Services from Tom March
Wouldn't you Rather Gather?
skip search engines and find sites fasterby Tom March
First published 1999 - MultiMedia Schools Magazine, © Tom March
In the last issue, I shared thoughts about how to contextualize a topic by using essential questions and looking for links that focus on the subject's inherent complexity. Supposing that you already have a topic and some sense of its contextual richness, a natural next step is to find Web sites related to the topic. The following article relates an approach I've found helpful in limiting the timesuck involved in collecting links to use in a Web-based activity.
The Early Days
Back in the dark ages of the Web, those gray background days of 1995, looking for Web sites to use with students was an unequal mixture of one part committed educator, a couple feeble search engines, a handful of keywords, and a spoonful of Boolean logic. Once you brought these ingredients together, you'd cook for what seemed like days, peeking into each cryptically labeled link. Even as we recognized the power of the medium, we knew there must be a better way. And that's the best part about the Web: it changes rapidly. And it does so in two important ways. First, as more educators get online, we carry more demographic clout and designers respond to our needs. Second, we put the darn stuff up ourselves.
So even though these are the early days, I believe the Web has evolved enough so that we can change our approach to finding the Web sites we want to use with students. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that at this point in 1999, if you're looking for links on a topic related to a core curriculum, you'd do better ignoring the lure of the search engine and look first to the kindness of strangers.
Gathering Links
Even in the early days of searching the Web, what saved the most time was coming across a page of links someone else had created on the topic. We call them hotlists, but they're sometimes referred to as indexes, catalogues, and directories, or by such names as "I Love Tole Painting, " "Whales on the Web," or "The Unofficial Spanish Page." Here, energetic souls who had an interest decided to see what the Web offered on the topic. Once they found the good stuff, they posted a page of searched and sorted links. A larger scale example of this could be the two Stanford students who did all right for themselves by creating Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle! (www.yahoo.com). But as helpful as huge directories and search engines are for finding good things on the Web, when it comes to developing Web-based activities on a given topic, we don't want the entire Web at our feet, we want the sites that we want sitting at our fingertips.
This returns us to the benevolence of strangers. When luck strikes and we stumble across someone else's list of links on our topic, we spend our time online culling or gathering the best from the list. This is the difference then between "searching" and "gathering." In searching, we go to one of the portal search engines and begin the Boolean two-step (Step one: try. Step 2: try again). Conversely, in gathering, we surf and assess pre-searched sites to see if they match the goals that we set for our learning activity. When you look at the value you can add as an educator, it shouldn't be hard to see where your time's better spent. So let's explore some sites that support gathering links.
The Filamentality Database
As Pacific Bell Fellows at San Diego State University's Department of Education, Jodi Reed and I created a Web site called Filamentality (http://www.kn.att.com/wired/fil). "Fil" is an interactive site that guides users to add links, helps shape the links into Web-based activities like Samplers and WebQuests, then posts these pages right on the Web, all without a tag of HTML or single FTP. The point of this article is not to trumpet the virtues of Filamentality, however, but to celebrate the contributions made by the thousands of teachers, media specialists, and students who have used it to create learning pages. As more people used Filamentality, it became clear that rather than only a tool for design, Fil could also serve as a medium for sharing expertise and saving time. Thus Jodi quickly cobbled-together an experimental database so that other educators interested in not reinventing the wheel could sort through all the pages made through Filamentality. For example, if a teacher were about to create a Web-based activity on a common curricular topic, a quick look into the Filamentality database might point to works already completed by fellow educators. The database soon outgrew its software, but the experiment proved so successful that when Filamentality migrated from San Diego State's servers to faster machines at Pacific Bell, a more powerful database was made available.
So What? (or The Dawn of a Golden Age)
So What? So how valuable is your time? If you don't have a life, stop reading and go to your favorite search engine. If you've got interests beyond searching the Web, try this experiment:
- Go to http://www.kn.att.com/kne_search.html
- Use the search field for "Filamentality"
- Type a common school-related topic in the field.
- Click on the Search button.
Within seconds you'll know whether other educators have created Web activities on this topic. Again, if you chose a topic that's traditionally taught in U.S. schools, it's likely your peek into the Filamentality database came up with at least a few hits. Let's look at some examples:
| Content Area | Topic entered | # | in Google |
| Science | whales | 479 | 32,500,000 |
| clouds | 461 | 124,000,000 | |
| English | Haiku | 136 | 21,400,000 |
| James Joyce | 113 | 40,400,000 | |
| Social Studies | California Missions | 260 | 34,300,000 |
| Vietnam | 290 | 371,000,000 |
These topics were all chosen at random with no attempt to assure success. Invariably this exercise inspires two words: "Wow!" and "Thanks!" Oh, and also the realization that on the Web, "small = good." Imagine the hours people spent searching the Web and now we don't have to!
Looking More Closely
To better understand the nature of what we've just discovered, let's look a little more closely. First, let's invoke the skeptic. Obviously, because these pages are not evaluated, anything goes in terms of quality. ThatŐs why we're looking at the pages merely as a source from which to gather links. In the next Golden Age of the Web, we'll be looking at something like Web-and-Flow where designers use self-assessment checklists and peer review to assure quality. Second, many of the pages were made quickly in workshops so are skimpy at best. Third, as with any Web pages, these will invariably contain broken links. Fourth, a search for something specific like "Chaos Theory" wouldn't turn up any direct finds.
On the up side, understand that the number found for each of the sample topics refers to Web pages that typically contain between five to 15 links. So even if a few sites are clunkers or suffer from Link Rot, at least you're off surfing and honing, not searching and moaning. Also, you may notice that some activities bear the marks of greatness just as they are. If you want to add resources to your current activities, look for a Hotlist. If you want to prompt knowledge acquisition or engage affective connections, see if anyone's created a reasonable Hunt or Sampler. Once in a while, you'll even come across some great WebQuests. Finally, realize that this is just the beginning and that if the first topic you looked for came up skimpy, try looking thematically or create the page yourself. Afterall, we're all making up the Web as we go along.
The Honest Truth
Do I use search engines? Of course. Especially when I'm looking for those quirky, contextualizing Web sites that most people wouldn't first think to look for. After gathering a first harvest from the Filamentality database, I've saved enough time and energy to think creatively about what related themes or juxtaposed topics set off some positive cognitive dissonance for students. But I honestly don't turn to a robot's mindless search when I'm looking for sites on a topic in the school curriculum. I'd rather gather from earnest educators. (And don't forget to send those good folks a nice email when their efforts have made your life easier!)