STUDENTS USING THE INTERNET

  
How do we get students (and ourselves) thinking critically about the internet as a research tool? Below I offer some of the resources and assignments I've used, as well as some of the problems I've encountered. Also included are sites offering guidelines for evaluation and citation of web resources. 

Feel free to use or borrow what seems useful to you. However, I would appreciate hearing what worked and what didn't, so that I can continue to improve upon these classroom experiences. 

 acarr@alleg.edu

ASSIGNMENTS

FS 101: Evaluating Internet Resources

This preliminary assignment for first year students was designed to get them using the internet right away in their research, and to get them to start thinking critically about the internet as a resource.

With help from Helen McCullough, A-V Specialist, and I developed one session in the Murray Smart Classroom on asked them to examine web research tools. One exercise asked them to evaluate sites that we chose of varying scholarly authority. Their in-class assignment was to locate websites pertinent to the subject of Hercules. These websites were consolidated into a webpage Hercules Online, and served as additional resources for class work.

LSW 200: Liberal Studies Writing

For this course that stresses writing across the curriculum, I devised a series of assignments that took three 75-minute class sessions and outside work from the student. Activities included
  1. having the class use web search engines to locate relevant sites,
  2. using evaluation criteria to write longer critiques of sites,
  3. revisiting the sites for follow-up on web navigation, citation, evaluation,
  4. editing the longer critiques into shorter ones for posting in a class web site.
For more information, see the assignments themselves or the class links webpage Surfing to the End of the World.

ART 110: Introduction to Western Art

This page demonstrates the use of QuizBuilder, a tool for making webpage quizzes quickly and effectively.  This tool was used successfully in Fall, 1998, for optional student quizzes.
All students in the class were required to take a Syllabus Quiz, developed as an introductory exercise for Art 110. Not only did this force each student to locate the quizzes and try one out, but it also insured that students reviewed some basic facts about the class, such as the timing of tests and what requirements it fulfilled.
Here are the quiz results as they are e-mailed to the profesor.
Here is a series of quizzes designed to prepare students for the first midterm.

At the end of Fall term, 1998, I administered a brief survey to gauge student reaction to the quiz. While not every student loved the quizzes, the results were positive enough to justify continuation of the practice, as a study aid and extra credit option.

A few cautions:

WomStud 100: Introduction to Women's Studies

An assignment on Women and Activism (Fall, 1999) asks students to discuss groups actively working on behalf of women or women's issues. One facet of student research was to use the internet to locate information about women and women's groups, an assignment that involved learning about web research tools, and exploring links already collected on my Women's Resources page.. Students submitted sites that were collected on a webpage. The final project will ask them to write an annotation about their activist group that will be part of a permanent webpage. Because many of the grass roots groups that the students are working with do not have websites, they are asked to consider the advantages and disadvantages of not being online.

ART 215: Medieval Art

Asuming that the students already knew about web browsing, this assignment asked them to use search engines to locate material pertinent to the class. One question asked for specific information from the Rule of St. Benedict (a readily accessible web text), while a second was more generic and simply asked students to find "medieval images". Questions were designed to help student compare the usefulness of libraries and internet information. The results were compiled on a webpage Medieval Art Websites.

Art 590: Hulmer Collection on the Web

This class was devoted entirely to creation of a website, and contained a series of assignments designed to increase student expertise.
  1. Assignment One let students work on their own to become familiar with websurfing.
  2. Assignment Two was a great one, asking students to identify good and bad websites. After creating the webpage, a follow-up class discussion helped students identify problems of design and use.
  3. Assignment Three asked students to examine other sites and ask questions about copyright and fair use.
  4. Assignments Four and Five were workshops on Adobe Photoshop and color images on the web.

CAVEATS ABOUT STUDENT & CLASS WEBPAGES

Anything we put on the web is "published" and is no longer a private transaction between teacher and student, or teacher and class. Even if I just thought I was making up a quick little webpage for use in a class, I may find mysef noticed by the outside world, noticed and not necessarily appreciated. Classwork of uneven quality helps to make the internet the messy resource that it is. In fact, in an online discussion about good sites, Paul Halsall listed as one of his major dislikes "sites authored by faculty members, and which include *unedited* student created pages/projects and *do not mark them as such*."

Considering the public implications of work we do on the internet, I try to ask myself the following questions, among others, when posting a site:

EVALUATION GUIDES

CITATION