Using the Internet is the latest trend in continuing education, academic research

By KEN CASTLE, Special Advertising Sections Writer

Poring through books to find information for a research paper is a time-consuming and tedious task, but now there’s an easier way toward academic enlightenment — the Internet.

It may sound frivolous to Google, Yahoo! or Kanoodle your way to a degree, but no one’s laughing over what has become the latest trend in continuing education.

You can zero in on specifics with a precision that beats thumbing through pages or scanning microfilm in libraries. Millions of personal computer users have discovered that, with a few words and key strokes, it’s possible to explore any subject in depth. Using search engines and directories, you can pull up scientific papers, encyclopedia entries, news reports and opinions.

Yet, even though 550 million searches are conducted daily in cyberspace, people aren’t necessarily locating what they want — and may still end up wasting hours of time, according to Jupiter Research, a leading research and analysis company on the Internet and emerging technologies.

The pitfalls include information overload, irrelevancy and — most important — veracity. What is credible — or incredible?

If you have an appetite for trivia, you can gorge yourself indefinitely. But, the Web also can be the primary vehicle for serious research, with a speed and efficiency that are difficult to challenge.

Before going online to catch the next wave, however, consider hooking up with an experienced “surfing” instructor.

Joshua Stern is one of an emerging cadre of educational Internet guides. Last year, the 34-year-old professor started an online course for UCLA Extension called “Getting Information on the Net: Knowing What’s Useful.” (Other UC campuses also offer search engine tutorials. UC Berkeley, for instance, recently launched a new course called “Googling to the Max.”)

Although Stern’s “virtual” classes attract both novices and experienced Web searchers, the format, which includes chats, discussion boards and e-mails, allows students to pursue their unique goals.

“There is no face-to-face meeting, and a lot of the assignments are exploratory and experiential,” he said.

While most students already know about Google and the other search engines, Stern teaches how to search more effectively, how to find hidden resources and how to evaluate content critically.

“The Internet is not a transparent medium where you show up and it’s equal for everybody,” Stern said. “You have to have certain knowledge to exploit it, and you can’t just passively consume it because there is so much information that is of varying degrees of validity. It’s not like watching mainstream television news where there has already been prior review and filtration. On the Web, there is no censorship. Content is in a raw form and ranges across the political spectrum from the extreme right to the extreme left.”

Among the tips that Sterns imparts during his cyber classes are the following:

• Recognize that no single search engine is comprehensive enough to scan the entire Web. One way to get more horsepower is to search several engines and directories simultaneously, through a site such as www.metasearch.com.
  
• Beyond websites, be sure to troll through secondary online sources such as news groups, listservs, chat rooms and blogs. A listserv is a collection of people with a common topic or concern, and the types of listservs run the gamut from video games to divorce support.
  
  “A listserv is like the perfect focus group,” Stern said. “It offers a wealth of information that the vast majority of Internet users don’t know about.”
  
  Yahoo!, he added, is particularly strong with listservs.
  
  Many search engines now display these other search channels on their home pages or under “Advanced Search” buttons.
  
• Learn about databases, many of which are not readily found or indexed through search engines. For example, a database called ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is a sizable database of journal and non-journal education literature.
  To search within it, go to www.eric.ed.gov. Much of the information on it is free.
  
  Another database, particularly for those researching individual companies, is EDGAR (www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml, which consists of filings with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission.
  
  
• Work backward from a Web page that you find on a search engine. This consists of deleting, one by one, each group of words separated by slashes in the URL space, or website address, on your browser.
  
  “ As you trim [the Web address] slash by slash, hit [‘Enter’] each time and you can go deeper into that website, bringing up additional levels.”
  
  Suppose you do a Google search on these words: “government grants for housing.” Among the first entries you might see is www.firstgov.gov/Citizen/Topics/Benefits.shtml. This gives you an alphabetical list of “Government Benefits, Grants and Financial Aid” and tells you that it is an official U.S. government website.
  
  If you delete backward a few times down to www.firstgov.gov, you get a lot of stuff on U.S. government programs, listed by topic. One of those topics is “Money and Taxes.” If you click on that, you get another menu that includes “Money in General.” You click on an entry for “Refinancing” and get a page about FannieMae and its programs with mortgage lenders as well as another topic called “Affordable Housing and Community Development.”
  
  
• Use services offered on the search engines such as alerts to automatically canvass the news sections of the Internet each day for articles that relate to specific names or topics. You can easily set up these alerts by clicking on the appropriate button on the search-engine home pages and entering whatever you want to monitor regularly. Then, each day, a list of relevant entries is sent to you by e-mail.
• Remember that just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s gospel. Apply a critical yardstick of veracity. Check out a document by finding out who wrote it, when it was published, whether or not it is copyrighted, and whether it has typos or grammatical errors.

One of the issues that continues to swirl around search engines is the disclosure of paid placement and inclusion policies. When you do a search, the first entries that pop up are often paid for, but they are not always clearly and prominently marked.

Consumer WebWatch (www.consumerwebwatch.org), a watchdog group formed by Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, reported in a recent study that disclosure headings in eight of 15 search engines tested were difficult to spot because they were in dull colors or smaller type.

“While some sites diligently disclose and explain their business relationships, others appear to obscure the presence of advertising within search results,” said the report, which is called “Searching for Disclosure” and can be read in its entirely on the organization’s site.

Consumer WebWatch is a good place to check for red flags about search engines and their content providers.

While instructors such as UCLA’s Stern believe that the future of learning and research centers around the World Wide Web, they caution that researchers should apply high standards of credibility.

“Be critical, be skeptical and evaluate carefully what you find,” he said.

Ken Castle is a freelance writer based in Burlingame, Calif.

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