NetResearch: Instructor's Guide
NetResearch: Instructor's GuideNetResearch is written in non-technical language easily understood by college freshmen and advanced high school students. The reader is assumed only to have an Internet-capable computer account and basic familiarity with email and the Web. For students without this background, Chapter 2, Internet Basics, provides a brief introduction.
At the same time, the Internet has little or no filtering of - shall we say - online garbage. Anybody can put just about anything they desire online. When a student researches a paper using the Internet, he or she might encounter numerous errors, biased sources, or even lies. While these problems are not unique to the Internet, they are certainly less common in more traditional reference materials. NetResearch discusses these issues of online accuracy and stresses that the material's source should be the student's most important indicator of its veracity.
NetResearch also briefly touches on citation styles for online resources. If one finds a piece of information on the Internet, how should it be cited in a bibliography? There is currently no single standard. This topic might also make an interesting in-class discussion for advanced students.
NetResearch teaches students how to search for any topic on the Internet, making it suitable for introductory Internet courses.
As a primary text, NetResearch is a comprehensive guide to Internet searching. As a supplementary text, it can serve as a handbook of search techniques for any Internet-related course.
Service courses, such as "Introduction to the Internet," present a challenge to computer science departments. Although these courses can be beneficial to the students, department, and university, the material covered often has little or nothing to do with professors' research interests or computer science as a whole.
NetResearch is designed to bridge this gap by providing a channel for injecting some real computer science into introductory Internet courses while maintaining a friendly appearance that won't frighten novices. In my experience teaching computer science at The Johns Hopkins University, I found that novice students became attracted to the computer science major when they were exposed to concepts beyond those found in introductory computer programming. The "hidden" computer science topics above are designed to do exactly that, while also giving CS professors some interesting things to talk about in service courses.
I've seen many novice journalists post messages blindly in public online forums, effectively saying: "I need information on this topic - please send me everything you know by email." Public posts are not only slow to get results, but also wasteful because they reach many uninterested people. In many of these cases, a few minutes of carefully targeted searching on the Internet would have located an appropriate information resource more rapidly and with less fuss. (And without revealing the subject of one's exclusive story to the whole world!)
NetResearch can teach journalists how to locate Internet resources rapidly through the use of
Librarians are "the key to the future of the Internet," according to ITCS (Internet Training and Consulting Services, www.itcs.com), who say that "only through effective organization of network resources will people be able to turn the Internet from a surfer's dream to a researcher's tool." This is exactly the goal of NetResearch: to enable people to move beyond casual surfing and begin to use the Internet as a serious resource.
Libraries are increasingly connecting to the Internet, both as information providers (putting their catalogs online) and as information clients (installing Net connections for the patrons' use). It's vitally important for librarians to know how to search the Net effectively, and what kinds of resources are available there. NetResearch provides a rapid introduction to Internet searching that complements traditional library science course material on information resources, information access, and cataloging.
In many ways, Net searching is an extension of what librarians have been doing for years, and many of the same general techniques apply. In fact, librarians may already have the style of intuition necessary to become experts Internet searchers. Nevertheless, the Internet has some resources that are wildly different from the traditional ones. Usenet search engines are one example, containing the stored conversations of millions of individuals, made available for searching by keyword. NetResearch introduces these resources.
Finally, librarians may need to explain the workings of the Internet
to patrons attempting to use local Internet connections.
NetResearch provides the background and some useful
analogies to aid this explanation.