Now that you have reviewed some computer basics, lets consider how to
use:
Now that you have reviewed some computer basics, lets consider how to
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You will need a means to get on to the Internet. Most home users connect to the Internet using a modem and an ordinary telephone line. Faster connections, often called broadband connections, are available most often involving the use of a digital subscriber line (DSL) provided by a telephone company or a cable line from a cable company. Some home users may also use communications satellites.
Whatever the physical means of the connection, you will want a reliable Internet Service Provider or ISP. The ISP provides access to the Internet and perhaps other services in exchange for a fee (usually by the month). America Online (AOL), AT&T WorldNet, CompuServe, EarthLink, and MSN are all well known ISPs. There are many others, including some local providers, who are worth checking out. If at all possible, select an ISP who provides a telephone access number for making your connection that is local so that you will not have to pay long distance charges in addition to your monthly access fee. You may also want to select an ISP who has access numbers in other regions where you may travel. Be cautious about entering into multi-year contracts with an ISP. You may not like the provider's services or you may later decide you want a higher-speed connection than the ISP can provide. Your ISP will, most likely, provide you with detailed instructions on how to get on the Internet. Extensive help is available in Windows 98. Click on Start, then on Help and select the Index tab. Then type in "Dial-up Networking" in the first box on the left and double click on connecting to the Internet in the second box on the left. You will see:
Follow the instructions in Step1, Getting an Internet account, in the box on the right.
For additional understanding you might check out the information provided at the following sites:
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The Internet has been around since the 1960's. It originated with the US Defense Department as a means to link various computers together without dependence on a central computer to coordinate activities. The decentralized nature of the network would make it more difficult for an enemy to disrupt nationwide communications. There would be no main computer to bomb. Gradually universities and other organizations were added to the Internet. The Internet became much more useful with the work of a British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, who, in 1980's, developed a way of easily linking various documents located at first on his own computer, but later in different places through the use of HyperText Markup Language or HTML. This was the beginning of the World Wide Web. But it was still text-based. This changed with the release of the Mosaic browser in 1993 by the University of Illinois. Mosaic, developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, supplied pictures as well as text in a graphical interface, making it much more user-friendly for the ordinary person, the non-scientist, to locate and read information on the Web.
Today, Internet Explorer and Netscape are the browsers used by over 90% of Windows devotees, with Internet Explorer strongly predominating. There are others. Opera is one that has gained in popularity because it is small in size and fast, though not as fully featured as the big two. Let us take a closer look at Internet Explorer, Version 5.5:
The fourth line down holds the Address Bar:
Since a Web site is a collection of files stored on a computer or server connected to the Internet, you need the address of the site you wish to visit. This address is called a URL or Universal Resource Locator. In the example above, you could get to the Web site of Union County College (UCC) by typing in http://www.ucc.edu after the word Address in the Address Bar. Then you would click on Go with your mouse or hit [Enter] on your keyboard. Hyper Text Transport Protocol or http is used to reach Web pages on a server and display these pages on your computer screen. There are other protocols. For example, File Transfer Protocol or ftp is often used to transfer files between different computers connected to the Internet.
Some URLs are much longer because they contain more detailed information about the path needed to reach a particular file located on a Web site. For example, http://www.ucc.edu/library/library/policy.htm might get you to a page on library policies at UCC. It is as easy (probably easier) to type in the wrong URL in the Address Bar of your browser as it is to dial the wrong number on the telephone. There are some ways to avoid mistyping when trying to reach Web sites. If you have a live connection to the Internet while reading a Web page, you might be able to use hyperlinking. Simply left click on words or images that change your mouse pointer to the shape of a hand when the pointer is over them. Using a hyperlink can take you to a different page or even to a different part of the same page. Sometimes we find a URL on a digital page that is not hyperlinked. Most of us will achieve greater accuracy by highlighting that address and using copy and paste functions to place the URL in the Address Bar than by simply typing in the address ourselves. Similarly, if you want to cite a Web address in a paper, it is much safer to copy the URL from the browser and paste it into the paper than to rely on accurately typing each letter of the URL. On some Address Bars you may also be able to click on the arrows after
to go to Web pages that Microsoft or other concerns believe to be helpful to users.
The top bar in the browser above is the Title Bar:
This gives the title of the Web page that is open and provides a means of changing the size of the screen on your desktop or shutting down the program. It functions in the same manner as the Title Bar in MS Word discussed under Reviewing PC Basics.The second bar, the Menu Bar, is more significant:
If you click on File, you may see the following submenu:
You can open a new browser window, open a new site, save the page, close the entire program, etc. Worth special attention are the Print... and Print Preview... choices. Print Preview allows you to see a preview of what the printed page would look like before you actually print it. It is often a good idea to use this option. If you find that some part of the right side of the page does not show in the preview, you will want to click on Page Setup... and change the orientation of the printed page from portrait to landscape in order to get more of the page's right side. You can also change the paper size, the margins, and even the designated printer from Page Setup. The Print... option has some choices that you should examine:
You can choose the printer or particular properties of the printer such as page orientation. A single Web page can be several pages when it is made into a paper copy. One way to handle this is to look at the Web page in Print Preview first. Then you can click on Print and go to the "Print range" section to choose whether to print all those pages or only certain pages, and then click on OK. Even just a selection from the page can be printed if you have highlighted the desired portion before clicking on Print and choosing Selection in the Print range.
Some Web pages are actually a fusion of several pages in different frames. If you only want the material in one of these frames, place your cursor in the frame you wanted, left click, then choose Only the selected frame in "Print frames", and then click on OK.
Going back to the Menu Bar, click onto see a submenu that permits cutting, copying, and pasting. There is also a find function that will let you search for the location of a word or phrase on the Web page.
Another very useful choice on the Menu Bar is
. It allows you to make a list of web pages you have visited that you want to be able to return to. This procedure can be compared to placing a bookmark in a physical book. (In fact, in the Netscape Browser Favorites are known as Bookmarks.) In IE5 you first go to the Web page you want to add to the list, then click on Favorites and then click on Add to Favorites... You can also organize these favorites into folders and subfolders.
Different Views, Tools, and Help can also be accessed from the Menu Bar. At the extreme right is a globe icon,
. When the icon is in motion, the browser is searching for a Web page.
The Tool Bar, which is just below the Menu Bar, provides a number of extremely useful icons:
Let us look at some of the most important buttons. The Back button takes you back to whatever pages you may have been previously viewing since you began browsing. When you left click on Back, you go back one page at a time. If you have viewed several pages, you can right click on Back to get a choice of which previously viewed page to return to. Similarly, if you have already gone back a few pages from where you were earlier, you can click on the Forward button to navigate forward (left click for one page at a time, right click to have a choice of going forward several pages).Clicking on the Stop button stops a page from loading. The Refresh button will update the page you are currently viewing. The Home button takes you to the page that opens when you first start the browser. (You can change your home page by going to the Menu Bar above the Tool Bar. There click on Tools, and then click on Internet Options... At this point, the General Tab has a space where you can change the Home Page.)
Earlier we discussed favorites which can be accessed be pressing the Favorites button on the Tool Bar. The History button is a very handy device also found on the Tool Bar. By pressing on History, you can go back to sites you may have visited during previous browser sessions during the day or in previous days. Once you click on the History button, you will see on the left hand side of your screen a frame that looks something like this:
Clicking on View on the second line will allow
you to choose pages arranged:
You may prefer to limit your use of some buttons on the Tool Bar. For instance, much more control over what you print on paper from a Web page can be gained by clicking on
, a submenu of
in the Menu Bar discussed above, than by using
(the Print Button) on the Tool Bar. You may not need to
Web pages or to
something using a discussion server, even though these buttons are provided on the Tool Bar.
As a student or simply an Internet user, you will certainly want to know how to conduct effective searches. The first thing to recognize is that there are several different tools that you can use for conducting searches on the Web. Search engines employ robots or spiders to search out pages on the Web. Most of the words on these pages are then indexed in databases that you can search using keywords or phrases. There can be over a billion pages in a single engine's database. These pages can be ranked by number of visits or some other criteria, but they are not broken down into subject categories in the way a human indexer might do. Alta Vista and Google are examples of search engines. There are also subject directories created by humans in which pages are broken down into carefully considered categories. Most directories have far fewer pages than search engines and will not index the full text of a document since they are only looking to fit a document into a distinct group. Yahoo is the best known example of a subject directory, but, if you are doing academic research, a directory such as the University of California's Infomine is a better bet. You might consider searching a directory if your topic is very broad and using a search engine if you are looking for information on a specific event or person.
The distinction just made between a subject directory and a search engine seems clear cut. But reality, as usual, is a little more complicated. Some directories will use results from a search engine and vice versa. For example, the subject directory, Yahoo, combines search results from its database with some results from Google on the same subject. This does not mean that Yahoo is an adequate substitute for the more thorough, more explicit responses you can get using the advanced configuration features of Google. There are also meta-search engines that provide the results of searching several search engines at the same time. Again their results are not as comprehensive and refined as using a Google or another outstanding search engine with advanced search capabilities. Dogpile and metacrawler are well known meta-search engines.
