THE FIVE LITTLE WOODEN SHIPS, wrought on medieval building techniques but resting on a Renaissance ideal, sailed from Sanluca de Barrameda in the fall of 1519. Navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached South America, rounded the stormy cape now named in his honor, and came about to face--infinity. A vast, placid sea of unimaginable size, breathtaking, daunting, a shining sheet reaching beyond the horizon. Two whole months' of sail took the starving and exhausted sailors to their first sign of land, Guam. The world was indeed bigger than any medieval mind had believed.

Today the physical world seems so much smaller, yet when we sail out after knowledge using the internet as our sea, the vastness is an exhausting mental challenge. An on-line web workshop(1) once reported a computer data firm's research showing that in 1985, the number of documents in the world was doubling every five years. By 1989, the amount was doubling every three years. In 1991 they doubled every year, and in 1994, they were estimated to double in nine months. Pages on the web may be doubling even faster-I can't keep up. I don't think anyone can. Google the doughty search engine tries: in September 2002 it reported its ability to search 2,469,940,685 web pages.

Everyone who has jumped into the web for a ride knows how quickly the hours can tick by as screen after screen of colorful text and links pass our tired eyes. We call up one page, then click an intriguing link to another page, then to another, and yet another colorful scene, a mesmerizing parade of text and images we call net surfing. It's informational inundation like trying to drink from a mug under Niagara Falls. And at day's end? Little to show for our glutted mind.

This is the challenge of the dawn of a Web-based age of information, the vast sea of knowledge through which we must navigate. Metaphors of seas and waterfalls, or highways and surfers, seem to be the only way we can explain the terrifying excitement of this ocean at our keystroke, yet perhaps it gives us some feeling of what students are up against. It is ironic that on the one hand we welcome the non-linear aspect of multimedia education, and yet on the other hand, we can let it drive us to stupor. Let's try yet another metaphor. Back to our walk in a new city. Let us suppose that the new city was Cairo. A first walk in this ancient crossroads of civilizations is a sensorial assault: flying taxis, roaring streetcars, aggressive shopkeepers, the swirling colors and dust of multitudes crammed through narrow streets. After the first shock one may be tempted to retreat back gasping into the hotel. But slowly we learn to find our way through.

Turn off the computer
We said that the non-linear aspect of multimedia learning appeals to our natural tendency to pick up information interactively, using all our senses. It seems that to organize your multimedia-harvested research for your own writing or Web page design, however, requires some means of controlling the itching clicking finger. Otherwise, you can too easily ricochet off your main topic and onto interesting, but ultimately irrelevant, tangents.

A first step is to turn off the computer. (Um. After printing this guide, of course.) Why? Because you need to scratch up a plan. Think about your topic, about ways you can refine your research, to ask specific questions. Similar to looking up very general questions on a library's computer card catalog, inputing very general terms to a Web search engine will pull you off on a chase far from the information you need. Because Web pages offer so many distractions, some of them helpful, some of them not, you need to hold onto a clear focus of your topic question as you dive in. Write a paragraph to help you focus, if necessary, and to help you settle on a research question. It may still be somewhat vague at this point, but the more specific you can be, the easier you will be able to control the glut.

All right, now turn on the computer. Navigate first to what is perhaps the most familiar and homey Web search aid, Yahoo: www.yahoo.com.

Yahoo offers to search by topic, somewhat like a library card catalog. It's called a database searcher, because someone has gathered the sites for you to look through.

On the other hand, some searchers launch a search on request for Web pages which contain that topic, whether or not they're part of an index. Try my favorite, www.google.com. Or your own favorite.

As you find pages and links, scan for information germane to your topic. Follow links as you think they may have a bearing: part of research is serendipity, and the Web makes it so much easier than following written footnotes.
You'll probably want to copy material you may find useful. Avoid copying too much, as it becomes as dreary looking back through it as it might looking through page after page of photocopied articles from the library. In fact, some find it's better to open a word processing program and take on-line notes, toggling between the word processor and the Web page. In fact, I use the medieval method of scratchings on parchment, I mean ballpoint on notebook, to keep track of notes. You can always call up the pages again, if necessary. Keep track of URLs in your notes, or in your Web Journal (see below).

A knotty problem students face using the web is the quality of information. While the credibility of sources is certainly worth careful consideration in traditional library research, information there usually has been screened and edited by a publisher. You can put confidence in material offered by a publisher known for high standards, whether it be a scholarly journal or nationally-respected organization.

A web page can be thrown up by anyone, anywhere, often without any editing filters at all, and because companies are in such a rush right now trying to build a "web presence," the quality of their material might be lower than in published sources. Generally you can use anyone's web material to help point you in the right direction, to help spark your ideas, but you can only use web material from legitimate and well-known sources in your final paper. Anything less, and you run the risk of producing an argument you can't easily defend by resting on information from an expert. However, the WebPaper concept asks you to look at footnotes differently. Instead of footnotes, you provide links. We'll talk about the mechanics of that below.

Note

1. Thomas P. Copley and Barbara L.Copley, "Make the Link" workshop, Tutorial Number 5/1, by e-mail, 1995.