5 August 4pm - 15 minutes on The Internet in Education
This is a practical session focusing on how the Internet can realistically be used for education in The South Pacific in the near future

Researching on the Internet

Search vs. Index

• Search engines like Google ( http://www.google.com ) work by looking for sites that contain specific keywords, while Indexes like The Open Directory Project ( http://dmoz.org/ ) or Yahoo ( http://www.yahoo.com ) let you drill down through categories to the topic you want.

Search tips

• http://204.17.98.73/midlib/tutor.htm is a detailed step by step tutorial on searching for the beginner. Highly recommended
• The Art of Getting Help ( http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/getting-help.html ) is a gem from Phil Agre ( http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre ), a wealth of good Web For Ed. wisdom.

Proper attribution

• You must cite any reference you make from a web site or email just as you would when citing books in your bibliography.

Herrington, Jan & Oliver, Ron (1995). Critical characteristics of situated learning: Implications for the instructional design of multimedia. Australian Society for Computers in Learning In Tertiary Education Conference, 1995. Retrieved December 5, 2002 from http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne95/smtu/papers/herrington.pdf

The University Region (1999). The University of the South Pacific. Retrieved December 2, 2002 from http://www.usp.ac.fj/admin/general.htm#The%20University%20Region

• • http://library.stmarytx.edu/lac/howard/apastyle.htm
  • http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html
  • http://library.csumb.edu/instruction/howto/citations.php#Other

Checking validity of online resources

• Before quoting or basing any lesson on anything you have learned from the Internet, you must check the source's validity. This Critical Evaluation of Three Websites ( http://tiger.towson.edu/users/wsmith5/threewebevaluation.htm ) uses a good set of criteria that you can apply to your own research.
• Resources for evaluating internet content

Storing notes on the Internet

Pros and cons

• Easy to update but currently pretty much impossible for most South Pacific students to access conventiently

Free Web space

• There are a number of sites that will give you free webspace in return for displaying thier adds on your site.
• Angelfire http://angelfire.lycos.com/
• Fortune City http://www.fortunecity.com/
• Yahoo Geocities http://geocities.yahoo.com/home

Blogger-like systems

• A Blog or Weblog allows you to create and update a site with relatively little Internet Knowlegde.
  • Blogger ( http://www.blogger.com ) is the most famous, and even gives away free webspace in return for displaying banner ads.
  • Grey Matter ( http://www.noahgrey.com/greysoft/ )is another popular free weblog system, though this one involves some instalation and knowledge of FTP..
  • Movable Type ( http://www.movabletype.org/ ) is another popular free weblog system. Very powerful, but it does require installation and knowledge of FTP
  • Blosxom (http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/) is the most zen-like of all systems, as it needs no additional interface, building your site from the directory-structure (the names of your files and folders) automatically. As such, it requires HTML and FTP skills.