Somewhere there's an answer

Logos of student-safe Internet sites

There is an answer to any question and help with any assignment on the Internet, but turning students loose to browse without preparation and guidance is not only wasteful, but potentially dangerous.

At the end of every email message I send out I have a ‘tag’ line which says “It’s out there somewhere — the trick is finding it”.

I am convinced that whatever your next job at home, school or at work there is something on the Internet, somewhere, that can make your life easier and save you time.

The aim here is to share and highlight some of the intricacies of the Internet so you might use it even more efficiently than you do now. Firstly a gentle reminder that “The Internet” is a general term that covers several applications including the ‘world wide web (www)’ which uses a web browser to display information, ‘email’ for sending and receiving messages, and ‘instant messaging’ for co-operating and sharing ideas with other people. There are other opportunities but space and the editor’s guidance means they will have to wait until another day.

A few years ago it was estimated there were over six billion, that's 6,000,000,000, individual web pages on the Internet worldwide, an easy number to remember as it's also about the size of the earth's population. I shudder to think how many pages there may be now. At the Internet Archives (www.archive.org/) they have over ten billion pages which can be searched with their 'waybackmachine' but many of these pages are now out of date or from sites closed down.

So being on the safe side, let’s consider six billion. If you looked at each one for a minute and worked eight hours a day without any holidays or weekends then it would take you over five hundred years to view them all. I suspect that even a dedicated surfer would give up or die trying.

For a teacher to give students a project to find information on the www without giving them searching skills or guidance would not only be unrealistic but they may be liable for a court case and be sued for mental cruelty. I know several parents who have contemplated this when helping sons or daughters use a computer to research material for homework assignments late in the evening.

To find specific information on the Internet most of us go to a favorite search engine such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. For a change let’s look at three others that are not so well known and also allow schools and parents some control over what content is received by their children, or rather what content is not received.

Vivisimo at http://vivisimo.com/ is a meta-search engine, it takes your request and goes off to find the results in other search engines and then displays them in one list. The relevance to education of this site is that it automatically takes the websites it received for your enquiry and puts them under different categories it thinks are relevant. So a search for Thailand on Vivisimo comes back with 164 websites and automatically sorts them into headings such as 'culture', 'business', 'travel', 'holidays', 'statistics'. This can reduce the time students take to find relevant sites. By clicking on 'Advanced Search' parents and teachers will find tools to filter out 'offensive materials'

Kartoo is another a meta-search engine, found at www.kartoo.com, which also has an optional "Parental filter" to help towards safer surfing. The additional reason for highlighting this site is the unique graphical way it presents the results. In their press release they quote from one review: "If there were a beauty contest for search engines, Kartoo, developed in France by cousins Laurent and Nicolas Baleydier, would win the crown". Words would take too long to describe the experience, which may be unnerving if you are conditioned to the traditional displays. However, it may well be different enough to add additional motivation to complete that homework assignment.

Another meta search engine, Picsearch, is one which focuses only on images, pictures, clipart and graphics with the additional security that your children should not come across anything that makes them feel uncomfortable. Their own 'About' page at http://www.picsearch.com/ states "... Picsearch has a family friendliness that allows children to surf in safety as all offensive material is filtered out by our advanced filtering systems.” As an additional safeguard, on the off chance that an undesirable picture does get through, you can let Picsearch know about this and they will remove the image from future searches.

But if I was a gambler, I’d bet that most of you will stay with your own favourite search engine, and for many I’m guessing it will be Google (www.google.com or www.google.co.th). If you have not tried the ‘Advanced Search’ facility then do so the next time you have the opportunity. Click on the button on the opening page and see what options you get to narrow down your search.

Most of the Advanced Search options are self explanatory so I won’t bore you with a lengthy explanation here except maybe to highlight the one called ‘Domain’. If in this box you put the letters ‘th’ then you will only get websites that are registered in Thailand. For example, our National brand washing machine broke down recently and we wanted to find the local service agent in Chiang Mai. A regular search in Google using the words “National Washing Machine” resulted in over 200,000 web pages being listed. But using Advanced Search still with the words “National Washing Machine” but this time also putting ‘th’ in the domain box this returned 87 web pages and the first was the Thailand agent. Just giving yourself a little time to play with the Advanced Search opportunities with any search engine you use will eventually be worthwhile.

Web Rings are a mechanism which allows websites with similar interests to link together so that surfers can move from one site to the next knowing that they will still be looking at material covering the same topic. Sites that are part of a web ring can usually be identified by some graphics displayed at the bottom of their home page.

To find out about web rings in general try the Webring (www.webring.com) which also allows you to browse or search a ring directory consisting of more than 60,000 rings and 1,000,000 sites.

For a list of web ring directories visit www.shambles.net/pages/school/Webrings/.

Now I have a confession to make, despite all my searching skills and knowledge of search engines I have to admit that I rarely spend time personally looking for the information I need on the Internet. So what is my secret? It’s simple; I make use of email and other services provided by real people on the Internet. Let me explain by citing some examples.

“What do you do when you want to add two big numbers, but they are too big to fit on a calculator screen?”

This is one question of about three hundred that are emailed to “Dr Maths” each day (http://mathforum.org/dr.math/). Dr Maths is just one of many services worldwide now known as Ask An Expert (AAE)

AAE is simplicity itself, first find the email address of an expert who is able to answer your question, send them an email and wait for the answer; the challenge is, of course, to find that elusive email address.

There are several catalogues of lists of experts at www.shambles.net/pages/school/askaexpert/ — in particular try Pitsco’s site at www.askanexpert.com/ and AllExperts www.allexperts.com/ .

