by Jon Margerum-Leys, the University of Michigan
The Web page you are looking at was compiled as background for a larger piece which is to appear in "Teaching and Teacher Education", a print-based journal for teacher educators. The intended audience for the article, as well as this page, are college and university faculty who work in teacher education. If you stumble across this page through a Web search or some other means, please email me.
As an overall comment, there is very little (as far as I am able to discern) available specifically for teacher educators on the Web. Some of the sites I have listed here are primarily intended for classroom teachers, but seem to offer value for teacher educators as well. However, there is hope; if each of us can provide one small service to the community, together we can create an on-line environment which contains resources for all of us.
This document is divided into two parts. In the first, I categorize the kinds of materials available on the Web, giving examples of each type of material. Following this, I discuss some issues to think about if you are considering providing one of these types of Web services yourself, either for local use or for the larger community.
In looking at the materials available for teacher educators and their students, preservice teachers, on the Web, four categories stood out. These were:
- Directories to other sites
- Information about teacher education programs and research projects
- Documents and resources concerning teacher education
- Forums for communicating with teachers and teacher educators
At the close of this section, I include comments on general considerations of what makes a Web site valuable.
Directories
The first, and most common type of Web site, were directories; sites which listed other sites or which were a means to access databases. The best of these categorized, commented on, or (very rarely) provided search engines for the sites listed in the directory. Two worth mentioning are the American School Directory, at http://www.asd.com/ and Charles Stuart University's WWW Virtual Library: Education, at http://www.csu.edu.au/education/library.html. Each is an example of a different kind of directory.
The American School Directory (ASD) is a directory which lists basic information about a huge variety of public and private schools in the United States. Data listed in the directory includes location, phone number, Web page if available, administrative contact, and number of students. Partners in providing the site include Computers for Education, Inc., Vanderbilt University, International Business Machines (IBM), and Apple Computer.
Charles Stuart University in Australia is the home of the WWW Virtual Library of Education. This vast compendium of links can be listed alphabetically or by topic area, or may be searched using a search engine form. On the plus side, the number of listed sites is enormous. The downside is that the library appears to rely on individuals and organizations to register and describe their own sites. Thus, sites which might be expected to be found in the library are not listed at all and the descriptions vary widely in form and content.
Most directories to educational research, however, consist simply of lists of links with little or no information on what the links are connected to. These can be useful, in that they do collect links that a user can "surf" through, but their utility would be increased considerably simply by including a sentence or two describing each link. Washington State University's Resources for Educators, at http://www.educ.wsu.edu/html/res_for_educators.html, is typical of directories which do not describe the links to which they connect.
Information about teacher education programs and research
A number of schools of education provide thoughtful reflection on the nature of teacher education. The University of Missouri's Undergraduate Teacher Development Center, at http://tiger.coe.missouri.edu/utdc.html, is a good example. Included at the site are their statements of goals for the program, syllabi, and reading lists. Teacher educators who are interested in how others in the community perceive and grapple with the complex issues we have in common can find connections to other teacher educators and their thinking through sites maintained by schools of education.
Similarly, descriptions of on-going research projects can be found on the Web. The Teaching Teleapprenticeship Project (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/tta/) at the University of Illinois--Urbana Champaign has Web pages which tell the story of their research efforts. The University of Michigan's Middle Years' Digital Library site also contains information on their project and its underlying philosophy, as does Northwestern University's CoVis project (http://www.covis.nwu.edu/).
Documents and resources
Documents for teacher educators fall into two main categories: On-line journals and on-line articles. Gonzaga University's Research and Reflection, at http://www.soe.gonzaga.edu/rr/, is a good example of the former. (Note from Jon: I have a note in to the editor as to the nature of the journal. The articles appear to be generated internally at Gonzaga).
The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education (http://www.ericsp.org/) has some online documents of interest to teacher educators. Additionally, the ERIC database can be searched online at http://ericir.syr.edu/Eric/. Currently, only bibliographic information and abstracts are available on the Web; however, ERIC will soon begin making full text available on the Web.
Another valuable resource can be found at the Critical Thinking Community (http://www.sonoma.edu/cthink/), sponsored by Sonoma State University in California. They include a glossary of critical thinking terms, a library of papers, and an archive of their e-mail discussion group.
Forums
The real promise of the World Wide Web lies not simply in being an information pipeline to disseminate ideas from a producer to many consumers. Rather, the promise of the Web is realized in projects which use the interactive nature of this medium to facilitate discussion. Teachnet offers an excellently structured forum for teachers, called Teacher 2 Teacher (http://www.teachnet.com/t2t.html). Most of the discussion centers around topics of interest to classroom teachers. Preservice teachers might find it interesting to see what inservice teachers discuss; additionally, questions from preservice teachers appear on the forum and seem to find friendly discussion from inservice teachers.
General thoughts
When evaluating a Web site, ask yourself if you are among the creators' intended audience. The publishers should make it clear in their opening pages who the intended audience is.
