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christopher l Teggatz* |
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Christopher Teggatz
Assessment Criteria for cvcways Links
The purpose of this essay is to suggest
methods for the assessment of the hyperlinks on our web site, cvcways.wisc.edu.
The site contains four sections of
career links:
i.
World of Work
ii.
World of Learning
iii.
World of Career Planning
iv.
World of Lifestyle/Budgeting
Each of these pages contains
roughly a dozen links.
In rating the links for this page, I have employed the following
criteria:
a.
Is the site a provider of original content, or
mostly a pointer site? Many sites contain more links than native content. I
recommend that our links focus exclusively on sites that generate native
content. For example, Academe this Week (http://chronicle.merit.edu/) is the
seminal web site for academic jobs, primarily because its job listings and
career advice are completely native.
b.
Who is the author or institution? What is their
authority? We should not select anonymous web sites. Our links should be to
sites written by experts in their field, or are vital to some aspect of a job
search.
c.
The site should contain high-quality information.
Specifically, is the information on the site accurate? Do the links work? Has
the site been proofread for errors? Is the noise-to-information ratio low?
Certainly, sites we link to should not violate copyrights.
d.
Is the site objective? I recommend we avoid any
sites with biases of information, given that the average student might not have
the sophistication to understand and account for bias. For example, does the
advertising on the site have an impact on content?
e.
Is the site current? Is it kept up to date?
f.
Who is the site's intended audience? For our
educational purposes, age is a key factor. Specifically, we can differentiate
our links from others available on the web by providing an age- or
grade-sensitive selection. Another aspect of audience is location. Career
development and job searching are often location-specific tasks; for example,
for a job search in
g.
Does the site provide easy technological access?
This aspect is critical in servicing schools in rural areas, where computers
are often old (making it difficult or impossible to download some forms of
data, such as heavy graphics, frames, and JAVA), and phone lines are often
low-speed. Thus sites that allow text-only or FTP access, sites that don't
require JAVA, and sites that don't require the latest versions of IE or
Netscape, and sites without excessive graphics (sites that preserve bandwidth),
are to be preferred.
h.
Is the site design easy to understand,
esthetically pleasing, and simple to use? Does it look professional? This subjective,
but some standardization on the topic has been attempted. For example, UW-DoIT
publishes guidelines for homepage standards (www.wisc.edu/doit/webpub/stand.html).
Other hypertext style guides include Campus
Libraries Web Page Standards and Guidelines (another UW site), Yale C/AIM WWW Style Manual, Stanford WWW Pages—an attempt at some
standardization, Composing Good HTML
(Carnegie Mellon University), and World
Wide Web Consortium. There are also many style guides such as The Elements of Style by William Strunk.
i.
Cost--does the site charge for access?
1. INITIAL CONSIDERATIONS
Our first consideration should be
what purpose these hyperlinks serve. It’s not clear at the moment, which is why
this study was commissioned.
Our web site suggests that the
student should "use this information to supplement what you know from
Career Visions and to help you develop your career plan in CareerWAYS" (cvcways.wisc.edu/main.htm). This would suggest that
the links should serve an educational and informational purpose.
Nevertheless, to focus on this
exclusively might overlook one of the basic functions of the site, which is to present
product information, to sell our three products (Career Visions, CareerWAYS,
and Career TEAM), and to aid in the use of these products. This would suggest
that the links should also serve a marketing purpose.
Because our page clearly serves
both an educational and a marketing purpose, it would follow that so too should
our links. I will provide educational and marketing suggestions below.
Our second consideration should be
what makes our links different from more developed and arguably more exhaustive
career pages. For example, all of the major web search engines provide
extensive, popular and high quality career links, examples of which include:
·
www.excite.com -> careers
·
www.yahoo.com -> business and economy -> employment
·
www.infoseek.com -> careers
·
www.lycos.com -> careers
Because these pages already contain
all the information our site offers, and because these pages have already
established qualitative standards, and furthermore, because these sites are of
high quality and heavily browsed by most internet users, we must ask ourselves
some serious questions. What does our links page offer to differentiate it? Are
we willing to expend the immense time and effort necessary to produce links
pages of similar quality? Indeed, are we serving the educational needs of
students by pulling them away from arguably more productive sites? (The low
traffic count on our site poses this question in particular.)
