How students evaluate information and sources when searching the World Wide Web for information

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become the biggest information source for students while solving information problems for school projects. Since anyone can post anything on the WWW, information is often unreliable or incomplete, and it is important to evaluate sources and information before using them. Earlier research has shown that students have difficulties with evaluating sources and information. This study investigates the criteria secondary educational students use while searching the Web for information. 23 students solved two information problems while thinking aloud. After completing the tasks they were interviewed in groups on their use of criteria. Results show that students do not evaluate results, source and information very often. The criteria students mention when asked which criteria are important for evaluating information are not always the same criteria they mention while solving the information problems. They mentioned more criteria but also admitted not always using these criteria while searching the Web.     

Sexualities, technologies, and the teaching of writing: A critical overview

In this introduction to a special issue of Computers and Composition, the authors critically review current literature on computer-assisted writing pedagogies that grapple with issues of sexuality. Although this body of work is small, it points to provocative ways to develop our students’ critical and rhetorical sensibilities about the constructions of sexuality in our culture. Further, such work innovatively addresses the place of networked communication technologies in the interrogation of such constructions. The authors conclude with both an introduction of the work in this special issue that addresses the intersection of sexuality studies and computer-assisted writing studies and with a call for additional work in this field.     

Web-Based Reputation Management Systems: Problems and Suggested Solutions

Individuals who use the World Wide Web (WWW) to purchase goods and obtain information face a high level of uncertainty as to the quality of those goods and information. Reputation management systems are one way in which information about past transactions can be used to form judgments regarding the quality of goods and information obtained via the WWW. This paper examines current approaches used in reputation management systems and outlines six main problems with them. The paper suggests how these problems can be solved and develops an equation that can handle many of the problems. Implications for practitioners and researchers are discussed.     

How did university departments interweave the Web: A study of connectivity and underlying factors

This paper presents two studies of the use of the WWW in Scottish universities and American land-grant universities. First, we investigated the relationship between the organisational profile of a university department in Scotland and its structural connectivity on the WWW. A Spearman rank order correlation analysis revealed a number of strong correlation relationships between structural connectivity measures and the organisational profile based on research assessment exercise ratings, teaching quality assessments, student–staff ratios and funding levels. Linkage patterns from 13 Scottish academic sites to commercial sites in Britain and America highlighted the impact of culture and the appropriateness of information technologies on the acceptance of the WWW. The second study is a content survey of WWW-based education activities in American land-grant universities to investigate successful applications of these enabling techniques in education. The two studies together highlighted cultural, political and technological interactions in the use of the WWW.     

An integrated CSCW architecture for integrated product/process design and development

Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) is increasingly being used by engineering design teams to reach a consensus on a range of design issues. CSCW systems are designed to increase the effectiveness of decision-makers by facilitating information exchange, retrieval, sharing and use. They encourage interactive information exchange and have the potential to reduce diseconomies associated with design activities, member dominance, social pressure, inhibition of expression, and other difficulties encountered by project teams. The use of CSCW is expected to have a favorable impact on the group decision-making process and the quality of the resulting decision. In this paper, a general CSCW architecture has been developed to support integrated product/process design and development will be presented. The architecture has been tested extensively on a representative industrial problem. The case study and evaluation of the architecture will also be discussed in this paper. The integrated architecture will facilitate information access, sharing, and analysis among design teams members using the open World Wide Web platforms and resources to make product/process decisions.     

Finding Acorns in the Technical Services Arboretum: A Reference Librarian's Guide to Vendor Home Pages

Abstract

Historically reference librarians have had limited contact with the book vendors and serials agents used by their colleagues in technical services. However, most vendors now support Web sites, including information on publishing trends, price studies of books and periodicals, and access to useful databases. The proliferation of such sites offers reference librarians additional resources, particularly for questions regarding the publishing industry. An overview of the nature and scope of these sites is offered, along witH some suggested reference uses. In addition, a brief survey of some vendor home pages is presented.     

