Information from/on the Net

There are two kinds of information on the Internet that you can use in teaching: what's there already, and what you put there yourself. It takes a little exploring to find what's out there and filter it for classroom use, and it takes a little work to prepare materials yourself, but both can be very rewarding.

One important principle is that the use of the Net makes it possible to blur a bit the boundary between classroom materials and research materials. The line is easily crossed, and a student who thinks she has fallen into a "page" with nothing but your syllabus and course instructions on it may quickly find herself reading primary texts and going further.

Some possibilities:

• The Library (ours and other peoples')
• Electronic Journals: a new medium
• Gopherspace: a way of navigating the net popular since 1992. Its strengths are ease of navigation, indexing, and ease of downloading. Its chief weakness is that it handles images with great difficulty, and thus is limited mainly to text.
• Newsgroups (a.k.a.: "Usenet"): the Internet equivalent of clubs or conversation groups; its strength is size (many thousands of such groups exist), its weakness is ochlocracy.
• The World-Wide Web: booming in popularity since the introduction of Mosaic in 1993, the Web offers easy access to images and sound (even motion pictures!) as well as text, and powerful links from within documents to specific places in other documents. At the moment its weakness is difficulty in indexing and searching, but many smart minds are working on this problem even now.

  Go on for library resources or go back to the start of this guide to new tools for teaching.