Assignment Two

DUE by 9PM on Tuesday 18 January

Part 1:

Make a hyperlink on your index.html page, pointing to a file named log.html.
  1. Open FrontPage, then use the 'Open' command (File menu) to retrieve your index.html page.
  2. Below the material you wrote for this week's assignment, type My logfile.
  3. Highlight that text. Click on the GLOBE icon in the menubar.
  4. Name the file log.html.
  5. Save the index.html page (use SAVE AS... to make SURE it's saving it as index.html unless you, like, totally trust Bill Gates...).

  6. Now tell FrontPage that you want to make a NEW page.
  7. Put the date on the page.
  8. SAVE AS log.html and go to your index.html page in a browser.
  9. