search engines, suggests which search engines cover the largest percentage of web pages available (and if size matters), and offers statistical data on just about every element of searching. The information here can be overwhelming, but its "First Time Visitors" link explains the organization of the whole. Start here for helpful tutorials on "search engine math" and "power searching for everyone."
Next visit "Allsearchengines.com" at http://www.allsearchengines.com/
"Allsearchengines.com" offers links to all the major search engines, including
Altavista
Alltheweb
to meta-search engines, such as
Ask Jeeves
Inference Find
and to directories, such as
Yahoo
Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org .
For an example of the Open Directory Project at work, visit
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/WWW/Searching_the_Web/Search_Engines/
Finally, be sure to consider the following search engines, not listed on Allsearchengines.com. The first, searchedu.com, allows users to consult only educationally-hosted web pages, as well as access to dictionaries, encyclopedias, and thesauri:
The Argus Clearinghouse of Information is a directory which offers a "selective collection of topical guides":
And LincOn.Com offers a large selection of specialized search engines:
Databases Available to the U.C. Davis Community
The Complete list of databases available to UCD instructors and students is available at
This list is broken down into disciplines by our various libraries’ reference departments:
My favorite of all these is Lexis-Nexis, where one finds hundreds of thousands of full-text articles under the "Academic Universe" heading:
Investigate the University of California’s "California Digital Library" at
and the U.C. Berkeley Digital Library at
Evaluating Web Resources and Internet Texts
I was pleased to discover that Susan Palo of the U.C. Davis Campus Writing Center has written one of the best guides to using and evaluating internet sources. Find this annotated bibliography of web sites and resources at
You might also investigate similar sites at Cornell University Library
And this bibliography and checklist provided by the Center for Instructional Technology at the University of North Carolina:
Tools and Resources on Campus
When I need help with technical or theoretical questions about teaching with technology, I look first to The Arbor, which exists primarily to provide support to campus instructors using instructional technology.
At the "Resources" link, the Arbor staff have written and organized a large collection of definitions, explanations, and autotutorials. Maureen Coulson explains how to get started building web pages
and Botany Professor Richard Falk has written an impressive number of articles for the site, including one that covers much of the above information on searching the web:
Other must-see resources include the Faculty Technology Guide, a publication of Information Technology: http://ftg.ucdavis.edu/computing/
And the sponsor of today’s talk, The Teaching Resources Center:
and consider registering for the Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology, or SITT, which will meet this year from July 17-21:
Finally, visit the "Training" site at IT, where you will find information about self-paced training, instructor-led training, and helpful reference materials:
Future Computing Resources at UCD
Web-Chat
Tim Leamy, one of the lab managers here at UC Davis, has written a program meant to be used to hold virtual conferences with students; it uses the web rather than any local area network (such as the network that connects all our computers in the Olson Macintosh Classrooms). I should add immediately that "Web Chat" is currently (April 2000) being beta-tested, that the program may have bugs, and that neither Tim nor I make any promises that the program is stable. Nevertheless, if you instruct your browser to visit
you’ll begin to see the possibilities the program holds for conferences that you can oversee while sitting at home in your pajamas, assuming you don’t reach a busy signal when you try to log on.
MyUCDavis
An article in the most recent IT Times (March 2000) argues that "MyUCDavis (formerly known as Project Gateway) will integrate existing UC Davis online applications together with new services into one convenient Web portal, a site that functions like a doorway to many other sites and that each visitor can personalize to reflect his or her interests and needs." Joyce Johnstone, the Project Manager for MyUCDavis, has been presenting the look and features of the prototype at the Arbor this month; she has planned four more such talks (not a series) this quarter (May 9, May 25, June 6, June 29, from 2:15-3:15). See the prototype at
Tools and Resources Off Campus
Every major academic discipline has a "portal" somewhere, that is, a collection or directory of resources specific to that discipline that interested parties visit to begin any investigation of web-based resources. One of my favorites for the topics we are covering today is Michael L. Hall’s "Teaching with Electronic Technology" page at the University of Maryland. I prefer this site because it is comprehensive and updated (with new articles and links) often.
Another is "Instructional Technology Connections" at the University of Colorado at Denver: http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itcon.html
The best way to find the major portals in your discipline is to enter the most relevant keywords in the Google search engine, paying special attention to which sites appear first. In the Humanities, we usually start with Alan Liu’s famous and monstrous site, The Voice of the Shuttle:
You might also want to investigate Camera Obscura's meta-index of academic and scholarly resources. It takes a while to load:
To see how other professors in your discipline have presented materials via course web pages, visit The World Lecture Hall at
Innovation and Experimentation with Existing Internet Tools and Resources
First, make sure that you are aware of all the Instructional Technology tools are available to you as a classroom leader. To do this, visit
As you review the resources available to you, consider creative ways to use them. Automated Class Mailing Lists allow instructors to expand students’ understanding of office hours and class discussion. Compelling students to offer substantive responses to questions raised during a class lecture may make up for unavailable discussion time. Finally, forcing students to participate in the information-gathering process will allow students to use their web skills, which are often more practiced and honed than our own, to add to the class discussion, or to keep their instructor updated on newly-discovered resources.