The contribution of apparent and inherent usability to a user's satisfaction in a searching and browsing task on the Web

Previous research found that apparent and inherent usability had big influences on user's acceptance of computer systems. This research extended these findings to the area of user's satisfaction. The study investigated the impact of inherent and apparent usability on user's satisfaction of Web page designs while the two main tasks on the World Wide Web, searching and browsing, were performed. The results indicated that inherent usability was the main factor contributing to user's satisfaction in both searching and browsing. General principles and specific recommendations for the design and evaluation of Web page designs are derived from these findings.     

Organized knowledge sharing with book-centered Web sites: An architecture, implementation and analysis

For educators, the World Wide Web offers a valuable technology for knowledge sharing. It can complement more traditional approaches to knowledge sharing such as books and lectures. Here, we identify and differentiate three major approaches for Web-based knowledge sharing: course-centered sites, subject-centered sites, and book-centered sites. A rationale for book-centered sites, those developed to facilitate students’ and instructors’ efforts in courses that use the book, is advanced. We introduce an architecture of features that can guide developers of such sites. This is illustrated by a book-centered site implemented according to the architecture. Several sites for introductory business computing books are compared and contrasted in terms of the architecture, suggesting ways in which each can be extended. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Semantic Web Mining: State of the art and future directions

Semantic Web Mining aims at combining the two fast-developing research areas Semantic Web and Web Mining. This survey analyzes the convergence of trends from both areas: More and more researchers are working on improving the results of Web Mining by exploiting semantic structures in the Web, and they make use of Web Mining techniques for building the Semantic Web. Last but not least, these techniques can be used for mining the Semantic Web itself.The Semantic Web is the second-generation WWW, enriched by machine-processable information which supports the user in his tasks. Given the enormous size even of today’s Web, it is impossible to manually enrich all of these resources. Therefore, automated schemes for learning the relevant information are increasingly being used. Web Mining aims at discovering insights about the meaning of Web resources and their usage. Given the primarily syntactical nature of the data being mined, the discovery of meaning is impossible based on these data only. Therefore, formalizations of the semantics of Web sites and navigation behavior are becoming more and more common. Furthermore, mining the Semantic Web itself is another upcoming application. We argue that the two areas Web Mining and Semantic Web need each other to fulfill their goals, but that the full potential of this convergence is not yet realized. This paper gives an overview of where the two areas meet today, and sketches ways of how a closer integration could be profitable.     

Concept mapping your Web searches: a design rationale and Web-enabled application

Although it has become very common to use World Wide Web‐based information in many educational settings, there has been little research on how to better search and organize Web‐based information. This paper discusses the shortcomings of Web search engines and Web browsers as learning environments and describes an alternative Web search environment that combines a concept mapping and a data mining technique to address their drawbacks.     

UNICORE: uniform access to supercomputing as an element of electronic commerce

The battle for the desktop has been won by workstations and PCs. Offering computational capacity adequate for most applications, and superior user interfaces, they also incorporate the user’s link to a global information base via the World Wide Web. By contrast, High Performance Computing facilities tend to be increasingly isolated by such deterrents as geographical remoteness, architectural individuality, and the non-uniform operational policies of autonomous centres. The future of such centralised Supercomputing facilities and large scale data resources may depend to a large extent on the development of interfaces for accessing their resources from the user’s desktop in a uniform and user-friendly manner; otherwise, High Performance Computing may fall short of its full potential, becoming increasingly specialised and less competitive. In the most pessimistic scenario, the volume of the HPC market could fall below the threshold required for its economic survival in the free marketplace. The Uniform Interface to Computing Resources (UNICORE) project addresses these issues using the mechanisms of the World Wide Web (WWW).     

