Chapter 2 |
2 Finding, using and publishing information on the World Wide WebWhen people enthuse about the Internet, they tend to mean the World Wide Web (which you will often find referred to as ‘the Web’ or ‘WWW’). The Web is the friendly face of the Internet and in most cases simple mouse clicks take you to where you want to go. If you can use a mouse, you can ‘surf’ the Net. The scope of what is on the Web defies listing, so here is a just a flavour:
What is remarkable about the Web is that it makes information so accessible – information which without the Web needs a letter, a phone call or a personal visit to obtain. Now you can have it without fuss right now, and probably for no more than the cost of a local telephone call. As Chapter 6 on the curriculum shows, the ease of obtaining things is opening up possibilities for everyone in the education system. But there is more to the Web than information to browse: there are opportunities to
interact with it too. Not only can you recycle the words and pictures you obtain, you can
also share the results of experiments, take part in a survey or collaborate on a piece of
research.
The World Wide WebOnly a few years ago, you might have connected to the Internet and just seen lists of documents to explore. You would have found the document you needed, copied it to your computer and used various programs to examine it. You used obscure tools such as Lynx, Gopher, FTP and ‘helper applications’. You would probably have been a computer expert. The World Wide Web changed all that. The system invented in 1993 by UK-born Tim Berners-Lee allows people simply to click on the things they want, and without needing much expertise, make use of them. With the technical side hidden, we can examine pages garnished with colour, graphics and multimedia. These ‘Web pages’ offer links to others, so with just another click, we can go and see these too. And thus, with pages stored on computers around the world, linked together like a spider’s web, the World Wide Web was spun. Research institutions – universities and defence establishments – were among the first wave of users of the Internet, which began with four host computers in 1969. With open communication lines stretched between them they used it by means of ‘gophers’ to access journals, show the work they were doing, and create great banks of knowledge to keep up with developments in their research area. Their activity continues today, but millions of businesses, organisations and individuals have joined in to add their contributions to the Web. And as the technology allowed more data to pump round the system, they used multimedia to compete for attention. What was once a mere card index has become a rich and colourful brochure. SoftwareA Web ‘browser’ is the crucial piece of software that lets you see the World Wide Web. Whatever computer you are using, a browser presents information in an almost standard way. Browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer are given away free over the Web, on magazine cover CDs and with Internet subscriptions. When you launch a browser it gets the computer system to connect to the Internet and with a click or two takes you to a menu or ‘home page’. It is from here that you can start to ‘surf’ (move over the surface of) the Web by clicking on underlined or highlighted parts of the screen. These are called links or ‘hypertext links’ and take you to other documents on the Web. The concept is the same as for the hypertext links in computer help files and on CD-Rom software. A browser has an address box or location box. If you want to visit a particular Web site, you can type directly into this box. On keying in an address – usually beginning http:www…, such as http://bbc.co.uk/ – you can go directly there. With some browsers, you can type just bbc.co.uk to arrive at the same place. Given a project such as preparing a newspaper, learners can assemble the material they need from news Web pages. They can view a page, highlight text or pictures and perhaps drag them into a word processor. Or they can save text, pictures or the whole page as a file on disk. In this way they can treat Web pages as raw data to mould to particular purposes. There are several brands of browser. Some offer handy ways of storing pages or different ways of controlling access to the Web. You may find that a feature in one eventually appears in an upgrade of another. The leading browsers for Macintosh and Windows computers are Netscape’s Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. For Acorn RISCOS machines there is Fresco in the Ant Suite (http://www.ant.co.uk). Whichever you have, your browser will display text in different sizes and styles, it will show links to other documents and it will show multimedia such as graphics, audio or video. Every few months a developer introduces a new feature for the Internet: it may be an animated graphic, an audio feature or a new type of database. Rather than insist that you change your browser, the developer will offer a partial upgrade called a viewer, plug-in or ‘control’. Often, the Web site will install this automatically the first time you access this new kind of material. It may help to think of your Internet