Many search engines and subject directories, however, can miss another area of the Web worth examining. This is the so-called Deep Web or Invisible Web containing specialized databases on legal, health, and other matters that are apt to be overlooked by most search engines, sometimes because they are not in HTML format. Both the Complete Planet and The Invisible Web promise access to many of these sites. The online student is urged to consider using Deep Web engines as supplements to more conventional searches.
Each search engine has its own rules for conducting a search. If we were to go to the home page for Google, http://www.google.com/, it would look something like this:
It automatically defaults to search the Web, but you could also choose to search for images or information in discussion groups or in directories. Here we will concentrate on searching the Web. If you type a few words in the space above "Google Search" you might find what you want, but chances are also quite good that you would be presented with a list of thousands of Web sites containing those words - 10 of these sites on each Google page. Whether using Google or some other search engine you will want to focus your search to make it more manageable. Most search engines have help sections. With a few clicks (clicking on Advanced Search, All About Google, and Help and How to Search), we found "Google Help Central" at http://www.google.com/help/index.html. It is a good idea to read through some of the help items before you start. For instance by reading "The Basics of Google Search" we quickly learn that if you type two words, Google will automatically return only pages that contain both words, as if you had inserted an AND between them. Also Google ignores common words such as "with" and "of." To include "with" in a search, we need to place a + in front of it (+with).
Most librarians recommend the use of an advanced search, wherever possible. If you click on Advanced Search on Google's home page you will see a search page with increased options:
Your options are now increased. Typing "Hannibal in Africa" [without the quote marks] in the box after 'with all of the words' is the equivalent of a basic search. A list of 20,400 Web pages are returned. But if you type "Hannibal in Africa" [again without the quote marks] in the box after 'with the exact phrase,' you have effectively put quote marks around your words and will only get pages with the same words in the same order you have typed them. Now you have 49 pages to peruse rather than 20,400. To narrow your search further, you could leave "Hannibal in Africa" in the second box and in the fourth box, 'without the words,' type "army." The new results list only 17 pages since pages with the word "army" have been excluded. To expand your search try completing the box after "with any of the words." Typing the word "Hannibal" and the word "Africa" in this box produced 1,430,000 pages since it turned up pages with either word. Try experimenting with a different phrase in the advanced search features of Google or another search engine to see if you are able similarly to limit or expand the number of hits you get from a search query.
There are rather informative sites on the Internet that provide detailed information on how to conduct searches. Two examples are Bare Bones 101: A Very Basic Search Tutorial from the University of South Carolina and Guide to Effective Searching on the Internet by BrightPlanet. Among the hints they offer are:
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Use nouns rather than verbs or adjectives as search keywords. |
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Use three to eight keywords rather
than one or two to narrow the |
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Use Boolean operators (AND, OR,
NOT, etc.) to make your search more |
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Combine keywords into phrases set
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List synonyms and abbreviations
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The most popular application on the Internet is email. Emails
are electronic messages sent over the Internet. You can choose to send a message to one person or to a whole group of people at the same time. It has advantages over both regular mail (alias: snail mail) and telephone service. It beats regular mail by being fast (often it only takes seconds to send your message to the recipient's mail box) and being cheap (there is no extra charge for sending the message beyond the usual fee from your Internet Service Provider). It beats ordinary telephone service because there is no charge; you can leave lengthy messages that an answering machine might not accept; and you can electronically attach documents and pictures.
To use email you need an email program. Here we will discuss Outlook Express 5.5, a free and rather fully-featured application (client) from Microsoft. As this is written, Microsoft is offering version 6 of Outlook Express, but most users still have some variation of version 5. (Outlook Express is designed for the home user, whereas Microsoft Outlook with a calendar and more group features is better suited for intermediate or large businesses.) Some people believe that the user-friendly features of Outlook and Outlook Express make them more vulnerable to hackers. If you prefer not to use Outlook or Outlook Express, there are other very capable email programs available. Two well known examples are Eudora and Pegasus, which is also free. All email programs work in a similar manner. Once you are familiar with one of these programs, the transition to another is not difficult.
If you have Internet Explorer you can get to the main screen of its companion email program in several ways: click on the mail icon
on the Task Bar at the bottom of the screen, or click on mail
in the Tool Bar of the Internet Explorer browser, or select it from the Programs list after clicking on the Start button. The main screen of Outlook Express may look like this:
The Title, Menu, and Tool bars resemble those of other Windows programs. We will discuss some of the Tool Bar icons later. Notice that below these bars the screen is broken into four separate panes. The top pane on the right lists incoming messages. The bottom right pane gives a preview of whatever message is selected. The top left pane shows a list of folders and newsgroups. Since the Inbox folder is selected in this pane, we see a list of incoming messages in the right top pane. If the Sent Items folder were selected, a list of previously sent messages would be shown instead in the top right pane. The bottom left pane has a list of people in my address book that I might send messages to.
