Digital Literacy: Web search ecology and some surprising conclusions about finding and promoting educational resources on the internet
Main Article Content
Abstract
An ecology is a system of interacting and or competing organisms or entities. Alternatively, it may also describe the study of such interactions or competition. In this paper I loosely consider the system of educationalists searching for content to use in their teaching practice to form such a system.
Having returned from a course on ICT for social and group learning delivered by the company Smart Solutions (Vassallo 2010) in Malta, I decided to use what I had learnt to build a number of websites publicising the computer tools I had learned about. In choosing free websites, I was choosing platforms which would be available at no cost to educators, as I was hoping to promote teachers’ active participation in the online community, which had been a theme of the course. Using free internet sites, I built a wiki (Cuffe 2011a), on Wikispaces (Anon 2010b), a blog (Cuffe 2010a) on the WordPress.com site (Anon 2011g), a Google group (Cuffe 2010c) , on Google groups (Anon 2011c), and a Trailmeme (Cuffe 2011c), on the Trailmeme site (Anon 2011e). I also built a second blog (Cuffe 2010b) on Blogger (Anon 2011a) and shot a number of Videos (Cuffe 2010d) which I placed on the You Tube site (Anon 2011i). Finally, I built a Prezi (Cuffe 2010e), which I placed on the Prezi site.
Some of the sites I created initially placed highly in Google search however web traffic did not seem to correspond in any clear way to my sites rank in search. This was surprising, however I noted that traffic would peak whenever I mentioned a specific site on an online forum, or on an email chat group, and this peak could be many times larger than the regular level of traffic coming in, presumably, from general search (see Figure 1). The rest of this paper describes what I did to explore this further.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors contributing to the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning retain the copyright of their article and at the same time agree to publish their articles under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to remix, transform, and build upon the material, for any purpose, even commercially, under the condition that appropriate credit is given, that a link to the license is provided, and that you indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
References
Anon, 2011a. Blogger. Available at: http://www.blogger.com [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Anon, 2011b. Facebook. Welcome to Facebook. Available at: http://www.facebook.com/ [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Anon, 2011c. Google Groups. Welcome to Google Groups. Available at: http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/overview.html [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Anon, Google Trends. Available at: http://www.google.com/trends [Accessed June 28, 2011a].
Anon, 2011d. Ning. Ning – Sign In. Available at: https://www.ning.com/main/signin [Accessed July 1, 2011].
Anon, search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf. Available at: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf [Accessed June 29, 2011b].
Anon, 2010a. Teachers Net. Teacher Mailrings: Teachers.net. Available at: http://teachers.net/mailrings/ [Accessed July 1, 2011].
Anon, 2011e. Trailmeme. Available at: http://trailmeme.com/ [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Anon, 2011f. Twitter. Twitter log in page. Available at: http://twitter.com/ [Accessed July 1, 2011].
Anon, 2010b. Wikispaces. Wiki’s for Everyone – Wikispaces. Available at: http://www.wikispaces.com/ [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Anon, 2011g. WordPress.com. Get a Free Blog Here. Available at: http://wordpress.com/ [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Anon, 2011h. Yahoo! Search – Web Search. Yahoo. Available at: http://www.altavista.com/ [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Anon, 2011i. YouTube. Home Page. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/ [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Chi, E.H., Pirolli, P. & Lam, S.K., 2007. Aspects of augmented social cognition: Social information foraging and social search. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Online communities and social computing. the 2nd international conference on Online communities and social computing. Beijing, China: Springer-Verlag, pp. 60–69. Available at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1784297.1784305.
Computer Education Society of Ireland, 2011. CESI-list – Google Groups. Cesi-List. Available at: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cesi-list [Accessed July 1, 2011].
Cuffe, L., 2010a. Eleven Tools For Education | Just another WordPress.com site. Available at: http://eleventoolsforeducation.wordpress.com/ [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Cuffe, L., 2011a. ElevenToolsFromMalta – home. Available at: http://eleventoolsfrommalta.wikispaces.com/ [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Cuffe, L., 2011b. SubjectResourcesForIrishEd – Stats. SubjectResourcesForIrishEd. Available at: http://subjectresourcesforirished.wikispaces.com/space/stats/overview [Accessed July 1, 2011].
Cuffe, L., 2010b. Tools For Social and Group Education. Available at: http://socedtools.blogspot.com/ [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Cuffe, L., 2011c. Tools for social or group teaching on Trailmeme. tools for social or group teaching. Available at: http://trailmeme.com/trails/Tools_for_social_or_group_teaching [Accessed June 29, 2011].
Cuffe, L., 2010c. Tools for Social Teaching and Learning | Google Groups. Available at: http://groups.google.com/group/tools-for-social-teaching-and-learning [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Cuffe, L., 2010d. YouTube – Social and Group learning tools intro, Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnWhMI9Qm74 [Accessed June 30, 2011].
Cuffe, L, 2010e. Eleven Tools for Social and Group Teaching,
Available at: http://prezi.com/jqqrik-y5n0q/eleven-tools-for-social-and-group-teaching/
[Accessed May 15 2012].
Evans, M.P., 2007. Analysing Google rankings through search engine optimization data. Internet Research, 17(1), pp.21–37.
Fetterly, D., Manasse, M. & Najork, M., 2004. Spam, damn spam, and statistics. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on the Web and Databases colocated with ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2004 – WebDB ’04. the 7th International Workshop. Paris, France, p. 1.
Fisher, R.A., 1930. The genetical theory of natural selection. 1st ed., Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.
George Price, 1972. Fisher’s “fundamental theorem” made clear. Ann. Hum. Genet, 36, pp.129–140.Available at:Wiley online library
Hargadon, S., 2011. educationalwikis – Examples of educational wikis. Educational Wiki’s. Available at: http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/Examples+of+educational+wikis [Accessed June 29, 2011].
King, A.B., 2008. Website optimization, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Kumar, R. & Tomkins, A., 2009. A Characterization of online search behavior. Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering, IEEE computer Society, 32(2), pp.3–11.
Langville, A.N. & Meyer, C.D., 2006. Google page rank and beyond, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Meiss, M., Menczer, F. & Vespignani, A., 2005. On the lack of typical behavior in the global Web traffic network. In Proceedings of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web – WWW ’05. the 14th international conference. Chiba, Japan, p. 510.
Sharratt, M. & Usoro, A., 2003. Understanding knowledge-sharing in online communities of practice. Electronic Journal on Knowledge Management, 1(2), pp.187–196.
Silverman, D., 2000. Doing qualitative research: a practical handbook, London: SAGE.
Stanford School of Medicine, 2011. Publicizing & Site Searchability – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) – Web Support & Development – Information Resources & Technology (IRT) – Stanford University School of Medicine – Stanford Medicine. Available at: http://med.stanford.edu/irt/webauthor/references/publicizing.html [Accessed June 23, 2011].
Usoro, Abel et al., 2007. Trust as an antecedent to knowledge sharing in virtual communities of practice. Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 5(3).
Vassallo, E., 2010. Smart Solutions. Available at: http://www.smartsolutionsmalta.com/ [Accessed June 29, 2011].
Wenger, E., 2006. Communities of practice. Available at: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm.
Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity 1st ed., Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, R., 2011. Web Marketing Today. The Web Marketing Checklist: 37 Ways to Promote Your Site. Available at: http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/checklist.htm [Accessed July 1, 2011].
Zipf, G.K., 1949. Human behavior and the principle of least effort: an introduction to human ecology, Cambridge Mass: Addison-Wesley Press.