connection as if it is plumbing. The browser is the tap that gives you the material in the pipes. If a developer offers a new kind of material, you fit extra taps and accessories. Fitting such extras – in other words, upgrading your software – is easy on the Internet: in fact it is an elegant use of the system. Browser software is changing, however. The browser knows how to handle and display almost any kind of computer file. You can test how good it is at this by dragging, say, a picture or spreadsheet file into your browser and, with luck, it should be able to display it. As computers get better at this, the browser may well become the centre of much that you do on a computer, replacing most other software – including word processors. The idea of having a separate browser, or even a word processor, will fade over time as technology develops. For example, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will be built into the latest versions of the Windows system. So whenever you see a document on the screen, a couple of clicks will get it – whether it is on your disk or on the Web. You can find broadly similar developments on other computers such as Apple Macintosh and network computers. How the Web looksAs we have seen, a browser can display many types of computer file, including multimedia. The most basic data sent over the Internet is text. It arrives at the computer quickly and appears on screen faster than you can read it. To make the display more useful, the text of a Web page also contains hidden codes which create headings and tables. Other kinds of media take longer to arrive. With photographs, every part of the image has to be sent dot by dot. With audio, every aspect of the sound has to be coded and sent. With video, a fresh picture as well as sound needs to be sent 25 times for each second of action. As the table below shows, with a modem, a telephone line and optimum conditions, speech, radio and music can arrive as fast as it plays so ‘real-time audio’ is just about practicable. Not so for video – a modem takes at best five minutes (and 40 minutes normally) to deliver a minute’s worth. But at peak times a simple picture can take an age to appear, giving the World Wide Web its well-earned nickname: the World Wide Wait. A faster connection will help, but this comes at a price. Only ‘superhighway’ technologies – the three columns on the right of the table – enable real time TV-quality video.
The table shows how long different materials take to arrive at the computer; the connection you have affects that. These estimates are best times – the actual time depends on how busy the Internet is, and whether someone else is sharing your Internet connection. Education sitesYou will find areas (called ‘sites’ or ‘pages’) on the Web devoted exclusively to schools and colleges. Some Internet providers offer directories of sites to save you time looking for things. For example, if your provider is Research Machines’s Internet for Learning, BT’s CampusWorld, CompuServe, Microsoft MSN, or America On Line (AOL), you will find an education area to use as a jumping-off point on your tour of the Web. If you key in your topic and the age of your group, you will get back a list of useful places to visit. It is a facility that can be extremely useful when it delivers reliable classroom material. Some providers add value to their education service by offering specially commissioned material. These materials are of course intended for you to use but, as always, read the small print about intellectual rights. There are also education sites that you can use regardless of your Internet provider. Special projects such as Schools On Line in the UK or The Global Schoolhouse and Classroom Connect in the US act as ‘one-stop shops’ for teachers. Others include Teleschools and Lingu@NET. Among these, you will find not only resources but also teachers’ discussions, notice boards and activities to involve learners. In time, all sorts of ‘courseware’ will appear. But just as the ideal textbook has yet to be written, the material on the Web is diverse, so it helps to be eclectic. Much of the excitement about the Web is that a great deal is available free. But there are people using energy to sift information, grade it and annotate it in useful ways. Some do this out of altruism, as a way of paying something back to the Web. Grants or sponsorship pays for some of the work, while advertisers renting space on pages pay for some. A few organisations are offering things for free now in the hope of ‘jam tomorrow’. Like it or not, a payment system is evolving for added-value information, products and services. There are people offering course modules, on-line journals and databases. Most offer a free sample of the service. Some are available on subscription; for others you pay as you go. Paying for goods and services over the Internet is now possible – for example, without a single shop you can walk into, Amazon, an American on-line bookshop, had a turnover of ten million dollars in 1996. Increasingly, you will find you need PINs, subscriber passwords and credit card details if you want to use areas of the Web such as the Times Educational Supplement site, which charges an annual fee.
