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An Innovation Grant funded by the Georgia Department of Education |
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Bill Jordan, Instructor |
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Finding Information: Topic Lists |
Objective: In this assignment you will begin to
learn how to find information on the World Wide Web by using topic lists. |
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Vocabulary: There are some new vocabular words in
this lesson that have to do with searching for information on the World
Wide Web.
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| Background Information: By now you have probably
encountered the terms browsing, surfing, and searching. These all relate
to finding information on the Internet and the World Wide Web. If you have
ever been "window shopping" you have a concept of browsing.
When you window shop, you are just strolling along with no particular purpose...just
checking out what's new in the stores. When you browse on-line, you are
just looking around, seeing what's new, with no particular goal in mind.
Surfing the Internet and World
Wide Web is a little bit like "channel hopping" with the TV remote
control. You jump from site to site and maybe only look at the first few
screens of a web site to see if anything looks interesting before jumping
to a new site. Again, you may not be looking for a specific topic. As you
can imagine neither browsing nor surfing are very effective means of searching
for specific information.
What would it be like if everytime you went into your favorite clothing store, music store, or video store all of the items had been moved around? It would really be frustrating because you would waste a lot of time searching for things. Fortunately, in most stores things are organizied in logical groups or categories. For example, if a sign in a video store says Comedy, you can be pretty sure that section of the store only contains comedy movies. One of the simplest ways of categorizing information on the World Wide
Web is with lists of sites, sometimes called topic
lists. However, when you use a topic list, you are limiting
yourself to information that someone else has collected. Still, lists are
a good place to start. In several later lessons, you will learn to use
search engines--just a fancy
name for searching a database. |
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| Online Assignment: In this assignment you are going to visit
Yahoo and explore some of the major topic categories. |
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| Homework Assignment: In this assignment you are going to visit
two different sites that contain lists.
You will spend some time exploring the sites referenced on the lists. Then
you will choose one site from each list and e-mail me the home page. Remember,
to e-mail a home page you select File from the tool bar and then Mail Document
from the menu. When the e-mail screen appears, enter my e-mail address
(jordanb@rose.net) and send the e-mail in the usual way.
Click on the icons for the two sites shown below when you are ready to begin exploring.
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| Competencies: This assignment has given you a brief introduction
to the use of topic lists to
find information on the Internet and World Wide Web. Keep in mind that
when you use a list compiled by another person, you how current the information
is or if the person compiling the information has a certain bias. Just
be aware that these are often good places to start, but there are other
ways to specifically find the information you are looking for. |
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Send comments to Bill Jordan Thomasville City Schools 915 East Jackson Street Thomasville, GA 31792 |
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