Site last updated on February 1, 1998.
This is a Jeanne Site
HELP, I'M LOST
BACK to Statistics Site Home Page.
Webmaster: Jeanne Curran
This guide will get you started on the Web. You have a choice of texts. BUY one or the other (unless you are wealthy and can afford both - neither the book store nor the authors will object).
If you are interested in Law and Criminal Justice I recommend the Internet Guide for Criminal Justice. by Daniel J. Kurland and Christina Polsenberg, Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1997.
If your interest lies more in women's issues, I recommend the women's guide to the wired world, by Shana Penn, The Feminist Press, 1997.
Both texts introduce you to the world of Web pages, e-mail, newsgroups, file exchange over the Internet. The Statistics Site will offer you additional links for finding information for analysis and about statistical interpretation.
NOTA BENE: Not all university lab machines permit e-mail to be sent on the Net. The Statistics Site, like the Dear Habermas site has numerous spots throughout where you can e-mail Jeanne by a simple click. This is one of the high tech pieces that may not work for a week or two, maybe not for the whole semester, depending on the complexity of access to the machines. If you find that you cannot use that neat trick, we're sorry. Just use straight forward e-mail. It will work the same way, just not as convenient. If you are using your own machine off campus, you should be able to click for mail, if you have e-mail access. Jeanne's e-mail address is at the bottom of each page on the web site.
Access the Internet. You may have Netscape, or Netscape Communicator, or Internet Explorer, or some other browser on your machine. Not all browsers produce the same visuals. Try to find machines with different browsers so you can learn what the different browser effects are. If you are using your own machine at home or work, that may not be possible. Then try to find different browsers at school.
The first place I would like to take the class on the Web is to the site of a professor at the University of Illinois. He includes on his Web page the articles and papers he has presented. One of them, on the risks in our reliance on high tech, matters very much for this course. I would like you to browse through it.
Nicholas Constantine Burbules and Thomas A. Callister, Jr., "The Risky Promises and Promising Risks of New Information Technologies for Education," Presented at the Education/Technology conference, Penn State University, Fall 1997.
LINK to the Burbules and Callister paper. Click on the underlined LINK.
LINK to Web-Related Exercise 1.
Go to the search engine, YAHOO. It is one of the most popular. You can access it by the URL: http://www.yahoo.com
At Yahoo's home page scroll down to the main areas of search. Since we are looking for sources for statistics, and since we want those sources for a college class, click on EDUCATION for our first search.
A new screen will appear with new search options. In the search box type STATISTICS Press the SEARCH button.
Now do Web-Related Exercise 2, based on this beginning search with Yahoo and Alta Vista.
LINKto Web-Related Exercise 2 In today's world, books, TV programs, movies, and practically everything else come with Web addresses. In the advertisement for Motsett's book, If It Wasn't For the People...This Job Would Be Fun, the publisher included an URL: http://www.slpress.com
If you type in that URL, you find yourself in a general home page for all branches of a publishing house. You don't want that. You want a link as direct as possible to the book you're looking for.
Here's one way to find that. Play with the site until you find the book. That's easy with any publishing site that has a search engine. And the search engine is usually attached to the catalog.
When you find the book information, an URL will show at the top of the page. The URL for Motsett's book is http://www.slpress.com./catalog/s12023.htm But sometimes a site won't allow you to access a specific file like that. If that happens, take a piece of the URL like:
http://www.slpress.com/catalog
and try that. Then you can complete the search once you're as deep in the site as the site will allow you to go. In this instance we managed to go one level deeper than the main site. Try it.
Using the piece of the URL that ends with "catalog," access the St.Lucie Press and find Motsett's book information. If you forget the steps in the process just use the BACK and FORWARD buttons on the browser menu to move between documents.
You should find yourself in the St. Lucie Press Catalog.
Notice that this whole process should give you a better sense of why links are so helpful. They mean that the author of the site has typed the URLs in for you so you don't have to do anything but click. When you design your own sites, remember that, and make it easy for your readers to link. You'll get more readers!
One word of caution: Remember Burbules' and Callister's article on "Risky Promises." High tech has a mind of its own, folks. As I redid this search to check it for you, the publisher's site skipped three steps and just gave me the information on the book three steps early. If that happens, smile. You can use all those steps next time if you don't get straight to the book information. Tolerance of ambiguity is the key here.
LINK to Web-Related Exercise 3.
Search Engines - Beginning Yahoo
Net Guide to Finding Publisher's Information on Books
Dialog Between Two Searchers Looking for Forgiveness
We were conducting this search in connection with our Forgiveness Workshop for Dear Habermas. For Habermasian discourse forgiveness is important as a means of bringing people to the discourse in good faith. There is a tremendous amount of literature on forgiveness, and much of it does not relate directly to our concerns. That is often the way with Web searches.. This is how we narrowed our search down and dialogued on it. The whole search can be found on the Dear Habermas Table of Contents. This was a Yahoo search. Try it.