Keeping track of placesPeople say that you can find almost anything on the Web. So, in theory, learners only have to go to the computer ‘cold’ to find the resources they need. With crossed fingers, this may work, but most teachers would be wise to take a more structured approach, previewing the resources they find and devising activities around them. The learnerswill obtain exactly what they need, and they work on their task towards an expected conclusion. The directed approach has been used for centuries and has its merits: it is tidy, focused and the outcomes can be easily assessed. When you go searching for resources, you can get the browser to ‘bookmark’ your best finds (an interesting and helpful metaphor from the world of print). All Web browser software has this facility, which allows you to collect resources. Usually, you just have to click a button or ‘drag’ a link off a page to file it. A colleague may even send you a set of bookmarks via electronic mail. The software may allow you to organise your bookmarks (called ‘favourite places’ on some systems) into topic folders. Indeed, schools and colleges build up collections of these, targeting them to specific lessons. Bookmarks and favourites are other words for the links that you find on a Web page. A link is an address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) describing the unique file location of a document on the Web. URLs usually begin http://www. There are millions of these URLs on the Web and you often see references to them in magazines. On the screen they usually appear, in blue or purple text, as BECTA. Part of a URL, such as www.becta.org.uk/ points to a computer or information server on the Web. When you click on a link, the delay in the response is partly caused by its location being looked up on the big Internet computers. A URL, address, location or link – they all mean the same in this context – may have an end part. For example, the end part of http://www.Becta.org.uk/info-sheets/security.html points to a page (called security.html) that is stored in a folder info-sheets on that computer. It can be tedious typing in long URLs and the system insists on total accuracy for capital letters, back slashes and full stops. Bookmarking is one way of mapping the constantly changing Internet. But, when using computer technology in the classroom, you may find things not going to plan. If the document you bookmarked has been renamed, deleted or moved to another part of the computer serving the information to you, a ‘not found’ message appears. Or the Internet connection or server may be so busy that pages take an age to appear on screen. The Web sites you found in the morning may be inaccessible in the UK in the afternoon (the peak time for people in the USA using the Internet). Opening a new browser window lets you explore elsewhere as you wait, but this is not likely to help you meet your deadline. The Web is by its nature dynamic and never the same two days in succession; this very strength and flexibility can sometimes prove to be a weakness.
Storing Web pagesThe Web pages you view are stored on a computer somewhere in the world. This ‘serves’ the pages to your computer (the ‘client’), and the browser interprets the instructions hidden within the page. When you have a page on your computer you can save it as a file, copy parts into a word-processor file, copy whole sites and sets of pages or, as they say, ‘cache’ them. Taken from the French for hidden, the cache allows you to store away and review the information without having to connect to the Internet to get it again. You can read the material at leisure when you disconnect from the Internet, and so save on phone charges. Using what some call a ‘dead page’ matters if it is about news or travel information; it may not matter at all if it is about, say, Cézanne. So as well as building up a library of bookmarks to useful material, you can keep a copy of the material itself on a disk. Learners can then use it on a network, or even on a computer not connected to the Internet. This can be a very useful way to introduce people to the Web, as you can be sure the pages are there. They load almost instantly; having a limited amount of material avoids distractions too. Caching is not as straightforward as it could be. You have to alter the settings on the options menu of the browser, raising the maximum memory available to as much as 100Mb and making the software never check Web documents. You must also remember to reload pages when you are on line if you think they may have changed since you last visited them. You can use special programs to vacuum up pages, and even to capture whole sites. Examples of these include Webwhacker, Near Site, Internet Odyssey and WebTool. These programs let you organise and recycle the pictures and text they contain. Even so, Web pages that use programs such as Java or CGI (see page XX) may not work when you are off line. Nevertheless, this off-line material has its uses: for example, you can rewrite the material or add pages with questions. It assumes greater importance when it comes to ‘intranets’ (which we discuss in Chapter 2).
