Teaching with Technology: A Review of Indexes on the WebA Review by Andy Jones
Coordinator, Computer-Aided Instruction Program
The English Department
U.C. Davis
A recent study estimates that the world wide web holds over two billion web pages, and that it is growing at a rate of seven million pages a day. Some search engines, such as Google, have indexed more than half those pages, but they still have trouble organizing and presenting information in a way that makes sense to the average web-surfer. As is the case at most large universities, faculty and students here at U.C. Davis increasingly rely on web-based information to enhance our research, our teaching and our studies, and therefore we recognize the importance of web directories, such as The Open Directory Project and The Librarians' Index to the Internet, for these and others have begun to categorize all that data responsibly.
If you are interested in the field of instructional technology--that is, in innovative uses of computer networks, new and familiar technological tools, and the academic resources available on the Internet and in library databases-- you will appreciate the work of those researchers who have already evaluated and collected the best resources on teaching with technology. One such author and web-publisher is Michael Hall, a senior program officer in the Research Division at the National Endowment for the Humanities, who has collected and organized hundreds of links about academic computing on his site "Teaching with Electronic Technology," available at http://www.wam.umd.edu/%7Emlhall/teaching.html.
Hall's site has it all. Whether you are interested in the supposed tradeoffs between access and quality or between technology and content; whether you are curious about guidelines for the educational uses of networks or the surprising uses of a no-frills virtual classroom; or whether you'd like to review the many academic computing centers at other universities, from the "Center for Instructional Technology" at UNC, Chapel Hill, to the Instructional Technology Program at U.C., Berkeley, Hall's site acts as an excellent portal for all your investigations. The site’s logical categories are particularly welcome, for they help the user to process the hundreds of listed links. The section on General Resources, for instance, includes publications and discussions of instructional technology, including recent articles on "Evaluating Web Resources," and groundbreaking favorites, such as the 1945 Vannevar Bush essay, "As We May Think," which is often seen as a foundational document of our current information revolution. The "Institutional Support" section highlights a few academic computing centers that serve some of the same functions of our own Teaching Resources Center "Using Technology in Teaching" Page, the Arbor, and the Instructional Technology and Digital Media Center. The "Institutional Projects" section "links to large scale institutional projects related to the development of teaching with technology," including the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Finally the "Resources for Teachers" section includes over 100 sites targeted at a wide range of disciplines. Surely you'll find resources there, and throughout Hall's site, that will be relevant and helpful.
Hall's site is the best, but it doesn’t cover everything. Many researchers in computer-aided instruction turn to the University of Colorado at Denver IT site the way that writing teachers and their students turn to the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University: each is a pioneer in its field, and each offers invaluable resources. This instructional technology site, titled simply "Instructional Technology Connections," seems more modest than Hall's: its first page lists only a search field and 12 categories of links with titles like "Theory & Philosophy in Education, Technology and Culture," "Current Research about Learning and the Cognitive Sciences," and "On-line Journals in Education, Communications and Culture." Each of these links, however, introduces the user to dozens of other sites, most of them hosted by universities and academic organizations. The "Teaching and Learning on the Internet" section offers the most practical advice, and is closest in subject-matter and scope to Michael Hall’s site. The Denver site is less well-organized and visually than Hall’s, though, and less up-to-date: many of the sites on the "Teaching" page are either potentially obsolete (18 from 1995) or dead (that is, they link to a "file not found" page). Although the site would benefit from some purging, you’ll find here many resources not collected elsewhere.
Two other indexes are worth visiting. Anyone who teaches or studies in the Humanities should bookmark Alan Liu’s "Voice of the Shuttle" site. According to the "About VOS" page, Voice of the Shuttle offers over "70 pages of links to humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet. Its mission has been to provide a structured and briefly annotated guide to online resources that at once respects the established humanities disciplines in their professional organization and points toward the transformation of those disciplines as they interact with the sciences and social sciences and with new digital media." The most relevant of Liu’s 70 pages for this review is his "Teaching Resources" page, which includes a "Technology of Teaching" section that offers interested researchers over 50 links to others’ sites and projects (though many of the links here also require updating).
Finally, an outfit called CBEL has created a bare-bones directory of 129 links on instructional technology, most of them current. This site includes helpful headings (such as "Student Assessment," "Network Learning," and "Course Website Software") but no annotations, so you’ll have to decide what to explore based on titles alone. If you find something worth using, be sure to share it with a colleague, with the Forum on Institutional Applications of Technology, or with me. I will continue to post suggestions, tips and workshop handouts at the English Department’s Computer-Aided Instruction Site (http://cai.ucdavis.edu) with the hope that we at U.C. Davis can continue to encourage research and collaboration in the growing field of instructional technology, both here and amongst the virtual visitors to our campus websites.
Recently I've also been investigating the ways that one can use audio to support cross-disciplinary courses as well as my own experiments in public affairs programming on community radio. I welcome all feedback.
See the published version of this review in the November/December 2000 IT Times.