EARTH SYSTEMS SCIENCE (GEOL 3923H)

NOTES ON INTERNET EXERCISES

The Internet exercises for this course are designed to help you with your writing assignments. Each week, there will be a list of hyperlinks to selected resources on the World-Wide Web for you to investigate. These sites may be purely informational (providing background on some of the topics we have discussed during the preceding week), they may be sites where you can download software to assist you with your assignments, or they may be sites to download relevant imagery or data sets.

I have endeavored to keep the number of sites to investigate each week to the minimum necessary for you to be able to complete your writing assignments. However, each of these sites will contain many links to additional information resources, and those sites will have links and so on. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the quantity of information available online nowadays. The purpose of the Internet exercises is to help you sort through the "information jungle". I anticipate that you will need to spend 2 - 3 hrs per week investigating these links in order to make sense of them. I equate this time to that you would ordinarily spend reading a textbook chapter. Of course, you are welcome to spend as much time as you wish - I think you will find that the more time you spend "surfing the 'net", the more adept you will become at gleaning information from it. You may also discover how much there is to know, and perhaps even experience the joy of discovering knowledge for the first time at an exceptional web site.

It is my hope that your experiences on the Internet for this course will be positive ones. The future of education and knowledge is there - I think it is important for everyone to develop a postive image of the potential of this medium and work toward that end rather than the gross commercialism of the past few years.

Finally, a word of caution: the Internet is becoming a very busy place and during peak hours (typically lunch times, late afternoon through early evening) network traffic can significantly slow down access to sites, especially those which are graphics-intensive. In addition, the network can be capricious - it will become unavailable at the most inopportune times (like shortly before you have a writing assignment due). As such, you should be aware of these limitations and adjust your work schedule accordingly. DON'T PROCRASTINATE! and definitely, DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE TECHNOLOGY!

I hope as the course progresses, each of you will discover that cyberspace is truly a wonderful invention of the human mind.

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