Web page broadcasting or ‘push’Rather than visit Web sites to find information yourself (so-called ‘information pull’), you can instead get them to send you their information. This approach, called ‘pointcasting’ (in contrast to broadcasting) or ‘push’, is a dramatically different way of using the Web. Using ‘push’, Web sites are able to transmit pages directly to your computer. You may, for example, ask to receive the daily news, weather reports and share prices; cricket lovers can use Score!watch (www.beeb.com) to receive the latest scores in a box in the corner of the screen. Be aware that you may also pick up vast amounts of advertising with some push services. When you visit a Web site you will be offered the opportunity to subscribe to materials and updates from the site. Some of these offers will be free and possibly carry advertising, while some – teaching materials from a publisher, say – you will have to pay for. The result is that the Web site will start to feed ‘content’ to your machine. Transmission can take place in the background, when Internet traffic is less or when the pushing site has a spare moment. This will work best when your computer is left switched on and has a permanent connection to the Internet. On a network, it may be a dream: you just sit down and see what is new. Like a TV, the screen will show the information in ‘channels’ that you can hop between: the news could be in one channel, an idea for a lesson in another. This push concept is not unlike signing up to a mailing list (see Chapter 3) and watching your mailboxes fill up with whatever takes your interest. But now what is being pushed is Web pages, and Web pages is everything. For schools and colleges, it presents fascinating opportunities to send out circulars, newsletters or whatever to whoever might be interested. The result entirely different from having a Web site that people visit: your visitors can subscribe to your network and when your pages change they will be delivered to the subscribers. People have coined the term ‘extranet’ for the network of people to whom your site pushes material.
Finding informationGetting information out of the Internet, with over a million sites in 160 countries, has been compared to trying to get a glass of water out of a fire hose. If you need information about, for example, an inspection report, a train time, the Science Museum or information linked to a specific organisation, then using bookmarks will work. Organisations working in related areas tend to cross-link to each other, so once you find one, the others are only a mouse click away. Internet directories list thousands of subjects and hundreds of thousands of sites, like Yellow Pages or a giant library index (incidentally, Yellow Pages on-line is one of the most popular UK sites). Organisations and individuals offer their own sets of site links, there is Lingu@NET with its listing of language-related sites updated monthly and there are teachers, Internet providers and support organisations putting together their own favourites. These can save teachers’ time. For an Internet directory, see the search engines Yahoo! and Magellan. But, with so many different sites on the Web, each possibly changing or adding pages daily, there will always be more information out there than can be catalogued manually. There will be times when you need to search the Web yourself. For something topical like information about an erupting volcano, football results or an Australian bush fire, search tools can make the flood of information manageable. Search tools (or ‘search engines’) let you key, say, ‘Aztecs’ or ‘river sediments’ into a box on the screen, and click Search. There are over a dozen ‘search engines’ on the Internet, all free at present but, whichever you choose, it is barely a minute before you see a list of links or URLs that match your query. Most search engines are commercial. The more you use them, the more they attract paying advertisers to their pages. Besides their names like Yahoo!, Excite and Alta Vista, there is something awesome about search engines. Many use software called a knowledge robot or intelligent agent that continuously looks (or ‘crawls’) across the Internet indexing its finds. When an organisation registers a new Internet name, such as myschool.sch.uk, the search engines find and note it automatically. These crawlers continually visit every document on the Web (many millions of them), and index them on powerful computers. Your search actually interrogates this index, not the whole of the Web – this is why answers seem to appear so quickly. Matches are ranked by the system as it attempts to best-guess what you want; it does this based, for example, on how often your search term occurs or how close it is to another in a document. Even so, if you key in ‘marketing’, for example, a search engine would find hundreds of thousands of documents and overload you with information. As technology develops, search tools will better understand our requests, so you will be able to key them in natural language, ‘Which snakes are native to the UK?’, for instance (AskJeeves is a search engine which works just like that already; it automatically turns your question