No War

Using the web as a resource

The web is an important resource for us for information about world events or research in areas of interest. We don’t usually have a lot of time to spend on the web for research; maybe 15-30 minutes at a time one to three times a week. Sometimes we are able to devote a larger block of time, a couple of hours; even so we still use the same process as with shorter blocks of time.

We use sites for jumping off points in web research. For example, for the war in Iraq we might use Thomas, which is the Library of Congress web site for US Congress. Or we might use the Guardian’s section on Iraq, an excellent resource created by the newspaper published in England. The left-hand links provide access to articles within the site or to other web sites. The pages load quickly and print well (unlike some other sites).

As we spend time on a topic over a number of sessions we will have a few sites we’ll always go to first as a starting point.

Searching is a skill that is not hard to learn. For searching the web we invariably use Google. We’ve downloaded the Google Toolbar for use with Internet Explorer browser. We further adapted Google to our needs by setting our preferences so that Google will open selected sites in a different window (you don’t need the Toolbar to do this). The skill in searching comes in selecting your search terms.

Sometimes we’ll see something that creates the basis for a search. Recently we saw and English political cartoon about a massacre at Najaf. The terms we used for our search were Najaf + massacre which netted us a site which looked interesting, Shia News (Najaf is an important Shiite religious site), which further led us to a page of photos of civilian casualties in Iraq. Note that the word we used, massacre, would lead us to web sites that offer a different point of view than if we used something like killed. American political and news sources would not use massacre in describing their actions.

We jump from site to site. We may have four or more browser windows open, Google searches, selected sites, a PDF Acrobat document downloading are all happening at the same time. Our aim is to find items of interest, print or save them and then go on to something else. We can read the text another time.

We use several different ways to save something (other than printing) that we find of interest. We may send ourselves an email of the link for a specific item to examine in depth later (on the menu of Internet Explorer at the top select File, select Send). We frequently use Favorites to store links. We go to either Favorites on the menu, or Favorites button and select Add to Favorites. We put saved pages/sites in folders we’ve already created or add a new folder (select Favorites, select Add to Favorites, when the box opens click New Folder and name it).

Saving web pages to your hard drive is easy. Go to the File menu, select Save As and browse to the folder you want to save your material in. This is helpful for really long pages that you might want to refer to from time to time. Graphics and text will be saved this way.

Some sites offer Adobe Acrobat PDF documents. This document type offers precise formatting and embedded pictures not available using HTML. PDF documents can be a single page or quite a long document, the B’Tselem human rights report on Israeli incursions made spring 2002 on the West Bank is an excellent example. PDF documents can usually be printed or downloaded. Sometimes documents are in Microsoft Word or Rich Text format and can be read and downloaded if you have Word or Works.

If you see a graphic, a photo or drawing, that you would like to save you can right click it and select Save Picture As.

We spend time later, in a more relaxed atmosphere, away from the computer, reading the pages or documents we’ve printed. Sometimes we find something that is really excellent and we’ve discovered a new site we’ll return to again and again.

If you have to use a computer at school or a library the same process can be done except you don’t have the ability to create Favorites, send emails easily, or download items. It is possible to record links or favorite sites in a word processing document (using Word for example) using copy and paste. The default for Word is that these links are active; you can click them in the document and the page will appear in a browser window. If the default has been changed, you can copy the link in the document and paste in the address in the browser window.

On some systems you may be able to download web pages, PDF or Word documents to a floppy disk. If you can’t download you can select material that is of interest and copy/paste it into a word processing document which can be saved on a floppy disk to print elsewhere (it is expensive to print long documents at our library).

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