The World Wide Web is a wonderful resource linked to more than 80 million on-line computers containing in excess of 800,000,000 Web pages (probably both are considerably larger now; these data are from 1998). Thankfully, several Internet "search engines" have come to the fore that are capable of ferreting out needed pages among this huge offering. Netscape's Communicator and Internet Explorer can allow you to read Web pages found by these Internet search engines. The advent of these browsers makes navigating the net a breeze. In this project you will be required to jump on the information super highway. The goal of the project will be to search for physics resources using different search engines. Resources will be identified and reviewed for content.
1. Begin by reading pages 343 - 346 in Internet Starter Kit.
2. Use each of the following search engines. Determine which
is the best one or two search engines for you. For instance, search
single terms like "quanta" or "special relativity"
or "wenning." See how many hits you get using each of
the following search engines (and any others you know of and use).
Note that some of these search engines organize their findings
in specific ways that may prove to be useful.
3. Report your findings, including unique features of each search engine. Keep track of and report to your course instructor the number of "raw" hits you get using each search engine. Note that not all searches under the words "special relativity" will be hits that legitimately refer to "special relativity." Any document that contains both "special" and "relativity" will be identified as a "raw" hit. NOTE: You can use Mac OS version 8's "Sherlock" finder to do an automated simultaneous search using a large number of the above and other search engines. Give it a try.
4. Use Switchboard (http://www.switchboard.com/) to find all the Carl Wennings listed in telephone books around the US. Print out the addresses and provide to your course instructor.
5. Use Yahoo Maps (http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py) to print out driving directions between the Carl Wenning you know, and at least one that you don't know. Provide the instructions and a local street map(s) for the Carl Wenning you don't know to your instructor.
6. Using the best search engines, find at least five sites that provide useful information/resources for physics teaching. Please note that we are talking physics here, not astronomy. For the purposes of this activity we will define useful information as pictures, QuickTime movies, audio files, tables of data, text files, etc.
The evaluation associated with this project will be based on
a successful completion of the above tasks.