into search terms and submits them to other search engines). In the meantime, the way forward is to repeat the search by using other words or logical operators like ‘and’ or ‘or’ to obtain a manageable return. With some engines you can type phrases in speech marks – for example, "get a manageable return" and only matches with that phrase will be listed. Incidentally, this is a handy way of seeing if work has been plagiarised. Because they work in different ways, one search engine may appear more intelligent than another. For instance, some are better at supplying unique, instead of repeat, references to the same resources. For a learner’s first searches, teachers can provide search words they know will work. They might start with a topic near to their students’ hearts, such as football, music or their own name. Learners may need guidance on the quality of the information they find. The Web is not managed by any particular organisation, so there are few guarantees about what is accurate and impartial. Ways of evaluating Web information are to look for a date on the page, see who produced the information, or visit other places to seek confirmation. The issue of finding useful data is in no small way behind the renewed call in education to develop information skills. In many teaching situations, a half-hour trawl to find something about, say, Van Gogh, may be a waste of time and, in any case, much information about Van Gogh can be found from books. Before learners are asked to use the Internet to obtain information they should be asked to consider alternatives nearer at hand, thus freeing the Internet for what it does best. But in the context of learners developing information skills, working as a team, or refining searches, a seemingly frustrating 30 minutes will have its gains – especially if they are asked to review their experience. In a trawl across the Web, learners will discover facts about the painter, his contemporaries, or his biographers on the way to finding something else. But with computer and lesson time so precious, there is a need to use the Internet purposefully. Which search engine is best varies over time, if only because when the best get too popular and heavily used, they slow down and people switch to another. Sadly, some are not suitable for school use because of the amount of undesirable material they list: even an innocent search for, say, ‘video’ or ‘CD-Rom’ may produce unfortunate results.
Java and Active XIn the search for better performance, more features, and therefore a market lead, developers are looking at ways of making the Web more interactive, thus enabling learners to use simulations and models over the Web. This is done by sending small programs, using languages and scripts like Java, Active X or Shockwave, to your computer which then runs them when needed. Java is the language at the heart of the network computer which, in some situations, may replace today’s personal computer. The network computer does not store its programs on disk; instead it gets them over a network. They say it will be cheap to run and easier to manage than a personal computer. The idea is actually an old one: you connect cheaper computers to a network and when you need to do some word processing, the machine loads the application from a central computer. The new idea is that the network computer can connect to the Internet and use applications written in Java, which can work on any computer system. An example from mathematics is The Picking Game where a Java ‘applet’ (mini-application) running on your computer lets children play ‘guess the number’ games against the computer.
CookiesThe commercial interest in the Web has led to technologies that enable business to take place. At some Internet sites you will be asked if you want to accept a ‘cookie’. This can be a way for the site to identify you and your interests and match its selling tactics to your preferences. A cookie is small file that is stored on your hard disk and contains code. If you signed into the site, the cookie might store your logon details – so that the next time you visit, the cookie may save you the trouble of entering them again. But ‘cookies’ have other uses. If you went to a search engine and looked for something about soccer, it might send you a cookie that records your interest. So in future, if you asked for something about football the search engine would know that you do not mean American football. The site might even show you an advertisement about sports gear and keep track of which advertisements you have seen. Cookies, then, are a way to provide you with customised content such as local news. Used in education, they could record students’ progress and provide them with differentiated materials. But realistically this is dreaming. At the moment, cookies are used as market research tools which may generate a daily pile of junk mail – or information. (It depends on how you see it.) Those who want to stay anonymous or who resent an invasion of their privacy should be aware of leaving these ‘mouse droppings’. You can get your computer to alert you to a ‘cookie’ which has been sent. You can refuse to accept it or simply delete the cookie files on your computer.