The Original Yahoo Search
One of them is wonderful. A simple page of a young South Vietnamese man's life experiences. He ends by saying that when life "gets a tad too exciting" he goes to the grocery store and looks at the shelves of groceries. He then adds, "I shoot left-handed." Not at the shelves of groceries, I hope.
I wandered across this site during the first 200 or so sites from the search. I didn't record it's URL. I went back on January 17 to find it again. It was still there. It was its title that landed it on my search list: "To err is human, to forgive is not our policy." -MIT Assassin's Group.
It probably won't be there long. It was an accident that I
found it. Or was it? Try my search, try the
LINK to it,
and then you decide.
The text which follows was taken from the January 1998 volume of Dear Habermas, results from the Forgiveness Workshop. The dialog took place by e=mail.
Linda Moritz wrote:
Just for fun, I used some of your links to other sites on the Web. Remember the story of the young South Vietnamese man's life? Apparently, he is a mathematics graduate student at Northwestern University. He has his picture posted on the site as well as the brief biography you found. His picture is at -
http://math.nwu.edu/graduate/listing.html
You might find it interesting and mildly amusing to check out. It seems we are not the only ones who like to "play" on the net.
====> Linda
Meanwhile, back at site headquarters, Jeanne was trying to answer Linda's e-mail and check out the links Linda had discovered:
Jeanne wrote:
Just came in from the math site. How did you figure out to go to the other sites , or was that the math link? How wonderful that you followed it through. The links weren't there yesterday. He's adding them. I lucked into a site under construction! Jeanne
and Linda answered:
Elementary, my dear Watson. No, I didn't use the math link although that goes to the same place I went. I did it the long way around.
I looked at the address and deleted the part after .edu. On that page, I looked down and found People in the Department and clicked on Graduate Students. From there, I scrolled down to Tran, since that was the name in the original address (tran/me.html). I know, I know. Two different ways to get there but I, as usual, took the long way. In any event, I'm glad I investigated. My sleuthing skills are not as rusty as I thought.
====> Linda
LINK to Extra Credit Web Exercise 1.
There is a certain assurance to learning when you are required to do no more than process the material given you in the security of knowing that the teacher will accept as valid the knowledge the teacher has taught. Unfortunately, that process leaves out the critical stage of evaluating and synthesizing the knowledge received for its truth value or the validity of its claim to be heard in good faith. (See Bloom and Krathwohl, A Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, or any other text on learning theory that establishes a hierarchy or taxonomy of levels of learning. Bloom and Krathwohl start out with recognition, then recall, then analysis, and finally synthesis and evaluation. Refer to Curran and Takata's Statistics . . . for more detail on learning theories. See Habermas for validity claims to be heard in good faith.)
One of our primary goals in the statistics course is to help you master the process of evaluating theoretical approaches, methods of measurement, and the resulting analysis of that measurement. Within the class there are exercises to guide you. But when there is no more class, the evaluation of multiple validity claims will rest squarely upon your shoulders. We live in an age of information overload. There is no dearth of information if you are diligent in seeking it. But all of that information must be evaluated and synthesized to fit with your own thought processes.
College professors all over the country are cautioning their students to evaluate carefully the information overload, to teach them to absorb information critically. In preparation for our next exercise, I want you to browse some other sites, where others are giving a similar message:
Crouse, Maurice. Citing Electronic Information in
History Papers. 28 January 1997. Available [Online]:
Big time sleuthing. Find Donald Hatcher. If you give up, here's his URL: http://www.main.bakeru.edu/html/d-phil.htm I'll give credit if you can describe how you got there, other than by my telling you, that is. Jeanne
This is a site I found thanks to Nicholas Burbules home page. Link to "Risky Promises. . .," erase the URL to the / after burbules/ and that will take you to his home page. (See Nelson's Web exercise.) Then use Quick Clicks for References, and click on the National Archives under News and Information. You'll find the posters under National Archives. The URL is:
http://www.nara.gov/exhall/powers/powers.html to Poster Exhibit Hall.
GIFs of the posters are available one directory back, just erase powers.html to give:
http://www.nara.gov/exhall/powers/ to GIFs.
Don't just take my URLS. Hunt around on Burbules site for where you will find these URLS in your browser.
LINK to Web-Related Exercise 5.
BACK to Statistics Site Home Page.
E-mail Jeanne at:
jcurran@csudh.edu
Exhibit of World War II Posters
Comments to Jeanne Curran.