I would suggest one of two
strategies. First, we might consider simply linking with an already established
page within a frame that displays our masthead. Second, we might consider ways
to differentiate our links pages. Links pages are a bit of a cliché on the web,
and our links should add value by providing unique or specialized data.
Our third consideration should be
the simplicity and clarity of the assessment process, and the ease with which
the surfer can comprehend our assessment. The average web surfer will spend a
few seconds glancing at our links. Thus our presentation should be simple and
clear. A good example is the format Consumer
Reports uses in its reviews; with charts, pie graphs, and concise 1-2
sentence reviews, the reader need not expend effort deciphering their review
system. Another good model is Infoseek. With every page of links, Infoseek
offers a 1-4 star rating and a sentence or two describing the site. Like Consumer Reports, this system is easy
and useful. Furthermore, Infoseek recommends the best pages in a hierarchical
order of quality, in contrast to other search engines.
Our fourth consideration should be
providing a manageable number of links; for example, Yahoo, while exhaustive,
provides 50 unrated links per page; in contrast Infoseek offers ten rated links
per page, which is arguably less intimidating and more convenient for the
novice surfer. Because more experienced surfers would go to a major search engine
anyway, we would do best to follow Infoseek's example.
A fifth consideration is Spanish
links for Hispanic students in
Finally, the internet does not
provide an exhaustive review of career-related material; books, journals,
magazines, and newspapers are all critical to career development. Thus,
"links" (i.e. recommendations) to non-internet data would be in order.
The web site "Business Job Finder" (www.cob.ohio-state.edu/dept/fin/osujobs.htm),
for example, provides recommendations of books with links to Amazon.com.
2. LITERATURE ON HYPERLINK ASSESSMENT
There is considerable literature on
web page assessment, much of which is produced by the UW-DoIT. After an
extensive review of literature, I found the following to be the most useful:
· The
Scout Report Selection Criteria:
http://scout.wisc.edu/scout/report/criteria.html
·
The Internet: Window to the Word or
Hall of Mirrors? Information Quality in the Networked Environment: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/toolkit/enduser/archive/1996/euc-9611.html
· Anatomy
of a Scout Report: Resource Discovery in the Information Age, or How We Do It: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/toolkit/enduser/1997/euc-9703.html
· Information
Quality: A Catalogue of Potent Truisms: www.ciolek.com/WWWVLPages?QltyPages/QltyTruisms.html
· Thinking
Critically about World Wide Web Resources: www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/instruct/web/critical.html
Hard copies of these studies are
available in my office.
T. Matthew Ciolek aptly describes
the internet as a "hall of mirrors... with some mirrors being more
luminous... The result is a breathless and ever-changing 'information swamp' of
visionary solutions, pigheaded stupidity and blunders, dedication and
amateurishness as well as professionalism and chaos" (www.ciolek.com/PAPERS/QUEST/QuestMain.html). This
state of affairs is because anyone with a computer and an internet connection
can now publish, creating a democratization of publishing which is hailed by
some as an information revolution. Nevertheless, the former middleman in book
publishing--the editor--has now been eliminated, and the web surfer encounters
a glut of information, much of which is low quality. Thus we saw the growth of
search engines and links pages.
3. RECOMMENDED EDUCATIONAL AND MARKETING CONSIDERATIONS
The most important marketing
consideration is age and grade in school. This is critical for determining the
student's cognitive capabilities with the data we are providing her, and also
for taking into account the student's stage in career development (eg, Academe this Week would be
incomprehensible for a grade schooler, while absolutely critical for a graduate
student or educator). I would recommend that our site employ age-and
grade-sensitive information, either:
a. Constructing a search engine for
the links on our site which uses age or grade as a search criterion
b. Having links grouped in
categories according to age or grade
Either of these methodologies
should preferably be constructed (or recommended) by educators who teach these
students.
A clear strategy according to age
and grade would succeed in differentiating our site from the glut of career
information available. In particular, this would give us a viable marketing
strategy for advertising the site to educators.