Security certificatesWith anyone allowed to publish and sell on the Web, people are looking for ways of guaranteeing financial transactions. With these, the ability of each of the contracting parties to deliver their side of the deal is important. A solution takes the shape of a site security certificate shown as a golden key or voucher on your browser window (look at the bottom left-hand corner of the Netscape window to see the key). The certificate may come from music shops, banks, shopping areas, travel agencies or bookshops; it is granted by an independent organisation which checks out the site’s credentials and procedures. On these sites any credit card details you send when you order a product are encrypted and handled in a secure way by the recipient. This way you can be sure you will receive the goods and that the correct amount will be debited, while the seller can be sure that you are who you say you are and that you will pay the supplier. Training and management tips
Publishing on the WebIn addition to drifting over other people’s work on the World Wide Web, learners can take an active part in putting their work on it. They can interact with a real audience who can judge their contribution on its merits unprejudiced by awareness of the age or ability of the author. This audience idea crops up repeatedly in the curriculum section where subject specialists explain how writing for peers and parents motivates students. More than this – people talk about learner control and autonomy, about participation and, with this new freedom to publish, about democracy, too. With modern software, publishing is no longer difficult, slow and expensive and no longer controlled by publishers, printers and commercial interests. Of course, the downside is a proliferation of vanity publishing and information of variable quality. Hundreds of UK schools and colleges have Web sites on which they publish news, diary dates, homework details and examination results. Some have not been slow to see the marketing possibilities. There are prospectuses with photographs taken with digital cameras, crests and mottoes. There are calls for project partners, appeals for funds, thanks and links to local businesses, even live Web cameras. Unlike the same kind of thing on paper, all of this is easy to update. Networks and intranetsSchools and colleges are turning their networks of computers into an internal Internet, called an intranet. It looks like the Internet, it talks like the Internet and it may even connect to the Internet, but the main thing about intranets is that getting information from them is now remarkably easy. The term intranet is often used loosely to describe a set of Web pages produced in an institution or gathered from other Web sites. In fact, an intranet is something more. On a traditional local area network, you might use a word processor or spreadsheet to look at some facts or figures, or use an administration package to look at attendance details. In essence, you use a range of different packages to view the information on the networked computers. On an intranet all this information is stored in Web-readable form on a central server and you use a single package, a Web browser, which as we’ve seen can view almost any type of data, and can even be used to change or update the data. The potential of this is considerable: students can effectively save and publish their work on the network in one step, and this can be accessed from a class Internet page. The intranet can structure a great deal of school and college information – schemes of work, exam papers, student records, links to off-line resources, even tutorial modules. Intellectual rights permitting, it can collect together like a set of trophies whole chunks of material gathered from the Web. It can be a window on databases of timetables, exam entries and test marks – all of which can be accessed using a Web browser regardless of which program created it. The institution can decide which data it wants outsiders to see. Some of the data will require password access and some will be on the public area of the Web site. In this context, people talk about ‘firewalls’: a firewall is the security fence between your private data and what can be accessed from outside, protecting it from malicious access. It is not essential to have a full-time connection to the Web to have an intranet, but several interesting opportunities appear if you have. A welfare officer might connect to the Web to check on attendance data, a parent can check the sports timetable and learners can look up things in the library. In the past,such things used to be alarmingly difficult to set up, with each new feature needing a special configuration. Now that Internet protocols enable computers on the Internet to talk to each other, the capabilities of the Web can be exploited over a network. An unusual side effect is that, using software add-ons such as NetMeeting, distant students can talk over the intranet or the Internet. With the same document on their screens, they can discuss and make changes to it. One other facility is that you can attach cameras to network stations and then use them, like a video-telephone, for internal communications. And when an information superhighway with faster connections is laid down, such video-telephones might become the normal mode of international communication. While some say that the Internet is becoming the centre of all existence, or that it is all moving too fast to implement, the value of video-telephones to language learning is already clear. Tools for publishingMany Internet service providers will allocate space for publishing your work on the Internet – as may your network administrator if you have an intranet. Most have rules about what you can publish and where the work should be stored. To produce hard copy, using word processing and desktop publishing, you write text, format it, add graphics and click on Print. Internet publishing is only a step or two beyond this. You use a word processor to create the text, add graphics and use an ‘HTML editor’ to format it. You then connect to the Internet provider, and run a special program to send the work to its destination. People call the business of putting work on the Web ‘frictionless publishing’. How frictionless it is depends on the Internet tools you have: current machines include tools expressly designed for publishing. With them, instead of a clicking on Print, you click on Publish to the Web, and the work is sent to your Internet provider. For example, Microsoft Publisher is software which enables you to assemble text and
