Faculty Use of the World Wide Web: Modeling Information Seeking Behavior in a Digital Environment Page: 78

amount of information retrieved ("information overload") even with simple searches,
weeding out irrelevant retrieved sites, and retrieving unwanted pornographic sites.
Along with the classroom activities already mentioned, many of these subjects
reported an active mentoring role in training students to use the Internet. All of the
subjects indicated they either required students to use on-line databases or made specific
assignments for finding information on the Internet. Several subjects had taught Internet-
based courses and/or used class Web sites to distribute information and received
homework from students.
One tenure-track faculty member in the humanities required her students to
evaluate Web sites on specific writers. She taught her students how to evaluate the sites
and admonished then not to assume every site was a "reputable source." A tenured
faculty member in the sciences also required her students to "judge" Web sites and
provided guidance on how to evaluate the sites. Another tenure-track, social sciences
faculty member commented that he tried to dispel students' notions that "everything is
digitized." Most of the subjects did state a preference that their students should be
familiar with or use the printed resources, especially peer-reviewed periodicals, before
using Intemrnet sites.
For most of the subjects, the Intemrnet influenced their teaching styles. One tenured
faculty member in the humanities stated it has "become obvious that students don't read
books. They do read Intemrnet pages... I changed to their style of learning." By contrast,
a sciences, tenured faculty member felt that her teaching of an Intemet-based course had

78