OR: HOW I WENT FROM NOT KNOWING WHERE THE ON - RAMP WAS FOR THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY TO BECOMING AN INTERNET GPS

Transcription

1 Internet 101 OR: HOW I WENT FROM NOT KNOWING WHERE THE ON - RAMP WAS FOR THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY TO BECOMING AN INTERNET GPS

2 Objectives for the Class This session is primarily a crash course in learning to use electronic information. To become a pro, you will need to practice on your own time. You can practice with the library public computers. What You Will Learn: 1. Learn how a web browser is laid out and how it operates. 2. Learn about searching the Internet effectively and evaluating online resources. 3. Learn about the online databases the Carol Stream Library has available for its patrons to use.<-time Permitting.

3 Quick Question Question: Does anyone know what the Internet is? Answer: The Internet is a series of networked computers communicating with other computers through the world. It was first funded by the United States Department of Defense in the 1960s and expanded to commercial applications in the late 1980s and through the 1990s and beyond.

4 Surfing the Net KNOWING AND USING YOUR BROWSER TO HELP YOU FIND THE INFORMATION YOU NEED TODAY.

5 The Browser Wars To begin with a little bit of terminology, a web browser is the program you use to access the Internet. Web pages are the information that you can then access on various online locations called websites. Think of web pages as rooms in a larger building which is the website. The doors to go to each room are called links. More on links later. There are a lot of browsers out there from Internet Explorer to Mozilla FireFox, to Google Chrome, to any number of others. The default browser on any Windows computer is Internet Explorer and from there you can go onto the web and download any of the others. Which browser you choose is ultimately up to you. The differences from one browser to the next are not very big until you start to become more experienced with using the Internet.

6 The Layout Of Your Browser Above: Mozilla Firefox Below: Internet Explorer

7 The Most Important Part: The Address Bar The above is the address bar which displays the location of what website you are currently on. The words inside of the address bar are called a Uniform Resource Locator a.k.a. a URL. Think of a URL as a street address for a house, building, etc. You type in the specific address and you will get to where you need to go; but if you type it in wrong, you will not get there. And unfortunately, with a wrong address it can be difficult to just guess what the right one may be. If that happens you will need a guidebook, which for the Internet is called a search engine. More on that later.

8 Breaking Down a URL Part I Example URL: The is called the website protocol which tells your browser how to open the specific webpage. With today s browsers, is largely unnecessary when you type in a URL as is the default protocol your browser will be looking for anyway. www. is known as the sub-domain and it too is largely unnecessary when typing in a URL, but this is not always the case. For example, the Microsoft Office webpage is office.microsoft.com, but typing in may or may not get you there.

9 Breaking Down a URL Pt. II The cslibrary portion of the URL is known as the domain name and typically it will also be a close approximation of the name of the website being accessed. The domain name chosen is often to reflect the brand of the company operating the website. The.org part of the URL is an indicator of what kind of organization is running the website..com=a commercial entity,.org=a non-profit,.edu=an educational organization, etc. What comes after the URL between two slashes is an example of a folder being looked at. For example with research is the folder. Animals.html is a file name and.html is called a file extension which is another way for your browser to know how to display the webpage.

10 The URL Breakdown in Image Form Image from the Boston University Website.

11 Linking It All Together The primary means of navigating the Internet is through a feature called links. Links allow you to navigate websites quickly and easily by clicking on them rather than having to always type in a URL. You can tell if a piece of text you are looking at on a webpage is a link or not because the cursor on the screen will change from an arrow to a hand. Once your cursor turns into the hand, click your mouse and then you will automatically go to the new page.

12 Understanding the Layout Pt. I The left button is the Back Button and the right button is the forward button. Back Button-After clicking a link on a website, use the back button to go to the previous page that you were just looking at. Forward Button-After you have clicked the back button, you can then click the forward button to return to the page you just left. This is the home button and clicking it will take you back to the first webpage that opened when you accessed your browser. To change the homepage, select tools and then options and then click the word general at the top. You can then either type in a webpage address or go to the page you want and then select use current. This is the webpage refresh button and you can use this when a webpage is either taking too long to open or does not display properly after first opening.

13 Understanding the Layout Pt. II This is an option to bookmark different webpages that you go to so you can easily access them later. Click this button and then click add to favorites or add bookmark and then click bookmarks again to see your bookmarks. Then click on a bookmark to access those webpages. More on that later. The above is an example of a tab. Tabs can be opened to different pages in a single browser. Then click on each tab to access the page. Open a new tab by clicking the small box next to the last tab opened. Or click the X next to the tab to make it go away.