graphics on screen, tests your pages to see if the links within them work, and lets you
‘publish to the Web’. Microsoft Word 97, widely-used word-processing software,
After a late start, a range of increasingly sophisticated Internet publishing software is becoming available for Acorn RISCOS machines. Dalriada have a drag-and-drop editor, R-Comp have HTML Edit 2 and Ant offer their Ant Suite. Details can be found in the authoring tools section at Becta’s Web site. Advanced toolsThose with more ambitious plans for a Web site – beyond, say, a dozen pages – will appreciate the more powerful packages. Titles such as Fusion, PageMill, FrontPage and World Wide Weaver can automatically maintain a contents page or help manage the way in which Web pages link together. On a larger site, for example, making a link change on one page can involve untold editing of others to update them. Instead of going round in circles, you can have one of these packages check every link and tell you if anything is missing. They can often do a spelling check or find and replace words across a whole Web site. Some packages help you create pages with special features. For instance, your group may survey opinions or collate data from experiments which involves collecting data from a Web page form. You may want a graphic menu on your Web site, or need to split the screen into separate frames with a different page in each. A browse of the Web will show you that these special features are common. For example, all the search engines use fill-in forms, and so do the sites where you register your details. If the school has expertise in ‘CGI scripting’, which makes such uses possible, your site can feature surveys and results forms. Take care not to ask too much on a form, or people will pass over such pages. Those who do complete them need to be told how you will use the data – and that you will be complying with the Data Protection Act if you plan to store personal details, i.e. by being registered to store such data. (Note though that, according to one survey, typically 40% admit to providing false information.) Many sites use pages with frames which divide up a single screen into smaller areas with perhaps a menu in one frame and information in another, but remember that not everyone will be using a browser that displays frames and, in any case, not everyone likes using them. The use of these features on your pages, while not entirely straightforward, is getting easier. Like the difference between a handsaw and band saw, the advanced packages can help. Microsoft Office 97 shows what is possible without programming skills. It includes a spreadsheet that can save data as Web pages with tables and a presentation program that can automatically turn lecture slides into a set of pages in seconds. Its database program can produce Web pages from information held on disk. Note that some features, like dynamic pages which change as new data is provided (for example an on-line database form), may need support from the Internet provider to make them work. HTMLHyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the computer programming language that Web browsers on any computer can understand. Web pages are files written in HTML sent through the Internet to your browser, which translates the language into different types of heading, tables, and lines to build up the screen display. If you look at the contents or ‘source code’ of an HTML language file, you will see ‘tags’ for each part of the document. Some tags specify the text style, position a graphic or draw a table. Some break the page into the viewing areas we call frames and some use other languages such as Java or Visual Basic to achieve special effects. HTML files can be very compact, so they can transfer quickly. They can be created and read by Macintosh, Windows, Acorn RISCOS, Unix and other systems. It is possible to use a word processor to create a HTML file to publish work. Students have been introduced to computer programming or coding through creating HTML pages. HTML editors make the job easier by showing layout changes as you make them. Many word processors and publishing programs make the job easier still by hiding the underlying tags and showing you just the end result as it appears on screen. This development has got to the point of making any career in ‘hard coding’, or working with raw HTML, into a very short one. Browsers show page layout in slightly different ways, which is a big issue in publishing – a Web newspaper may not look the same on different screens. Like most languages, HTML continues to develop, and publishers often try to extend the language to improve consistency between browsers or to build complex pages more easily. For this reason, you will want to keep your browser up to date. Typically browsers are upgraded every four months, a period that some are calling ‘a Web year’. Designing for the WebPeople spend an average of 15 seconds looking at a Web page, so if you want anyone to linger at your Web site you will need to offer