Surfing Safely with Social Navigation

"Surfing Safely with Social Navigation"

SITE 2001 -- Orlando, FL

Bruce Lewis, Ed.D.
School of Education
Freed-Hardeman University
Henderson, TN

Many parents and teachers are concerned about the growing proliferation of published material on the World Wide Web, some of it being unfit for small children’s eyes and minds. Thousands of new websites are being added every month to the Internet with a wide range of HTML styles and structures. Navigating this vast sea of information safely becomes a nightmarish adventure for the uninformed and/or uninitiated.

Dieberger (1997) proposes that when Internet users help each other with this navigational task, they are using “Social Navigation.” Often users will e-mail each other URLs with descriptions of the websites and recommendations. Or they might create a webpage with pointers to their favorite and/or most helpful sites. When the recipients and readers use these resources, whether via e-mail or the webpage, they are engaging in a social activity while surfing the web.

Dieberger (1997) recommends direct social navigation where a group of individuals with common interests agree to share ideas, resources, and evaluations. These recommendations become a point of discussion as others view the selected Internet resource, evaluate the site for themselves, and compare and contrast their own evaluations of the site. Undergraduate and graduate education students at the author’s current university have been involved in Social Navigation for the past few semesters in an organized manner. This has lead to more and varied integration of educational technology into the School of Education's courses and into the actual teaching of the courses by the established faculty. It has also encouraged the faculty to experiment with new technology and explore the multiplicity of offerings on the WWW.

For example. Education Strategies students, under the direction of their instructors, are now required to do web-based research on available on-line resources for their discipline as part of a lesson plan. With the technical guidance and instruction of the author, each student researches a minimum of four websites and composes an HTML document containing the name of each site, its URL, and an annotation of the webpage. The web-based lesson plan is then edited, as necessary, by the webmaster and uploaded onto the School of Education's server for viewing through the World Wide Web at http://teach.fhu.edu/technology/.

Other undergraduate and graduate courses are also involved in web research and webpage design, although to a lesser extent than the Education Strategies classes. For example, some of the introductory Special Education classes have created webpages featuring specific learning disabilities and handicapping conditions. These are hosted on the School of Education’s website, as well.

The author’s graduate students in EDU 506, Computer Applications in Education, have not only created webpages with Internet resources, but have also been involved in e-mailing their instructor and fellow class members. They are providing thoroughly reviewed and evaluated, hand-picked lists of URLs to other websites of interest to K-12 teachers. Dieberger (1997) argues that the locations of social navigation are important and therefore our class provides a supportive atmosphere to both explore the web and share found resources in a collaborative environment. Creating e-mail discussions that represent different interpretations reinforces an advanced state of cognitive functioning.

Bruce Lewis, Ed.D.
Assistant Professor of Education and Instructional Technology
School of Education
Freed-Hardeman University
158 East Main Street
Henderson, TN 38340

Created 2-01-01 by Dr. Bruce Lewis.