14 Understanding the Layout Pt. III The last of the important browser features you will likely find yourself using is the search bar. With this search bar, located in the top right of your browser, you can type in search terms for anything you may be interesting in learning more about. Upon pressing enter you will then be taken to a search engine which will then display the relevant results. In newer versions of web browsers, this bar may not appear and is instead merged with the address bar.

15 Searching the Internet BECAUSE GOING FROM POINT A TO POINT B IS NOT AS EASY AS IT MIGHT SEEM.

16 But Enough Boring, Let s Get Exciting! Now that the groundwork has been laid out, time get to some hands on practice. You are now on the homepage, which for these laptops is the Carol Stream Public Library. The Ask a Librarian box on the right is actually a chat box where you can converse with Carol Stream librarians.

17 The Homepage The first page that appears when you open your web browser is called the Homepage. The Homepage can be changed to whatever you want it to be. You can change the Homepage by clicking the down arrow next to the Home Button and selecting add or change home page and then either select using the webpage as your homepage or adding it to a tab. If you choose the tab option, you can have multiple homepages across multiple tabs.

18 Where to Find Answers on the Web Most likely when using the Internet, you either will not know the URL of the webpage you want to go to or you are looking for an answer to a question you may have. When this happens, you will need to use a search engine that combs the Internet looking for whatever question you ask it. It will then display the websites that it finds that may have the information you are looking for. But coming up with a good search query and finding the answers for what you are looking for is not as easy as you might think.

19 Water, Water, Everywhere For fun, go to the search bar and type in Google Fight or try the address bar and type: When done with either, press enter to go forward. If you used the address bar, click once on the first link and go to Google Fight. Listed on the page are a number of fights. Click on one to start a fight between the two fighters. The results you see are the number of results you would find on Google. Clearly there is a lot information out there on Google alone, not all of it relevant to whatever you may be searching for. Try and refine your search with additional keywords that will get you better results.

20 Key to Searching the Internet When searching the Internet, try and avoid asking direct questions. Ex. Where is a restaurant in Carol Stream, Illinois? While search engines will provide relevant results; this will not always be the case. Search engines search by keywords and not questions. Instead, try and pick out those keywords and use them in your search. For example, Carol Stream, near, and restaurant. From there you can find fewer and more relevant results. Other search options are included in your Internet searching pamphlets. Try and perform the dog searching strategies in the Internet Searching brochure when you have time on your own in the future.

21 Using the Advanced Search Option Advanced Search options are provided by most of the major search engines. Using these fields in your search can help limit your results by a great deal so you have fewer websites to look through to find answers. Use them in whatever combinations you want.

22 Anyone have any questions we can search for? WHAT KEYWORDS MIGHT BE USEFUL TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION?

23 URL Bar vs. Search Bar In older versions of web browsers, performing a search required you to use the search bar and not the URL bar. This is because when typing in search terms in the URL bar, the browser would look for the website address of what you typed in and would return no results. Newer versions of web browsers have merged the search bar and the URL bar into one. The easiest way to tell is that with these updated browsers, there will not be a search bar visible. In that case, type in your search terms in the URL bar and you will be redirected to a search engine.

24 Making a Bookmark To make a bookmark so you can quickly access a website you have previously been to, first go to that website. Once you have gotten there, click the Favorites button with the star next to it on the toolbar and then click add to favorites. Here it gives you the option to name it what you want. To access your bookmark, click Favorites again and then the appropriate one that you created. That will take you to that webpage.

25 Evaluating Online Resources Unfortunately, just as not everything published in books may be accurate, the same is true for the Internet. When you find information on the Internet, you should always look at who has produced the webpage and does it seem to be a credible resource when it makes its claim. For example, Wikipedia.org is an online encyclopedia and is a fun resource to use to learn about many new things. However, because anyone can edit the content of the website s articles and some do not always cite their sources when they write down information in an article, credibility sometimes comes into question. So always consider where you are getting your information from in regards to the Internet and whether that source seems legitimate or not.

26 Go and Search the Internet In the time we have remaining, feel free to conduct your own searches of the Internet. If anyone has any questions about good search techniques or search terms please ask. If anyone has any other questions, feel free to ask them as well.

27 One Last Word When it Comes to Searching To become better at using the Information Highway and performing searches to become an Internet GPS, you will need to practice, practice, practice. The more you practice, the more comfortable you will become. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke s 2010, All these Internet search techniques are yours except searching using an entire phrase. Use them together. Use them in peace.

28 Internet Class Fun Fact Who here knows where the computer, HAL 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey was built? He was built on January 12, 1997 in the HAL Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois. Coincidentally, H-A-L are all one letter before I-B-M.

29 Credits Part of this course was based on a similar course designed by Carol Stream Reference Librarian, Adriana Albers. Various pictures courtesy of Microsoft Clipart. All contents of 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey 2 are copyrighted to Arthur C. Clarke.