MARGUERITE HELMERS
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN OSHKOSH
EXTERNAL LINKS
The following is an annotated list of external links from the article "Using Student-Created maps to Understand Web Navigation" by Marguerite Helmers. They are organized by node.
The first link is to my own home page in the Department of English at the university of Wisconsin Oshkosh. This page lists the websites I have developed.
The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Department of English Link takes the user to the server in the department and contains information about our faculty and our courses.
The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh home page is the main page of the university's site.
Brills' Content. This link takes visitors to the online version of the print magazine. Brill's Content is a media-watchdog monthly magazine that even watches itself. Their focus is on the hyperbole and irresponsibility of various medias: electronic, print, visual.
PBS, Public Broadcasting. This is the home page for PBS that lists all the programming and programming-related websites.
Everest Quest is part of the PBS Online website, listed under the subheading Travel and Exhibitions. This is an online adventure suited for grades 4 and up, and the related web areas associated with this adventure contain a virtual tour of base camp, facts on the height and atmospheric conditions of the mountain, and several transcripts of e-mail communications from the top of the mountain.
Library of Congress. The Library of Congress Home Page continually evolves and requires a diligent educator to use it. While all the information is archived, the interface--the look--of the pages changes frequently. Use the main pages for Exhibits and American Memory to begin searching and browsing the collections:
Exhibits. Students will enjoy the online exhibits pages, which correspond to actual exhibits at the library itself, but which are independently useful for research and learning how to browse the web.
American Memory. American Memory pages contain documents and photographs. They are useful for upper grades and more advanced computer-users. Students ready to do research will find many primary sources in these pages.
WebQuests. Bernie Dodge, of San Diego State University, pioneered the WebQuest idea. Since his initial work to develop a theory and practical advice, a WebQuest Webring has developed. A webring is a series of individually-maintained, but linked sites, all relating to the same subject. Now, educators can access information at the WebQuest Home Page, titled "Creating Web-Based Lessons: WebQuests and other Internet Projects." From this homepage, educators can link to webquests developed for each grade.
Library of Congress Learning Page. Rather than try to summarize the entire site, I highlight links to important areas for educators:
Activities contains quizzes that utilize the collections and the internet to find answers.
Feature Presentations bring together items from across the American Memory collections to investigate a common theme. Choose from Elections, Presidents, Inaugurations, Women Pioneers, Thanksgiving, and Immigration. Like the exhibits, these provide a good browsing introduction.
Each Learn More About It focuses on an individual American Memory collection. This is essentially another way to search the collections, but, importantly, the collections are made interactive. Students and their teachers can choose from a Summary, a Historical Contextualization, Historical Thinking provides questions for search options and making connections, Language Arts allows educators to make connections between the online collections and readings by providing a list of writing ideas, such as journals and reports.
Lesson Ideas are also provided, posted by educators who have used the collections.
Yahoo! is linked in this site because it provides access to several web encyclopedias among its channels, among them the PC Webopaedia, a searchable, accessible on-line dictionary. These online dictionaries help novice users learn terms that are helpful to understanding the workings of the World Wide Web. To reach the dictionary, the user should follow the links to Computing Dictionaries from Yahoo!, which includes the following nodes: Yahoo, Computers and Internet, Information and Documentation, Computing Dictionaries.
PC Webopaedia, a searchable, accessible on-line dictionary. The site is extensive, but fortunately can be searched by category (such as graphics or hardware). Users can quickly access "new terms" or they might print out the Internet Error Messages for students.
EdWeb Home Room created by Andy Carvin announces that it will explore technology and school reform. Although I use it to highlight Carvin's metaphorical approach to internet navigation, this site is a valuable resource for teachers-in-training and established professionals. Carvin discusses the role of technology in education and offers practical advice on how to begin networking with other teachers through listservs and how to build pages with HTML.
John Tolva. Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word. Tolva, now a Web designer with IBM, completed this essay as a student at Washington University in St. Louis. In it, he outlines some of the particular challenges, problems, and benefits from writing on the web. He works to integrate aesthetic theories of vision and space with the with the "space" of the web.
Marguerite Helmers' course Honors Composition. This links to an assignment that I created and put online to facilitate browsing. Students were studying the social background of World War I in Britain. This brief page was designed to engage the students in visual and verbal study. They looked at paintings or contemporary photographs of battlefields and wrote short journal entries based on their work from the web.