Enterprise-Level Groupware Choices: Evaluating Lotus Notes and Intranet-Based Solutions

This paper considers collaborative software atthe enterprise level, specifically Lotus Notesand alternatives which use Intranet-based (WorldWide Web) technologies. We examine thestrategic reasons, both short-term and long-term, motivating firms' choices in the decisionphase and organizational issues in theimplementation phase in three exploratory casestudies. We review prior coordinationtechnology literature to show that our focus onthe decision faced by senior management of whichgroupware system to implement is a useful andnovel perspective to pursue. We argue thatthis choice, and its consequences, is of crucialimportance to the firm. To understand morefully the nature of the decision, we consider athematic pair of related issues: Internetstandards and interoperability. Why are so-called ‘Open Systems’ a major factor to some firms and notimportant to others? Why is theproprietary nature of Lotus Notes a stumblingblock to some firms and a strategic advantage toothers? We explore enterprise-level groupwareexpectations and requirements in our casestudies to address these interesting questions. The final section focuses on predicting changeto understand when an organization might reverseits initial enterprise-wide collaborative strategy.     

Display and Interactive Languages for the Internet: HTML, PDF, and Java

The rapid rise of the Internet has lead to new technologies. These include HTML, the basic markup language for pages on the World Wide Web; PDF, a file format designed for precise layout control of documents like working papers and journals, and Java, a general purpose language ideally suited for use on the Internet. This paper introduces these technologies.     

Learning and Revising User Profiles: The Identification of Interesting Web Sites

We discuss algorithms for learning and revising user profiles that can determine which World Wide Web sites on a given topic would be interesting to a user. We describe the use of a naive Bayesian classifier for this task, and demonstrate that it can incrementally learn profiles from user feedback on the interestingness of Web sites. Furthermore, the Bayesian classifier may easily be extended to revise user provided profiles. In an experimental evaluation we compare the Bayesian classifier to computationally more intensive alternatives, and show that it performs at least as well as these approaches throughout a range of different domains. In addition, we empirically analyze the effects of providing the classifier with background knowledge in form of user defined profiles and examine the use of lexical knowledge for feature selection. We find that both approaches can substantially increase the prediction accuracy.     

Annotating The Satanic Verses: An Example of Internet Research and Publication

The project of creating annotations to Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, involved drawing on many resources on the Internet, including Web pages, E-mail lists, and individual correspondents. Internet research naturally stimulates collaborative research, and the end product is more flexible, useful, and available to a wider audience than is conventional paper publishing. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Annotating The Satanic Verses: An Example of Internet Research and Publication

The project of creating annotations to Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, involved drawing on many resources on the Internet, including Web pages, E-mail lists, and individual correspondents. Internet research naturally stimulates collaborative research, and the end product is more flexible, useful, and available to a wider audience than is conventional paper publishing. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

WTMS: a system for collecting and analyzing topic-specific Web information

With the explosive growth of the World Wide Web, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to collect and analyze Web pages that are relevant to a particular topic. To address this problem we are developing WTMS, a system for Web topic management. In this paper we explain how the WTMS crawler efficiently collects Web pages for a topic. We also introduce the user interface of the system that integrates several techniques for analyzing the collection. Moreover, we present the various views of the interface that allow navigation through the information space. We highlight several examples to show how the system enables the user to gain useful insights about the collection.     

Analysis and modeling of World Wide Web traffic for capacity dimensioning of Internet access lines

A study on traffic characterization of the Internet is essential to design the Internet infrastructure. In this paper, we first characterize WWW (World Wide Web) traffic based on the access log data obtained at four different servers. We find that the document size, the request inter-arrival time and the access frequency of WWW traffic follow heavy-tail distributions. Namely, the document size and the request inter-arrival time follow log-normal distributions, and the access frequency does the Pareto distribution. For the request inter-arrival time, however, an exponential distribution becomes adequate if we are concerned with the busiest hours. Based on our analytic results, we next build an M/G/1/PS queuing model to discuss a design methodology of the Internet access network. The accuracy of our model is validated by comparing with the trace-driven simulation. We also investigate the effect of document caching at the Proxy server on the WWW traffic characteristics. The results show that the traffic volume is actually reduced by the document replacement policies, but the traffic characteristics are not much affected. It suggests that our modeling approach can be applied to the case with document caching, which is demonstrated by simulation experiments.