Abstract

"Over-hyping the Web: Directories, Gateways, Resources, and Higher Education Pedagogy." EdMedia, Denver, June 24-29. 

This paper focuses on the adequacy and role of freely available Web resources in higher education courses, particularly, but not exclusively, in the social sciences. 

In the United Kingdom, the higher educational funding councils and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have channelled extensive funding into creating subject gateways, including SOSIG (Social Sciences Internet Gateway) and BUBL (Bulletin Board for Librarians). They continue to fund such programmes.  These, along with other factors, particularly some relating to the perceived change in the role of librarians in a digital world, a factor that has application outside the UK as well, particularly respecting the US academic community, have provided the background to the creation of general or specialised subject gateways.  A recent report, funded by the JISC, demonstrates that students and academic staff do not use them extensively.  (JISC User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework. First Annual Report. August 2000) 

These subject gateways constitute lists of annotated resources arranged by topic. The paper will illustrate that many of those pointed to are of poor quality, and may be regarded as part of a padding exercise to bulk up the low volume of useful resources available.  In the long run this exercise is unsustainable, as illustrated, for instance, by the fact that the Scout Report has some time ago dropped its specialist lists dealing with social science, and business Web resources. The poor quality of the resources indicated is partly a function of the poverty of the contributions made by many academic staff. Many of these take the form of lecture notes and power point presentations and are a form of Web pollution.  They appear on many lists due to the need to bulk them out, but are hardly worth the effort of downloading them.  Such resources, which are directed largely at students undertaking particular courses, would more properly be uploaded on Intranets. Many of the resource lists maintained by academic staff are themselves unsustainable, largely due to the input in time necessary to adequately maintain them. 

My conclusions are: (1) the volume of social science Web resources that are pedagogically likely to be found useful by academic staff in the context of teaching, is small, and is likely to continue to be so, for a variety of reasons; (2) pressures on academic staff to create a Web presence with minimal effort, largely because this is additional work that is not funded, has led to the uploading of poor quality resources that are of limited, if any, use; (3) the proliferation of poor quality resources constitutes a major impediment to use of the Web by academic staff and students; (4) concentration of government resources in the UK on the development of subject directories and gateways is not justified by their usage, which, for various reasons, is unlikely to change; (5) given that more than eighty-five percent of requests for pages are directed through search engines, resources should be focused on improving the searching skills of academic staff and students, whilst re-evaluating the role of subject gateways in that context.