something special. One school of thought says that if a page takes longer to load than you can hold your breath, it is poorly designed and no one will stay on your site. As in any publishing, the early stages in communicating effectively in this new medium are best devoted to thinking about purpose and audience. The audience for a prospectus may be obvious. Its purpose may be to impress parents and recruit students – which is not quite the same as providing them with information. Impressing people is something that schools and colleges have tended to employ outsiders to do by means of traditional marketing. It follows then, that you would not make public anything that might tarnish your image. But rather than hide behind a veneer, educational institutions of all kinds are using the Web to show the work that they are doing. There are repositories of notes, class work and learning materials for all to see – creating the impression of a place alive with learning. There are exemplar sites that engage outsiders, seek feedback or present the institution as part of its community. Learners can be involved at many levels, and easily motivated to produce their ‘best’ work. Audience certainly comes to the fore when children publish their poetry or writing. At once their audience is real and potentially world wide (but how do the audience show their appreciation and do the producers of the information really care about their reaction?). Like pinning up work on a notice board or including it in the school magazine, publication on the Web is the new medium for vanity publishing which teachers can exploit. But even with such a drive to communicate, there is a subtle difference between ‘let’s provide something useful’ and ‘let’s build a Web site like everyone else’. The difference ought at least to ensure that material which serves no purpose in the public domain is kept at base. Examining what other people are doing is a good way to start. The Web is fertile ground
for learning about media and communication. You might like to begin by capturing a set of
pages and letting a group explore these off line. They could use a reviewer’s sheet,
based on the points raised in this section,
The extraordinary thing about the Web as a medium is that the material – text, pictures, sounds and ideas – can be recycled. By working on text, instead of just criticising it, learners can try to improve it. The idea that you can improve on something runs right through this medium: people save pages as ‘source’ code – the HTML language – and adapt them for your own use. It may seem like plagiarism, and run close to infringing intellectual rights, but it can lead to creative work all the same. There is plenty more advice on the Web about how to create pages: the RM Internet for Learning site and BT CampusWorld are among the places to look. Examples of well-constructed and useful school and college sites are listed in the Appendix. Sending work to the WebOne of the last vestiges of yesterday’s Internet is the way that you send work to the Web. With luck, you will never knowingly use a program called File Transfer Protocol (FTP) but it is that which allows you to post the work you have created. You connect to your Internet service provider in the usual way, and launch this program (or it may actually be built into your software). You then send all the files that belong to the Web site. It will save you picking off files individually if you keep all these files (and no others) in a single separate folder. In some cases you will need to use a password to enter your Web storage space, and you may see the folders on the computer you are sending to. From here it may be a matter of dragging files from one folder to another, as you might if you were copying files in the usual way. A logical next step would be to tell others that your site now exists, indicating what they will find there. After building your pages, you can go to a search engine such as Lycos, register your site and describe its contents. Or you can use software such as the Exploit Submission Wizard, which will register your site at several search engines in a single sweep. And if your target audience is other schools and colleges, some education sites have places where you can register and be found. Traditional media are still useful in promoting a site, as in TV advertisements showing a company’s Internet address. It will help to include yours on letterhead and leaflets, along with the usual address and telephone and fax numbers. Names on the InternetSome educational institutions, as well as many businesses, like to register themselves on the Internet with an exclusive ‘domain name’. Domain names are human-friendly addresses – much like personal car plates – and the cause of considerable scrambling for choice names in business. You do not have to do this to simply get your pages displayed, because most Internet service providers offer you space as part of your connection deal. They supply the storage space and encourage you to use it. But if you want to be found easily by name, as in Xemplar.co.uk or rmplc.co.uk you can ask your service provider, or an agency called an Internet Presence Provider to register a domain name. They work to naming protocols established by the industry and allocate names such as myschool.sch.uk for around £200, and on a first-come basis. They also record your domain name (actually it is kept as a four-part number) on a database on the big Internet computers. From then on, entering a link or URL will find your Web site, and should you move your site to another service, you can ask the provider to change your record. Larger schools and colleges might do this if they choose to run an Internet site directly from their network or intranet. Web page design tips
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