WebQuests. Bernie Dodge, of San Diego State University, pioneered the WebQuest idea. Since his initial work to develop a theory and practical advice, a WebQuest Webring has developed. A webring is a series of individually-maintained, but linked sites, all relating to the same subject. Now, educators can access information at the WebQuest Home Page, titled "Creating Web-Based Lessons: WebQuests and other Internet Projects." From this homepage, educators can link to webquests developed for each grade.
Example WebQuests. These are useful a) for helping students learn how to navigate and b) as templates for teachers contemplating writing their own websites. The two samples that I cite on this page are:
Be a Web Site Sleuth by Jan Ferguson and Marge Wagner. This exercise in internet browsing is designed for grades one and two. The authors ask students to look for information about the authors of their favorite children's books. The students create a table with information about the sites that they visited, which include The Magic School Bus series and The Cat in the Hat.
The Realm of Fairy Tales by Judy Hoke. Ms. Hoke and her colleagues have created an extensive web of their own to teach the structure and style of fairy tales. The site is nicely designed and easily manageable for students in grades four and five and above.
Jamie MacKenzie, The Internet as Curriculum. MacKenzie is the publisher of From Now On an online educational technology journal. In this article, different strategies for integrating the internet into the curriculum are surveyed. Primarily, MacKenzie argues that the metaphors we select to talk about the curriculum and the internet determine our attitudes: either computers are essential or peripheral. He supports the use of the internet to find primary material. This is a hyperlinked article that is worth reading and sharing, as are several of the other articles linked to the From Now On website.
Victorian
Fairy Painting. The site is
the on-line extension of an exhibition sponsored by the University of Iowa
Museum of Art in 1998. Overall, there are eleven pages that encompass the
website, but there are only six main information pages on the site. As the
organizers of the exhibit point out, " Fairies became a valid subject for ballets, operas, books, paintings and
illustrations. Several factors contributed to this phenomenon including the collection and recording of
folklore and fairy tales, and the renewed interest in Shakespeare's plays, particularly the "fairy plays",
A Midsummer Night's Dream, written in 1594, and The Tempest (1610), which had been drastically adapted in the
eighteenth century but now were restored to something approaching their original form. By the mid-nineteenth
century a passion for the occult and for spiritualism also
contributed to the craze." Among the works featured in the exhibit was Queen
Mab's Cave, by Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Sobel Assessment Guide, adapted from Mapmaking with Children. This is a reproducible page
The first external link on this page is to WebQuest Rubrics. There are several evaluation rubrics listed within the WebQuest home page. From this page, educators can also access the page called Rubrics for Web Lessons.
Part of the vast Library of Congress website, American Memory includes over 70 collections on American life that are ready to browse, print, and study. They include: Northern California Folk Music, Baseball Highlights, and Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project. Less for browsing than fodder for the students ready to do research.
Victorian Fairy Painting. The site is the on-line extension of an exhibition sponsored by the University of Iowa Museum of Art in 1998. It is described above.
PBS has posted three electronic field trips, despite not offering a formal program called "Electronic Field Trips" any more. These electronic trips are Bering Land Bridge, Costa Rican Rainforest, and Colonial Williamsburg. Although the Electronic field trip adventures are no longer is service, the online versions are useful to introduce students to the world wide web and to introduce the way to write pages for educators eventually wishing to try their hand at design.
Costa Rican Rainforest. One of the electronic field trips posted by PBS. Students generally find this site intriguing because they are concerned about preservation of indigenous rainforest species.
Evaluation of Information Sources, The World-Wide Web Virtual Library. An extraordinarily comprehensive site, Evaluation of Information Sources contains "pointers" (or outlinks) to other sites on the Internet with criteria for evaluating Internet resources. Divided into three categories: General selection criteria, Selection criteria used for specific sources (such as what makes a "cool site"), and Commentary.
A Student's Guide to Research with the WWW. This is a nicely formatted "tutorial guide" using frames by Craig Branham at St. Louis University. Read the introduction and then scroll down to the index. Following the first hyperlink to "Anatomy of a Webpage" the user will be in a frames version, with contents listed on the left side of the page. This site is heavily text-based, which students might argue hinders navigation. For older students, the entire site might be assigned as homework. In addition, focusing students' attention to shorter sections on site design, search strategies that yield the best information, and criteria for evaluation, will make this guide to research an essential reference.
Send mail to Marguerite Helmers, helmers@uwosh.edu