Concluding Thoughts: Toward a Larger Conversation

I taught this unit to my first-year writing class in the spring of 2004 over the course of two days work shopping in a computer laboratory. The class I was teaching was focused on the topic of place and space with the writing assignments and course readings tailored to this topic. I introduced the comprehensive online document evaluation as a one-week research primer for their second major research assignment.

On the first day of the unit I asked that my students bring in copies of working bibliographies they had assembled for a paper due the following week. Each working bibliography contained several online sources. I then paired students up into groups of three with at least one person in each group who self-identified as feeling "comfortable with web technology." Each group selected one online sources from their bibliography to investigate further. Before the students proceeded I asked each group to show me the source they had chosen to investigate further. I required this check-in because I wanted to make sure the students were working with a valid Internet address.

After each group had chosen their online source to analyze, I went through a thirty-minute presentation of the CODE tutorial using a lab computer projector. In my overview I contrasted each point in the tutorial with a comparison to the MLA citation format I was requiring in their final papers. I found this to be a generative way to talk and teach about both why researchers need to produce a works cited for research papers, as well as why we need to find comparable information for online sources.

After my  presentation students worked to explore, play around and become comfortable with each utility: traceroute, whois, web.archive, etc. During the next class I circulated around the lab and helped students work through their worksheet. I structured the lab time so that for the majority of the class students learned through both trial and error, as well as from the newly acquired knowledge of their peers. For example, when I helped one group understand traceroute more clearly, I’d redirect new questions on traceroute to the first group. This structure of trial and error, peer learning, and instructor assistance meant that students learned some things through trial and error, but also taught others through peer support.

In this particular course, I found that students took very quickly to using resources such as web.archive but found the applications of traceroute difficult to envision. Part of this is certainly due to a deficit on my part to develop a international web curricula. Specifically, it's one thing to diversify the readings of a course curricula based on topic, but it is an entirely new challenge to do the same based on the geographic location of websites. However, this is something that I believe needs further reflection the next time I attempt to teach comprehensive online document evaluation.