webliographies

Webliographies: Helping Students Deal With the Quality and Quantity of Information on the Web

Faculty development in technology at Georgia College & State University has many facets. One of the more successful of these is the Faculty Development Workshop, now in its third year. Faculty submit competitive proposals specifying how they will use the expertise gained in a series of eleven once-a-week full afternoon sessions. Those who are selected receive a new laptop computer to keep for the duration of their tenure if they have attended every session and completed every assignment.

A highly motivated audience like this provides a truly golden opportunity to introduce innovative ideas and be able to expect that they will get a thorough workout. I had been developing such an idea and had all of the pieces in place. It was ready for human subjects. Consequently, I signed-up to present two workshops on the same subject, "Webliographies: How to help students get better information from the web."

Like the traditional bibliography typically found on the last pages of a syllabus, a webliography represents a professor’s carefully considered opinion about where good, relevant information on a given subject may be found. Here’s how it works.

The professor develops a short list of URLs that s/he has found to be especially relevant to a given topic. The URLs can specify an entire web site or just a portion of a web site.

We feed this short list of URLs to a web crawling robot that indexes every significant word on every page it is told to examine. This index is then passed to a search engine that responds to properly formed queries with results that look very much like what you get from one of the very large search engines that purport to index the entire world wide web. The important difference, of course, is that these results are from an expertly selected subset of the web.

Once the index is complete, the professor is given the HTML that makes up the search page. Before uploading this web page to their site on the GC&SU Faculty Web Server (http://www.faculty.de.gcsu.edu), they have the opportunity to customize it by adding a header and footer. With the header and footer in place, this search page fits right in with all of the other pages for an online course syllabus.

When the professor is satisfied with the appearance of the page, s/he sends us the URL to it so that we can make sure that results pages match the appearance of the initial page and that when a student selects “New Search”, they are returned to the initial search page on the professor’s web site. The final result is a fully customized search facility for a course that, like its bibliographic analog, points students in the right directions.

An important option that can be selected is the “agent.” If agents are enabled for one of these sessions, one can ask the agent to repeat a particularly successful search automatically, say, every week. When the agent completes its work, it sends an e-mail message to the requester with a list of links to pages that fit the search criteria and are new. That is, they weren't there the last time the site was crawled.

Of course this is just too good for exclusive use by students. Faculty use it as well to keep tabs on their areas of research interest. Its like having a very good unpaid assistant!

Fifteen faculty signed-up for one or the other of the two Webliography workshops offered electing to give it a try. A menu that enables one to survey the webliography pages created by GC&SU faculty in these workshops may be found at:
http://www.faculty.de.gcsu.edu/~flowney/FDW/webliography_pages.html

Some have created elaborate headers and footers, others are plainer and some are still working on getting their search page up but all are making progress toward helping their students deal more effectively with the quality and quantity of information out there in cyberspace.

Critical Reviews

It's an interesting article and interesting concept. I think it's worth publishing with some revisions.

Biggest concern is that the article needs more information that readers can use to replicate the same kind of service at their own institutions. For example, I'd like to know more about the robot. Was it bought off the shelf? In which case, please identify it. Was it developed locally? Would it be available to readers' campuses?

Is any kind of quality control done on the hits that result from the search? Does somebody do a critical evaluation for relevance? If so, who? The article talks more about the header and footer and page appearance than the results of the search.

Who performs this service? Who (not names) are the "we" and "us" mentioned in the article? Does the library do this? Faculty development center? Anything interesting about the way this program is funded? Laptops for all successful participants is a pretty hefty investment on somebody's part!

What is the "agent" mentioned in the eighth paragraph? Is this another robot?

The link at the end to sample pages is very helpful!!

A couple of other things: Reconcile the use of singular and plural terms. "The professor"...[uploads the page]..."to their site...." is pretty bad grammar. The article has several cases of this.

Edit the use of first person in the second paragraph, which is inconsistent with the rest of the article. Just write objectively about what happened, not what the author did.

In the fifth paragraph, "one of the very large search engines that purport to index the entire world wide web" is incorrect. As of a few months ago, even the most powerful search engines were only getting about 40% of the web.

This is a how-to article on building a webliography. As most campuses have tools and workshops in place to help faculty build webliographies, I see no value in publishing the article.

Webliographies: Helping Students Deal With the Quality and Quantity of Information on the Web

(Reviewer comments in blue throughout and at conclusion)

Faculty development in technology at Georgia College & State University has many facets. One of the mo re successful of these is the Faculty Development Workshop, now in its third year. Faculty submit competitive proposals specifying how they will use the expertise gained in a series of eleven weekly ~~once-a-week full~~ afternoon sessions. Those who are selected receive a new laptop computer to keep for the duration of their tenure if they have attended every session and completed every assignment.

Like the traditional bibliography typically found on the last pages of a syllabus, a webliography represents a professor's carefully considered opinion about where good, relevant information on a given subject may be found. Here's how it works.

The professor develops a short list of URLs that s/he has found to be especially relevant to a given topic. The URLs can specify an entire web site or just a portion of a web site.

Once the index is complete, ~~the~~ professors are is given the HTML that makes up the search page. Before uploading this web page to their site on the GC&SU Faculty Web Server (http://www.faculty.de.gcsu.edu), they have the opportunity to customize it by adding a header and footer. With the header and footer in place, this search page fits right in with all of the other pages for an online course syllabus.

When the professor is satisfied with the appearance of the page, s/he sends us the URL to it so that we can make sure that results pages match the appearance of the initial page and that when a student selects "New Search", they are returned to the initial search page on the professor's web site. The final result is a fully customized search facility for a course that, like its bibliographic analog, points students in the right directions (this last "right directions" is very vague and begs the request, "please elaborate").

An important option that can be selected is the "agent." If agents are enabled for one of these sessions, one can ask the agent to repeat a particularly successful search automatically, say, every week. When the agent completes its work, it sends an e-mail message to the requester with a list of links to pages that fit the search criteria and are new. That is, they weren't there the last time the site was ~~crawled~~ searched.

Of course this is just too ~~good~~ useful for exclusive use by students. Faculty use it as well to keep tabs on their areas of research interest. It's like having a very good unpaid assistant!

Fifteen faculty signed-up for one or the other of the two Webliography workshops offered electing to give it a try. A menu that enables one to survey the webliography pages created by GC&SU faculty in these workshops may be found at: http://www.faculty.de.gcsu.edu/~flowney/FDW/webliography_pages.html

Summary Comments:

This is a creative suggestion for instructors who otherwise might be tempted to argue that their students are poor at searching for and employing useful web-based resources! The commentary is occasionally a little informal for my taste, though this adds somewhat to its charm and energetic presentation. I'd recommend publishing it as a Technology Source Commentary. The author might consider elaborating at the conclusion about creative ways that faculty have already used webliographies in their teaching or about plans for the future such as completely automating the process using CGI scripts and so on; perhaps ideally students might eventually build their own webliographies as part of their online portfolios of writing and reading or instructors might collaborate to build a webliography devoted entirely to particular issues?

This article was interesting but needs additional clarification. What indexing tool is used, who created it, is it generally available and how much does it cost? What search tool is used, how comprehensive is it (the big search engines catch only 15% of the Web), is it generally available, what supporting hardware is needed and how much processing time is involved? Who reviews the results of the search to evaluate the validity or relevance of the sites returned?