USING WWW MATERIALS IN COURSEWORK

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Notes by Keith Montgomery, Department of Geography-Geology.
 
  1. General policies on local use of e-mail and the Internet
  2. Some course materials on the UWMC server
  3. Independent research on the internet: quality issues
  4. Evaluating materials
  5. Finding materials
  6. Summation

GENERAL POLICY ON E-MAIL AND INTERNET USE

A general policy on student use of computers, e-mail and Internet at UWMC can be found HERE.
 
 
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SOME COURSE MATERIALS ON THE UWMC SERVER

Internet materials are used for a variety of purposes at UWMC. Examples of Internet use in UWMC courses include:

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 INDEPENDENT RESEARCH ON THE INTERNET

Usually, the use of materials such as those listed above is carefully guided because you are referred to them for a very specific purpose. However, there are a number of independent research projects, such as term papers, for which you might try to find material on the 'Net. In fact, some professors might even require that one or two web sources be used.

ISSUES OF QUALITY AND APPROPRIATENESS OF INTERNET MATERIALS FOR UNIVERSITY RESEARCH

As explained and defined elsewhere, generally the type of material you ought to use for writing a research paper should be "scholarly" in nature or present data which is generally accepted as reputable and reliable. As explained on another site, such material is relatively easy to identify in books and articles and, as you might expect, the majority of holdings in a university library are of this type. So, a certain amount of selection has already been done for you but, because not all university library holdings are of this type, you should still be able to evaluate the value of the material for yourself. (Local public libraries are not recommended as sources of materials because their selection process tends to be in favor of non-scholarly works, so you will just not find as much of the correct kind of material on their shelves).

How good is the Internet as a source of materials? The answer depends on what you are looking for. The Internet is not yet a significant depository for free scholarly (i.e. well researched, balanced, documented, reviewed) articles and books and therefore is not particularly useful as a source for papers that require a scholarly tack (e.g. term papers). What IS the web good for, then?

However, there is much data and information that can still be located FASTER using print sources in the reference section of the library (i.e. encyclopedias, almanacs, fact books, yearbooks) and there are other computer searches that are possible, but not web-based (e.g. EBSCO host): Do NOT automatically head for the web!

When you search the Web for materials, there is the least possible quality control on what you will find. For example, just think about the process by which materials are published and distributed in print compared to the Web. Clearly, compared to books or magazines, the Web allows almost anyone or any organization to "publish" and distribute materials across the world for a fraction of the cost. True, relatively few of all printed books and magazines are scholarly, but on the Web the fact of publication carries even less indication of the value of the material. And the fact that it can be accessed in a university carries even less weight yet!
 
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EVALUATING MATERIALS

Be on your guard and at your most critical as you peruse materials. In addition to the guidelines for evaluation of materials listed elsewhere (e.g. Berkeley, Cornell, UCLA, and Widener University, ) you might also want to consider the following questions as you investigate a site for possible use:

If you wish, you can explore an exercise in evaluation of materials at the Virtual Geography Department Project.

U. Wisconsin Madison Computer Science reviews web sites and maintains an archive of reviews: See if a site is revewed there.
 
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FINDING MATERIALS

Berkeley has some excellent materials on web searching (and evaluation). The link materials listed below are drawn from UWGB. The UWGB site also contains materials on citing web sources.

Most searchers go to "search engines" with key words or phrases. For scholarly purposes it is best to go established web libraries of materials and NOT search engines. Web libraries have limited and selected materials on topics: Some evaluation of quality has been completed. Search engines are vacuum cleaners that suck up everything -- they supply too much with no quality control.

Virtual libraries include:

There are also "Subject Directories". Most often individuals and organizations submit URLs to them and on some (NOT all) there is selection: There are sites that review sites and pages -- but be careful of the criteria they use: Then there are are search engines that find key words located somewhere in a given document. The better ones will rank the "hits". Using a search engine will be much better if you pick one and get to know its "advanced search" features -- for example, in AltaVista one can find pages that link to a given page, which is very useful if you are expanding asearch and already have a couple of good sources. A useful "keyword" technique to use is to use the name of an author you know is well-known in a particular field of study, rather than the field itself.
Here are some search engines: Meta-Search Engines search the search engines!
Here are some Meta-Search Engines:
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SUMMATION

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