With our hyperlinks, we might best
follow the philosophy expressed on the CareerWAYS site: "student interest
and involvement are critical in developing their control and ownership of the
planning process" (www.cew.wisc.edu/WCIS/CATA9798/page4.html).
The major career links pages, such as Excite and Yahoo, employ this strategy to
some extent (though for different reasons) by offering a customized search and
a "personalization" of the hyperlink search process. We might
consider both of these approaches for cvcways.wisc.edu, because both would
foster "control and ownership" of the career planning process:
a.
"Customized search" refers to the
search criteria each engine employs; the same key words will net different
results at each site. Thus we might consider designing a search engine on our
site which meets our goals, eg, designing a search engine that is location-,
career field, and age- or grade-sensitive.
b.
"Personalization" refers to the server
storing individual information. This would require us to design our site with a
login and password, to record individual student data. The student would enter
a series of data such as age, grade, location, and career fields. Thereafter,
we would be able to provide individualized data and store each individual student's
preferred links. This would have several miraculous results. First, we would
again be differentiating our links page from the glut of information already
available. Second, the noise-to-information ratio would be significantly reduced.
Our site could provide Anna J. Student with information about astronauts and
runway models, and skip information about law enforcement. Joe R. Student would
receive information about the job market in Milwaukee, but no other extraneous
information, such as the job market in
These strategies would give us
considerable advantage in marketing the web site (and hence our products), but
also would give the student control and ownership of the career planning
process.
We might consider linking with relevant
pages on an already-established search engine, such as Excite or Yahoo. This is
fairly common on the web, and could help make our site more comprehensive,
up-to-date, and give the student wider exposure to career-related resources.
For example, when we provide links to newspapers, it would be easier and arguably
more productive to link with Excite's "
A final marketing consideration is
the design of our links pages. Obviously it could be much improved; from a
marketing point of view, a modern, attractive, interesting web site will
inspire confidence in our product, give us greater educational authority, and
will encourage surfers to return to our web site. There are far to many ameteur
sites out there, and many high quality job links pages; unless we design a site
of the highest quality, we're wasting our time.
Web design has become somewhat of
an art in itself, and is beyond the scope of this essay. I would recommend we
simply identify a page we like as a model, and build ours like it. A superb
design is found at "Business Job Finder" (www.cob.ohio-state.edu/dept/fin/osujobs.htm).
Here, links are presented in a non-frame format, graphics are interesting and
animated, but not excessive, and the site requires no effort whatsoever to
navigate.
4. CATEGORICAL LISTINGS
At first glance, cvcways
categorical listings, such as "World of Work," seem too broad.
However, these categories are broken into fairly intelligent and simple
sub-categories; for example, "World of Work" is broken into
sub-categories such as "Apprenticeships," "Community
Services," etc.
If we review the categorical
listings on each search engine's career page, we find a rigmarole of
categorization which arguably doesn't improve upon what we already have; e.g.,
Infoseek lists the category "How to write a resume," while we have
"Resume Preparation."
Because such categorizations are
relatively self-evident, and because our current system functions well, I don't
recommend we change it.
5. RECOMMENDATIONS
Taking into account the studies
I've mentioned, and the points discussed above, I have the following
recommendations:
1.
Develop a clear statement of purpose for the
links on the cvcways site.
2.
Develop a personalization procedure for our site.
3.
Develop an age, grade, location, and
career-sensitive search engine for the links on our site.
4.
Link to established search engines or web pages
within a cvcways frame for comprehensive categories such as "newspapers,"
"job banks by state," etc.
5.
Develop a simple graphical review system. I would
recommend we follow Infoseek in reviewing sites with 1-4 stars, and then
presenting the links hierarchically.
6.
Use simple assessment criteria as suggested
above.
7.
Provide "links" to non-internet
material (eg links to Amazon.com).
8.
In most cases, employ only the top ten links (or
so) to avoid information deluge.
9.
Retain the current categorical listings
("World of Work," "World of Learning," "Military
Training," etc.), which are simple and informative, and if it ain't broke,
don't fix it.
10.
Consider expanding links to include Spanish,
which would increase our value in
11.
Make a more esthetically pleasing design for our
links pages.
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