In order to send or receive mail you need to setup a mail account. Most frequently it will be with your Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it could be with your school, your work, or some free email service such as Yahoo! Mail or Microsoft's Hotmail. The account provider probably has instructions on how to set up an account using Outlook Express. Get those instructions before you begin. Then you may start the process by opening Outlook Express, then click on Tools on the Menu Bar. Choose Accounts... and then select the Mail tab and you will see:
Click on the Add button on the top right, choose Mail... and the Internet Connection Wizard opens up to guide you the rest of the way. It asks your name, your email address (for example, username@provider.net), the type of mail server (choose POP3, IMAP or HTPP depending on your provider's instructions), incoming mail server (for example, postoffice.provider.net), outgoing mail server (for example, mail.provider.net), your account name (often the portion of your email before the @ symbol), your password, and a checkmark if your provider instructs you to log on using Secure Password Authentication; then press the Finish button to complete the process. To review or change these settings repeat the process click on Tools on the Menu Bar. Choose Accounts... and then select the Mail tab once more. Now you will see:
Highlight your new account and click on the Properties button:
You can now check your settings and make any adjustments needed to retrieve your mail. The same basic procedure can be used to access the many newsgroups or discussion groups on the Internet. (There is even a "24hoursupport.helpdesk.") Just get the necessary address information from your ISP and when you get to the "Internet Accounts" box shown above, click on News rather than Mail. A wizard will open to guide you the rest of the way.
Now let's take a closer look at the Tool Bar on the main screen of Outlook Express:
If you have selected the Inbox on the top left pane of the main screen and click on Send/R... on the Tool Bar, you can receive any new mail and send out any new messages. To open your mail just double click on any item in the top right pane. You also notice buttons to reply, forward (to some other account), print, and delete a highlighted message. Similar buttons are on the Tool Bar of an opened message:
along with buttons to go to the previous or next message and to access your address book. Going back to the Tool Bar showing the main screen (prior to the last bar), we see the New Mail button at the far left. Clicking on this button brings up a screen that looks, in part, like this:
(Note that you will only want to type actual email addresses in the Cc: and Bcc: boxes without added comments.)
To attach a file to this message, click on the paper clip in the Tool Bar. An Insert Attachment box opens up.
Highlight the file you want and press Attach. The file will go along with your message to all the addressees. You can find the attachment just under the subject heading:
Your recipient can open the file just by clicking on it, provided he has the appropriate software for viewing the file. To send a completed message click on the Send button. Depending on your program settings the message may be sent right away or stay in your outbox until you press Send/R... on the main screen.
The Address Book is another useful tool. If you click on Address in the Tool Bar on the main screen or an opened message, you can access the Address Book:
The actual email addresses on the screen above are blanked out for the sake of privacy. The addresses were automatically added to the book when we replied to messages. This option is available in Tools, Options, Send in the main screen. You can add an address by clicking on the New button in the book. When you click on the New button you will also be given the option of creating a group, a list of people who will receive the same message from you. This is a great option to take advantage of if you are a member of a study or a discussion group.
Email is an asynchronous technology. If you send a message to a group, the recipients of your email do not all see it at the same time. If you do want to communicate with everyone at the same time, an alternative means of communication is chat. Chat works in a synchronous mode. You can have a conversation with whomever is in your chat room or chat group in real time (synchronously). You and the other participants in the chat are online at the same time. A widely used form of chat is IRC (Internet Relay Chat). To learn more about chat connect to one of the online tutorials such as Chat or IRC FAQ. You will need a chat client; try mIRC, a well known shareware client, or a freeware application like Microsoft Chat. If you follow the setup instructions for either of these applications you should not have too much difficulty. Here is what the chat window looks like using the mIRC application:
The top left pane contains the conversations of the online members of a group. The narrow right pane shows who is in the chat room at any given moment. In the bottom pane you can add your own thoughts to the conversation and hit enter. Your words will be posted to the top left pane. Chat can be fun, but most people find email to be more efficient.
We have now completed our short tour of Internet basics. Together with the previous review of PC basics, you have enough information to get online and find your way around!
© Copyright 2001, Thomas J. Kehoe. All Rights Reserved. Your comments and suggestions are most welcome. Please email tjkehoe@att.net.
