Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Ramesh Krishnamurthy: Electronic resources for language teaching and learning: cornucopia or information overload?

material that we wanted! But why should we expect the first consultation to be perfectly successful? After all, when we go to the library, do we expect that the first book we find on our subject will be the ideal one? We are happy to chase up Index references, Bibliographic entries, and footnotes. Why should the Web be any easier? But superabundance is not the only problem. Fortune magazine (March 1

s

t 1999) did their own test of search engines and came up with several examples: for instance, searching for "hockey", Lycos gave "SuperBowl.com: the official website of SuperBowl XXXIII" (for those who don't know, SuperBowl is an American Football tournament) as its first hit! So inaccuracy is another problem. Luckily for us, solutions are being developed. The Guardian newspaper recently reported on a website (http://www.teem.org.uk) called "Teachers Evaluating Educational Multimedia", which contains reviews of software by teachers. Another issue of the same paper refers to the Virtual Teaching Centre on the National Grid for Learning website (http://vtc.ngfl.gov.uk), where teachers can dip into additional resources set up by local education authorities in the UK, and the Learning Resource Index (http://www.ngfl.gov.uk), which is a directory of educational resources, products and services. Some of these sites may be restricted to UK members, but apparently even Bill Gates is trying to help us: Microsoft is investing heavily in "Adaptive Probabilistic Concept Modelling", software which identifies the concepts or ideas behind a text, remembers sequences of texts that you have looked at in previous searches, and tries to filter incoming data accordingly! Another recent newspaper article tells us about the increasing number of educational software retail outlets where members of the public can browse the electronic products and evaluate them before deciding whether to purchase them or not. 6. Proposed Temporary Solution Meanwhile, is there nothing we ourselves can do? I would like to propose a temporary solution. Each academic institution should build up an evaluated list of websites, to which all members of the institution would add the results of their own experiences, especially students. Indeed, as our students are now often more comfortable with computers than the staff, we should utilise their enthusiasm, experience, and ingenuity. Just as students are shown the library and how to find books in it, we should show them how to use the Internet and ask them to record sites of academic or pedagogic worth. And 24