🚀 go-pugleaf

Janet (et al)

I like your charts, and know that a lot of time and effort went into them.  I also use charts, and I get a lot of positive feedback about my chart....but I think I'm going about it the wrong way.  

My outline USED to go something like this:

1.  explain what a search engine is
2.  describe the limits of a search engine (what is indexed, what is not)
3.  define the following terms (with examples) on the board
boolean
+/- syntax
phrase searching
proximity operators
field searching
case sensitivity
truncation

4.  start the hands on portion:

How to find a site 

1.  educated guess  (www.merck.com;  www.harvard.edu)
2.  Yahoo (then I describe what it is, that humans index it....yadda yadda) & we search a broad topic like "pediatric surgery"
3.  briefly mention Inktomi (doing a specific search on Yahoo (like pyloric stenosis) throws you into Intktomi's huge db, but results are not ranked & often irrelevant)
4.  Go to Alta Vista simple search (demonstrate +/-, phrase, field searching, ) then to advanced search for Boolean and proximity
5.  go to Excite (demonstrate boolean with AND, OR and reiterate phrase searching) show advanced search drop-downs quickly
6.  go to Infoseek (demonstrate +/- again, reiterate phrase searching)
7.  go to Northern Light (you can use +/- or Boolean, truncation, phrase searching
8.  go to Hot Bot to briefly discuss stop words, demonstrate drop downs.


Doing it this way, the students LOVED the chart, because it kept them straight.  (Let's see, plus/minus syntax in Infoseek, but Boolean in Excite...oh yes, it has to be in uppercase)  I just don't think they are learning the concepts, and I think they end up confused a week later.  

(as Sean said: "if you are trying to impart some valuable take-away
strategy to casual users in a brief show-and-tell type session, there
may not be time to effectively teach separate techniques and query
language quirks for each SE (at least not anything an audience will
remember next week).")

This, I think, has been my mistake.  I'm thinking of telling them less about the quirks of each engine, and just focusing on what the engines have in common.  By the way, my audience is medical students, physicians, nurses, medical staff, biomedical researchers, and administrators (secretaries, clerks, temps, )  They are, for the most part, impatient about getting results....they don't care that AltaVista and ask Jeeves have partnered so that queries will go through an "AskJeeves"  even if you don't want them to.  No, just tell them how to find clinical practice guidelines for the management of type II diabetes.  Skip the fluff.

Anyway, I know this is long, but I need to revamp, and I know that many of you have great courses you're offering.  
I enjoy hearing how the rest of you are doing this....when I revise the course I'll send out the outline.

Jo-Ann

Jo-Ann Benedetti
Education and Technology Librarian
Albany Medical College
benedej@mail.amc.edu
518-262-6058