Reading Together On-line
Introduction to computer-mediated learning, The Internet

Your course material will be delivered over the Internet or the Worldwide Web (the Web), a global network of educational and business computer networks. You can access the course material wherever you (and a computer with Internet access) are, from home, work, a public library, a computer lab, or a lab classroom.

Offering our course on the Web allows us to have access to all the resources of the internet, in addition to our course-specific materials. This offers you, the learner, a much richer reading, research, and information base. However, working on the Internet may be a bit confusing. There is a lot of information out there, and it is in a format that many of us are not used to.

So, if you are new to the Internet, visit some of these sites for help. For an easy to follow tutorial with easily understandible text and graphics, visit Microsoft's Internet Tutorial .For a simple conceptual diagram of the Internet and a handy Tour of how the Internet works, go to Global Village's Internet Tour site.  Also, use these excellent glossaries of Internet vocabulary.

For extra help on using the Internet and searching, work through Finding Information on the Internet: A TUTORIAL by Teaching Library Internet Workshops from University of California, Berkeley. And finally, for those of us with an ongoing interest in the Internet, there's WebNovice, an E-zine (Electronic Magazine available on the Internet) with lots of tips and information on surfing the web.

When you finish with this exercise, press the button in the navigation bar to go on to the next section.