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"If you can determine how many of your students can access the Web, and how easy or difficult it is for them to do so, you can make an informed decision on how much Web technology will be useful to you in your teaching." |
You don’t want to further harm already marginalized students by making access to Web technology a key component of your course if not everyone has equal access. On a more positive note, if it turns out that everyone in your class has easy access to the Web, this in itself may provide some motivation for expending effort on learning how to use Web technology in your classes. Here’s the experiment. On your home page, put a link in a fairly prominent place to your "WWW Access Survey." This link will take students to a Web page containing a form allowing them to input data of interest to you (e.g., name, e-mail address, how difficult is was to get online, how difficult it was to fill out the survey, etc.). (I’ll describe in detail one way to implement such a form below.) When you want your students to take the survey, give them the Web address of your homepage (e.g., www.personal.kent.edu/~brosmait), not the address of the form itself. Part of the purpose of this exercise is to see how well your students can navigate the Web. In addition to whatever classwork you’ve already got assigned, ask them on a Monday (or Tuesday) to fill out the form before the next class meeting. (My experience has been that if you allow them a weekend, too many students forget to do it.) Don’t show them in class what the survey looks like, or how to fill it out. Again, part of the aim of the assignment is to see how well your students can use Web technology independently. An important part of this assignment is to tell your students that if they are not able to access the Web to fill out the survey, they must hand in a one-page typed description of the steps they took to try to gain access, including what lab on campus they went to, how long the wait was, the name of the person at the help desk, and the phone number there. If they tried to call in and couldn’t get a modem connection, they should give you a list of the time periods they called, and how many calls they made in each period. This way, you can give students who can’t get access full credit for the assignment, while at the same time making it worthwhile for other students to expend the effort required to get on the Web and fill out the survey. The survey form can be easily implemented by using what’s known as a mailto form. For this kind of form, the user clicks on a "SUBMIT" button and the responses are sent to you in an email message. You can see an example of such a form at www.personal.kent.edu/~brosmait/cyber/surveysample.html. It’s just a regular Web page written in HTML. Feel free to go to the page and use the "save as" option on your browser to put a copy of it on your hard drive. You can then edit it for your own purposes, making the changes suggested in the comments in the file. (You can also use the "view source" option in your Web browser to see the comments if you just want to take a quick look.)
This kind of form is easy to write, and easy to use from the student side. A drawback is that the e-mail result you’ll receive won’t be easy to read. It will be a long string of characters of the form NAME=STRING separated by ampersands, e.g.,
FORM=SAMPLE&COURSE=LOGIC&NAME=Jim+Shorts&EADDRESS=
jshorts%40null.com&DIFF=EASY&BRWSTYPE=GRAFB&BROWSER=
Netscape+Navigator
(Webmaster's Note: The example above was broken across multiple lines to solve display problems in this online document. The example in the author's original text was one long, unbroken string of characters with no line feeds or hard returns. -JKZ.)
It’s not easy to read, but you can parse it without too much trouble. (Note the plus sign used to indicate a space, and the "%40" to represent "@".) If you want to see how this works in action, download the sample form, edit it to put your email address in the place indicated in the comments, and mount it on your Web site. Then use the form and compare the "raw" HTML version of the form to the email message you receive. You’ll know which one it is because the "Subject" of the message will be "Form posted from Mozilla." (Don’t ask me what that means. It’s an inside joke at Netscape.) The advantage of mailto forms is that you can easily write one yourself and get going on your survey right away. A disadvantage is that not all browsers (in particular, Internet Explorer) support them. If most of the computers at your institution are running Netscape Navigator, however, you’ll be OK. (It’s a good idea to put an e-mail link somewhere on the form for people using different browsers.)3The Web survey is a worthwhile activity. We’re still at a transitional point in the integration of Internet technology into the classroom, and students vary widely in their expertise and access to the Web. While many students view Web surfing as a natural activity, many of them are scared of computers or unfamiliar with the technology. If your situation is such that you’re not teaching students fresh out of technologically advantaged high schools, taking a Web-based survey is a good way to find out how well your particular students can navigate the Web.
