MARGUERITE HELMERS
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN OSHKOSH 

USING STUDENT-CREATED MAPS
TO UNDERSTAND WEB NAVIGATION

As I work with the World Wide Web, I see it more and more as a metaphorical world like a game board. Less and less do I see it as a text, encyclopedia, or dictionary. Many of my ideas for teaching on the web derive from studying educational websites and reading articles on the web about educational uses and effective design. Everyone needs to be able to ground themselves within the frequently changing web, and everyone can benefit from conceptualizing the web in terms of metaphor and visual design. The World Wide Web is a space in which we can connect with others and in which we can craft our own skills of navigation. Finally, while websites may have print, they are not books. Books are linear--their secrets are revealed as readers go from cover to cover. Webtexts aren't meant to be read from start to finish. 

We know that students learn best when they have clearly-defined and achievable goals for assignments. Sending students into a computer lab with an open-ended assignment to "search the web" is not effective because the assignment is too broad. In addition to hundreds of hits of varying quality resulting from keyword searches or subject directory channel listings, the space of the web, by which I mean the very sense of where we are, is not at all clear. Novice users of all ages are frequently confused about who has written pages, at what location they have arrived, and whether they are connected to a server at a local site or a remote site. In fact, many top hits on channels are paid positions. Drawing attention to the consequences of this for-profit information system in the new magazine Brill’s Content, Noah Robischon cautions:

Most on-line consumers are probably unaware that the most valuable real estate on a channel goes to the highest bidder rather than to the best content provider. (40)

Thus, what begins as an adventure can become frustrated by sharks, seduction, floundering, and shipwreck. A combination of conceptual thinking, learning objectives, performance objectives (which are behaviorally-based), class discussion, pen, paper, colored pencils, and chalk can be wonderful aids to thinking about the World Wide Web and designing practical assignments. My solution is to have my students make maps of webtexts. This assignment can work with any grade. My students are college students, but the websites and books that the research is based upon are all addressed to K-12 teachers. I've used this assignment in teacher-training programs, too, and can testify that it's fun and useful.

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Send mail to Marguerite Helmers, helmers@uwosh.edu