Welcome, EdPsy 387 students!

Who am I?

Jim Levin

Department of Educational Psychology

College of Education

My background

Who are you?

• Post in the WebBoard “Welcome” conference– Your name– Where you work and what you do– Your goals for this class

Introduction

• Course web site: http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/courses/edpsy387/fa01/

Plan for EdPsy 387

• Project-oriented

• Strong links to your own interests

• Highly interactive

Project-oriented course

• Mini projects

• Major project

Office hours

• Monday, 10am-11am, 230C Ed Bldg

• Electronic office hours: j-levin@uiuc.edu

Educational uses of the web:“From surfing to serving”

• Initially people see the Internet as a vast source of information

• The web as a distributed hypermedia

Hypertext & Hypermedia

• Our class web page as a hypertext• What is hypertext?• Text that can be read in multiple ways• Print hypertexts?• Hypermedia:

hypertext+graphics+sound+video+animation+etc.= hypertextual multimedia

The World-Wide Web

• A distributed hypermedia

• Different parts can be on different computers all around the world, with hypertextual links via the Internet

Web surfing

• Web “surfing”– Advantages– Disadvantages

Surfing to Serving

• Web Serving:– Advantages– Disadvantages

Education and the web

• The Global Schoolnet web site– Harnessing the Power of the Web

Search Engines

• Databases of web resources• Two kinds

– Directories (human classified) - Ex: Yahoo– Web crawler-based (not human classified) - Ex:

Excite

• Which to use?– Use whichever ones you find useful– When you don’t find one useful, switch to another

Understanding URLs

• A unique address for each web resource

• Structure: what + which computer + which file

• Example: http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/courses/edpsy387/sp01/index.html

• What kind of resource: http:// -> Web file• Which computer: www.ed.uiuc.edu• Which file: courses/edpsy387/sp01/index.html

Understanding Computer Names

• Domain names: used both for computer names in URLs and in email addresses (whatever is the to the right of the @ sign)

• Like a postal address, but with “.” instead of new line as separator

• Most general to most specific, right to left

Example:www.ed.uiuc.edu • From the right: edu -> US higher education

institution– com --> US commercial institution– gov --> US federal government– org --> US non-profit– us --> US– mx -> Mexico– au -> Australia– Country code list: http://www.nsrc.org/codes/country-

codes.html

Example:www.ed.uiuc.edu

• Next to the left: uiuc– University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Email example: l-gomez@nwu.edu– Northwestern University

Example: www.ed.uiuc.edu

• computers in the Education Building at UIUC

• www.beckman.uiuc.edu is a computer at the Beckman Institute

Example: www.ed.uiuc.edu

• www --> a particular computer in Room 10 of the Education Building

Sending/saving URLs

• Have to get the URL exactly right (sometimes case mAtTeRs; no spaces)

• Copy & paste is best

• Emailing a URL from your web browser– Advantages: can do anywhere– Disadvantages: need to set & then unset email

preferences

• Emailing yourself

Using URLs to evaluate web sites

• Largest level domain: .edu vs. .com vs. …

• Subdomain elements: .ed.uiuc vs. .cs.uiuc

• Directory elements: /students/joe/ vs. /facstaff/chip/

• Institutional vs. personal pages: /deans/ vs. /~jlevin/

Search Engines

• Yahoo & Open Directory: human classified databases of web sites

• Google, Excite, Hotbot, etc.: automatic databases of web sites

Web spiders

For next week

• Post in the “Welcome” conference

• Skim through the Global Schoolnet website

• Search for an exemplary educational website, post in that conference the name, URL, and why you think it is exemplary

• Read Nan Goggin’s web design guide & skim the Yale Style Guide

Digital Photo

• To be used (if you choose to do so) on your eportfolio web page or as your “signature” in WebBoard

WebBoard

• A commercial web-based conferencing system

• Log in:

• Username: your net-id

• Password: your net-id (change it)

C-Base

• A web-based computer-supported evaluation system

• Username: your net-id

• Password: your net-id (change it)