A new breed of websites offer software solutions that try to answer questions automatically from databases, for example Pointask www.pointask.com/ does have an expert list but it also tries to answer questions directly. Another, Freeanswers www.freeanswers.com/ tries to answer questions about computer problems using simple language and using the databases directly from software and hardware suppliers.

A few websites offer experts online in real time to answer questions as well as offering the standard AAE service using email. ivillage www.ivillagehealth.com/experts/ offers this to answer your concerns on topics covering health, finances, fitness, parenting and cooking.

It is advisable to keep an open mind about the quality of the “Ask and Expert” services. Some are set up by very reputable organisations and individuals but they could also be set up by those who have only a brief knowledge of the subject themselves. Check your source before accepting the advice.

If your son, daughter, student (or boss) has asked you to tackle that awkward education question and you have no time to even look for a expert, then help is still at hand in the form of ERIC. The Educational Resources Information Center is a USA federally-funded national information system that provides a variety of services and products on a broad range of education-related issues.

One of the services is called AskERIC (www.askeric.org/). Just send your question by email to askeric@askeric.org and you will receive a personal email response from one of their network information specialists within two business days! They will send you a list of ERIC database citations that deal with your topic and will also refer you to other Internet resources for additional information.

It's that easy! When submitting your question, it is advisable to let them know if you are a teacher, parent or student; they customise the response to suit the audience and reading age. This is a wonderful service, try it now, you will not be disappointed.

Students, of course, immediately see the advantages of this as a possible solution to easy answers for their homework assignments — I’m assuming some students are reading this. But the guys at AskERIC are professional educators and structure their replies carefully to provide brief information but more importantly provide guidance on how the student might use and expand that information and work co-operatively with others.

A wonderful example was sent to me by a teacher in a school I was working with in Hong Kong. A grade 3 student, Hong Chun, emailed askeric@askeric.org with his homework question “Why do Ancient Egyptians sometimes write upwards?” The answer received was an excellent example of good teaching practice. A copy of the full answer can be downloaded as a Word document from www.shambles.net/files/csmith/askeric_egypt.doc .

Listservs are still a well-kept secret as far as many teachers and parents are concerned but they are very powerful learning and teaching tools. They are simple to use and set up once you have been shown.

Think of a listserv as a club or group of people with similar interests that has been set up on a computer connected to the Internet. People can join or leave the club automatically by sending an email or filling in a form online. Some listervs are open to the public, some are restricted to certain professions or professional association members and are closed groups.

Once you have joined, an email sent to the ‘club’ is automatically sent out to all club members and usually saved in a webpage somewhere. “So what is so special about this?” you may ask.

I belong to one listserv which has over one thousand school IT advisors and educators as members. When I have a question about the use of computers in schools I send them a short email and just sit back and wait for the answers to come back — which they do.

Another I belong to has several thousand school librarians from across the world as members. Questions sent to them via email usually result in replies coming back almost immediately. In July I was asked by a teacher in South Africa if I could set up a webpage of links to forensic science websites. Rather than spent hours searching for links on the Internet, I sent an email to each of my listservs above — 24 hours later I had a sizeable list of relevant sites which now live online at www.shambles.net/science/.

It is easy to set up and run a listserv and there are many companies offering them as a free service; you might like to try http://www.smartgroups.com/ , http://www.topica.com/ or http://groups.yahoo.com/.

For a list of listservs visit www.shambles.net/pages/staff/ListMail/. If you are an ICT coordinator in an International School in Thailand then you might consider joining the listserv at http://www.topica.com/lists/ISTEC/ if not already a member.

Listservs can run for years or can be set up for small projects where a group of teachers or students may only work together for a few weeks. If you are a teacher then you might like to set up one or more of these for your class in the new term. Most are free and students can connect from anywhere with an Internet connection – school, home or a cybercafe. The only skill that is needed is to be able to use email.

Ask a cyber-wise teenager what they like doing on the Internet (other than games) and they will probably mention instant messaging, chatrooms or forums. There are students all around the world who get home from school and power up their PC and log on to applications such as ICQ (http://web.icq.com/) which enables them to talk with schoolmates, in real time, about homework assignments and, possibly, other topics.

These students have even developed (or should that be evolved?) their own online language to improve the efficiency of the communication.

Parents and teachers are a little anxious about the control and use of these new tools but they are definitely part of the future; the challenge, for educators, is to work out how they can be used for teaching and learning.

Apparently there are a few people out there in the world who believe that using the Internet is not always the best way to find information — and I have to agree with them. Simply asking a friend, parent or colleague can often yield immediate results in a highly time efficient manner.

This became clearer to me a few years ago when talking with a teacher of young children who were doing a project on World War II. They had spent considerable time reading books and searching the Internet and were completely overwhelmed with the amount of information that was turning up. In fact the students were drowning in information. One girl eventually let it slip that her grandfather had actually fought in the war. Immediately the teacher asked if it was possible for him to visit the class to talk with them. This did eventually take place and the students had a much richer experience listening to the old soldier share his experiences first hand. I later found out that some teachers have a rather endearing description for this type of exercise — “grill a granny”.

Final words of advice, especially for students and teachers who are still not sure where to find help, go and talk with your school librarian. You may be surprised to find that librarians know much more about information than just organising books — they are, or will become, key players in the new information age.

Remember “It’s out there somewhere – the trick is finding it” but now, hopefully, you are closer to being convinced that people are still much more important than machines.

That’s IT

| Comments to Terry F. at terryfrd@ksc15.th.com |
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Last modified: August 11, 2003