Studying Using the Web

The Student's Guide to Using the Ultimate Information Resource

Brian Clegg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134140527
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Anyone can type a few keywords into a search engine. But that's only the beginning. With Studying Using the Web you can find the right material, check its authenticity, transform it into your own original work and keep up-to-date on essential topics. The book is about how to find the right information, and making the most of it. It shows you how to:

• know what to look for
• make the best use of search facilities
• gather pictures, sounds and more
• make use of the human side of the internet
• learn how to test information with a trust CSI kit
• collect and structure your information effectively
• make text your own
• keep up to date.

You could stay jogging round the information track. But think how much better you could do with the right technology and skills to harness a leading-edge study machine. Move into the study fast track now.

Chapter 1
Venturing out

This first chapter is mostly background for those who like to read around a subject. If you prefer to plunge in and get started, you can skip straight to chapter 2 when you’ve read the next few paragraphs. (Keep going for now – I’ll let you know when to make the jump.)

First, let’s get some basics about the book itself out of the way.

To avoid confusion, where I show words I want you to type into a web page I will make these bold. So please type this phrase, means type the words “this phrase” without those double blips (quotation marks or inverted commas). If I want you to put some text in double blips, then the blips will be in bold too – that way it becomes obvious if I want you to key in this phrase or “this phrase”. That’s important because the two have different meanings to a search engine.

Each of the chapters ahead will improve your skills on making use of the web. You don’t have to read them in any particular order, but the way I’ve written them made sense to me, so why not go with it? If you’re determined to pick something up without waiting, I’d suggest checking out chapter 8 (making the text your own). The biggest complaint everyone has about students using the web is that all too often they just cut a piece of text out of a website and paste it into their work. It’s little more than stealing, and most teachers and lecturers can spot it.

If you take this idiot cut and paste approach, your results will suffer. So turning what you find on the web into your own work is an essential. But then so is knowing who to trust (chapter 6) … and a whole lot more. So why not take the time to work through? It won’t take too long, I promise.

Okay, this is the point to jump to chapter 2 if you don’t want some background on the internet and the web. But it is useful to know a bit about your vehicle before you jump in and try to drive it.

Where did it come from?

Once upon a time there was no internet.

Aside – “internet” and “web”

You may notice (even if you don’t care much) that I use two words that are often given capital letters – the internet and the web – in lower case. There’s a reason for this. As a technology becomes part of everyday life it tends to lose its capital letters to show it’s everywhere. It’s just not special any more. We don’t write about “the Telephone” or describe someone as “watching the Television.” I believe the internet, and the web, have now earned that same generic status and deserve to lose their capital letters.

No, really – there was a time when the internet just didn’t exist. And it wasn’t so long ago, either. It was only in the late 1990s that the internet changed from being a special place for academics, techies and the military to something ordinary everyday people would take for granted.

Consider this. When Microsoft introduced its first half-decent PC operating system, Windows 95, it started something called Microsoft Network at the same time. This wasn’t an internet gateway site like what’s now called MSN. Microsoft Network was a separate electronic network you dialed into using a phone and a modem (we didn’t have broadband back then). It was a private way to connect your PC to a computer belonging to Microsoft. Bill Gates and friends wasted a lot of money on the Microsoft Network, something they wouldn’t have done if it had been obvious at the time that the internet was going to be there for everyone. And if the big brains at Microsoft missed it, so did a whole lot of others.

At the time, all the big computer networks used by ordinary folk were private, so it’s not entirely surprising Microsoft went down that route. America Online (AOL) and Compuserve, for instance, were both private networks. If you belonged to Compuserve, you dialed up a Compuserve phone number, logged onto a Compuserve computer, accessed information on the Compuserve network and sent emails to other people who were also on Compuserve (luckily, back then, practically everyone with an interest in the technology was on Compuserve).

It wasn’t that the internet didn’t exist – it just wasn’t something anyone at home or school could get onto, as we take for granted now. It seemed like an obscure also-ran for computer science students and people who got excited about Unix (whatever that was) when compared to the sophisticated power of Compuserve, or the graphical ease and elegance of America Online.

The internet was built on the back of ARPAnet, an electronic link that was set up in the days before personal computers. Back then, most computers were controlled by little pieces of cardboard with holes in them – punched cards – but a few computers could be worked with terminals – these looked a bit like PCs, but were little more than electronic typewriters, or a combination of screen and keyboard with no processor or disks. Until the ARPAnet came along, if you wanted to use one of the big, room-filling computers of the time, you had to use a terminal that was directly wired into the computer. Sponsored by ARPA, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPAnet was a way for universities working on defense projects to switch their terminals from one computer to another, even if that computer was hundreds of miles away.

When the ARPAnet started in the late 1960s, there was no real idea of connecting computers together, just of being able to flip from one to another, as if your terminal were directly connected to that particular computer. But soon it was realized that if information could move from computer to terminal this way, then it could also travel from one computer to another. By the early 1970s, the idea of electronic mail had taken off and in 1980 the inspiration came of linking together the various networks that had by now been modeled on ARPAnet to connect them together with an inter-network – a collection of networks that was rapidly becoming worldwide and together would form the internet.