If you or your students are among the intended audience, here are some things which make a Web site useful:
- Does it offer current information? One of the great strengths of the World Wide Web is that resources can be up-to-the-minute.
- Is it easy to use? The first few pages should contain some kind of indication of what can be found on the site: A clickable site map or hypertext index makes the underlying structure explicit.
- Is it complete? If special software is needed to see the pages (such as Acrobat Reader to see Portable Document Format files), is the software or a link to it included in the site?
- Does it offer interactivity? Some publishers think of interactivity as pointing and clicking. More useful sites offer at a minimum the capability to search the site by user criteria. Most compelling are sites which offer the chance for visitors to add to or comment on the site or to interact with each other through on-line discussion forums.
There is a disturbing tendency to view the World Wide Web as an unlimited fountain of knowledge. It's not, especially for relatively small groups such as teacher educators. The information or resource for which you are looking may not exist on the Web. If you don't find what you're looking for on the Web, look for it in other media or consider creating the resource yourself. In the next section, I'll discuss the factors in the creation of Web materials.
This section is intended for those who publish materials on the Web. It is categorized parrallel to the section above, with an additional section on audience considerations.
Who is the (intended) audience?
Remember that anything you put up on the Web is available publicly throughout the world and can be found by search engines even if there are no links into your site. When you design Web materials, keep your audience in mind; either provide enough context to help the material be useful to a wider audience, provide links to contextual material, or put a disclaimer on your pages indicating who the intended audience is.
Creating a value-added directory
Two features will help your directory to be of value to a world wide audience:
First, give a summary of each link on your list. Helpful information might include who the site is created by, what kinds of resources might be found there, time required to download the pages, and any special plug-in or software needed to view the site.
Second, people who visit your directory will probably have other sites they've encountered which could add to the richness of your site. You can provide a means for them to give feedback and suggest Web sites simply by including a link which allows them to send e-mail to you. Alternatively, you can provide a form which allows visitors to reccomend sites in a format which you can plug right into your site.
Creating a value-added description of your program or research project
As with everything on the Web, keep your audience in mind. You may even want to state on the first page of your site who the pages are intended for. You might also provide different pages for different audiences, tailoring your information to the reader.
Many programs and research projects use very specialized vocabulary. Having a glossary of terms used on your site, with specialized vocabulary hypertext-linked to the glossary, can help your readers to understand how you are defining and using vocabulary.
Creating a value-added set of documents or other resources
Providing resources for users has been compared to standing at the bottom of a swimming pool with your hands up so that the user can appear to be walking on water--you have to constantly guess where the user is going to go next and make sure your hands are there.
Carefully defining what will be on your site as you collect materials can help you provide a useful resource. Stating what kinds of things may be found on your pages will let visitors know up front whether your site will meet their specific needs. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- What kinds of visitors do you want to support? A local audience? People working in certain areas of the field? Users with a specific kind of computer?
- What resources will you provide for those visitors? Software? Documents which give background or general information? Documents for visitors to use in their professional situations, such as surveys? Will these resources be things which you have created yourself, or will you distributie the public domain work of others, such as shareware?
- In order to make use of materials they pick up at your site, what else do visitors need to have? Plug-ins for their browser? Specific hardware? Commercially available software? Make these needs excplicit and provide links to other sites on the Web where needed software is available, if possible.
Creating a value-added forum for teacher-educators
Should you choose to create a public forum specifically for teacher educators, you will be providing a service which, to the best of my knowledge, does not yet exist on the Web. Forums for other groups which seem to be most popular have the following features:
- Ease of use: A simple navigation structure will encourage visitors to engage in your forum.
- Clear purpose and categories. Visitors should be able to tell immediately what the purpose of the forum is and how it is organized.
- Moderation. You may want to consider having a moderator for discussions. All messages sent to the forum will go to a clearinghouse (usually your e-mail box) for approval before being posted to the forum. Experiment with this. It's less formal and faster to have an unmoderated discussion, but in some cases, unmoderated forums are flooded with commercial advertisements and off-topic messages.
Some forums on the Web allow visitors to search for comments by certain authors. For example, you might want to find out if a colleague has written anything at a forum you visit. You could search on her name and pull up everything she has written on that forum. I feel this has a chilling effect for on-line discussions; people may not be willing to post thoughts in progress or initial reactions if they know that a year from now someone else can search for those comments.
General thoughts about creating a Web site
Publishing on the Web has become incredibly popular. It's relatively easy for anyone with access to a Web server to create attractive looking Web pages which can be viewed by anyone with a computer connected to the Internet. When fashioning Web pages, ask yourself this: "Do I really want/need to make a resource which can be viewed by the entire world?" If the answer is no, consider using a less public forum such as an intranet, electronic mail group, or (gasp) paper-based publication.
Having asked yourself that, the next step is to decide who your audience will be and what you want to provide as a service. Remember that there are already millions of sites available; look at what's already out there and decide how what you have to offer meets your expected visitors' needs in unique or especially valuable ways. If you work from the vantage point of knowing your users and their needs, you will be miles ahead toward providing a valuable resource.