2. Taking Advantage of Existing Resources
Once you’ve determined how many of your students can access the Web, you’ll be able to decide how much effort you want to devote to developing Web resources for them to use. Because of the wealth of resources out there, you really don’t need to spend too much effort to get your students started. An easy thing I’ve done with some success is to put together an annotated list of links to particular resources I’d like my students to be aware of. You can see my list at www.personal.kent.edu/~brosmait/phil_refs.html. Students can search the Web themselves, even using the Philosophy-dedicated search engines, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll find relevant quality materials. You can make sure they do by selecting some good starting points from which they can begin their explorations. It’s important to provide annotations so that students have some idea of where each link is taking them. Otherwise, they tend to get discouraged if they wind up in too many Web sites that don’t address their particular interests. It’s also important to find some sites that you feel handle the topics of interest appropriately, because otherwise there is no telling what kind of misinformation your students will come across. Pretty much everything looks good on the Web, despite the quality of its content. The signal-to-noise ratio is depressingly low on the Web, and there are an awful lot of Web pages out there. Happily, there is some excellent stuff on the Web—you just need to give your students some pointers. My experience in providing a list of resources is that students who like to use the Web really take advantage of it, sometimes bringing points they’ve noticed on the Web into class discussion. This in turn stimulates a few more students to look on the Web for topics relevant to class. And the best thing is that you can make available to students materials on topics that you just don’t have time to cover in class. This is a very easy way to extend learning beyond class discussions and homework. The advantage to this approach is that it doesn’t call for much of a time investment on your part. The disadvantage is that (unless you’re very lucky) it doesn’t allow you to provide students with a set of Web resources specific to your course.3. Creating Your Own Interactive Resources
I said earlier that the stress would be on easy things you can do with the Web. I’m going to describe an easy way to make interactive quizzes that your students can take on the Web. The quizzes use JavaScript so that a student can click on a button and have the quiz graded automatically, indicating which answers are correct and which are incorrect.4 Students like these quizzes because the self-grading feature gives them immediate feedback in privacy. The use of JavaScript allows the Web page itself to be self-grading, so there’s no connection back and forth with a database to check the answers and (possibly) keep track of how many times the student has tried the quiz. So students know that they can retake a quiz as many times as they need to. One disadvantage of JavaScript, though, is that if you know what to look for, you can use the "view source" option on your browser to see all the correct answers. Since I use these quizzes for practice, I don’t care. Just having the answers is no help to a student (unless he or she also reads the questions to see what they are answers to!). Another disadvantage to JavaScript is that not all browsers support it. The dialect of JavaScript I’ve used is parsed correctly by Netscape Navigator, which is fine for me, since that’s the browser mounted on all the machines on my campus. But beware that while Internet Explorer supports JavaScript, Microsoft has implemented a dialect different enough so that my quizzes don’t work on the Internet Explorer (Author's Note: These quizzes now work with the latest versions of the Microsoft Internet Explorer, beginning with version 5.0. This is due to changes in the Explorer, not the quizzes! -BJR.). So as with many things associated with computer technology, if you’re in the right situation, these quizzes are very quick and easy to implement. Otherwise, implementing them is complicated and time-consuming! I believe that enough universities have adopted Netscape Navigator as their default Web browser to make these quizzes easy for other instructors to use. If you are not such a person, I apologize.5 You can see a sample quiz at www.personal.kent.edu/~brosmait/cyber/quizsample.html. I’ve put comments in the quiz that can be seen if you use the "view source" option in your browser. The comments tell you what changes you’ll need to make to adapt the quiz to your own purposes. This sample quiz uses "radio buttons" for input, which work well for a multiple-choice format. For some situations, however, you might want to use a "selection box" for input. A sample quiz that uses selection boxes can be seen at www.personal.kent.edu/~brosmait/cyber/quizsample2.html, and as with the other sample quiz, you can use the "view source" option in your browser to see the comments explaining how it operates. If you want to see how I’ve used the quizzes in a course, you can look at www.personal.kent.edu/~brosmait/syl/21002_s99_syl.html#pquiz for a list of hyperlinks to some quizzes. The lower-numbered quizzes use mostly radio buttons, while the higher-numbered quizzes use selection boxes. I’ve only used interactive practice quizzes for my Introduction to Formal Logic classes, but they can be easily adapted for other philosophy courses. I’ve found that the interactive quizzes are popular with students. They give students a good idea of what the quizzes I’ll give in class will be like, and also encourage students to perform self-assessments throughout the semester and get a sense of what topics they should study some more. I’ve also found that the self-grading feature of the quizzes motivates more students to do them. It’s fun to press a button and see which questions you answered correctly. I’ve found that these interactive quizzes encourage students to work on some extra problems, thereby getting more practice than we can get in "real time" in logic class.
4. Conclusion
We’ve examined three easy approaches (admittedly, some easier than others!) to using Web technology in conjunction with your classes. I encourage you to try them all, especially the Web access survey. If you can determine how many of your students can access the Web, and how easy or difficult it is for them to do so, you can make an informed decision on how much Web technology will be useful to you in your teaching.
Notes
1. I’ve put together a Web page that contains hyperlinks to all the resources discussed in this article, as well as some more tips on how to adapt these techniques to particular situations. You can find it at www.personal.kent.edu/~brosmait/cyber.
2. You’ll be in the best position to take advantage of these ideas if you already have a home page and know a little bit about Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). You don’t need to know much. As long as you can recognize an HTML tag (e.g., <P>) and know what HTML comments look like, you’ll be able to put the techniques described in this article to use. HTML comments begin with the characters '<!' (i.e., a less-than sign followed immediately by an exclamation point) and end with the characters '-->' (i.e., two contiguous hyphens immediately followed by a greater-than sign).
3. After you’ve used mailto forms for a while, you’ll want to find a better solution. What exactly this is depends upon your programming acumen and how well your institution provides support to faculty developing Web pages. Some links to places to look for suggestions are on the Web page associated with this article (see note 5, below).
4. I got the idea for this technique from Steve Hackett at Humboldt State University. You can find his Web site at www.humboldt.edu/~envecon.
5. I would be very interested to hear from anyone who figures out how to port these quizzes to the Internet Explorer, especially if you do it in such a way that the quizzes will work in both browsers (instead of requiring separate versions for each browser). Depending upon what version of Explorer you are using, you’ll get an error message when the quiz loads (older versions), or the quiz will load fine, but pressing the grading button does nothing (newer versions). So it’s not clear to me what the problem is. (There’s probably a JavaScript debugger that can be run through Explorer, but consistent with my focus on easy Web techniques, I haven’t tried to find out if it exists or how to use it.)