In a sense, not much happened for the next 15 years – amazing, when you think how quickly computer technology changes. The internet grew to connect together many universities and a handful of businesses, but it wasn’t something the general public would have come across. When we reach 1995, and the launch of Microsoft Network, the internet had become more widely available, internet email was more common, but the net was still largely used for connecting a dumb terminal to other computers, or for moving files from one place to another using a clumsy system called FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

What Microsoft hadn’t spotted when they invested all that time and money in Microsoft Network was a burst of unusual internet activity at the CERN laboratory. CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) is a vast international research establishment working on high energy particles, usually described as being in Geneva but in fact straggling over (or, rather, under) the border between Switzerland and France. Apart from its leading role as a sinister location in Dan Brown’s thriller Angels and Demons, CERN is a place where the basic components of the universe are battered together with immense energy in an attempt to analyze their makeup and understand their characteristics. And it was at CERN that the Word Wide Web was born.

In 1990, a scientist at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, thought up a simple way to share information with others, not as an email or as an online discussion in a forum, but using something that worked more like publishing. Academics like Berners-Lee were used to sharing information by getting papers printed in journals, but this was slow and costly. Berners-Lee’s idea was to make it easy to get a document quickly onto the internet so it could be read by other researchers anywhere in the world. Because there were to be no boundaries (rather than any clever foresight that the web would take off the way it did), Berners-Lee’s little system was called the World Wide Web.

At the time, the publishing world had started to use electronic printing. Up to then, printers had to put bits of metal with letters on into a special frame to go into the printing press. (The letter blocks were held in two cases, one above the other. Capital letters were in the upper case, and small letters in the lower case, which is why we have upper and lower case.) With the new electronic devices, documents prepared for print included special instructions to the typesetting machine (big, clunky professional printers), called a markup language.

The markup language told the machine when to insert a new paragraph, or to change font or to print in bold. Unlike the hidden information that controls these settings in a word processor, the markup language was in plain English, distributed through the text, but with special markings that told the typesetting machine these were instructions, not stuff to actually print. Berners-Lee took the same approach with HTML, HyperText Markup Language, which instructed software how to display the documents on his World Wide Web. (If you aren’t familiar with HTML, open a web page in a browser, then take a look at the source. Select Source or Page Source from the View menu. All that stuff that isn’t the text of the page – often in special brackets like this: <title> – is the markup language.)

By the second half of the 1990s the web was fairly easy to get onto, but there was not much to look at if you weren’t in the research community. I can still remember the brief thrill of being able to connect up to a botanical garden site in Australia, and to know that those words I was reading were coming all the way from the other side of the world – but that was about it. It wasn’t exactly life-changing, and there wasn’t much an ordinary person wanted to look at. But with easier tools to put information on the web, the ability to use graphics and pictures in web documents, and the gradual realization by companies that the web was something they could use to make money, it took off like a rocket. In less than ten years the internet went from a technical oddity to a must-have facility that everyone would need access to, whether they were doing business, getting information for their schoolwork or just getting on with life.

What the web is … and isn’t

You don’t need to know anything about the technology behind the web or the internet to use it, but it is helpful to know what it is (and isn’t) as far as being a study facility, if you really want to take charge of the web and get it to do what you want.

Let’s start with what it’s not. It’s not a library. At least, as Spock might have said on the original Star Trek, it’s a library, Jim, but not as we know it. (If you don’t get this reference, do a web search on it’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.) For a start, if the web were a library, it would be one where millions of books were thrown with great force through the windows each and every day to land randomly anywhere in the building. All the time, an army of spiders would be working its way around the library, cataloging what’s in there and leaving cobweb links between the documents. And simultaneously a horde of virtual mice would be nibbling away, ceaselessly destroying information.

There are no librarians to decide what goes in this strange library. Anyone, anyone at all – professor, madman, enthusiast, salesman, crank, terrorist, president, even you – anyone can hurl whatever they like into the library. And at first glance there is no difference between those high-stacked volumes, no way to tell the good from the bad. (Luckily, as we shall find, there are actually plenty of clues if you know how to look for them.) A lot of the people who throw things into the library will be trying to sell something. As well as being the ultimate collection of reference information, it’s like the biggest heap of junk mail order catalogs ever. Yet those salesmen may also provide genuinely useful information, to tempt you to visit their site. And there is no limit to the size of this virtual library. In principle it can just keep on growing and growing for ever.

Here’s something else the web isn’t. It’s not comprehensive. It won’t tell you everything you want to know. And it is never likely to. If you are looking for something that has been the subject of recent research in a university, chances are it’s there. Pretty well any organization that is worth thinking about from the Nobel Prize people to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have a website (try www.nobelprize.org and www.oscars.org), as will any business worth dealing with. Yet there is a surprisingly large amount of useful information that isn’t accessible online yet.

Take books. Wonderful though the internet is, much of the really good stuff is still only to be found in printed books (like this one). Wouldn’t it be really convenient if all those books were on the internet? Surely it should be done as soon as possible. Well, yes, it would be convenient. But the trouble is, there wouldn’t be any new books once the existing titles all became freely available, because the authors wouldn’t be able to make a living. ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Venturing out
• Chapter 2 What to look for
• Chapter 3 Smart searching
• Chapter 4 Amassing media
• Chapter 5 Real people
• Chapter 6 Who do you trust?
• Chapter 7 Collecting output
• Chapter 8 Making text your own
• Chapter 9 Keeping up to date
• Index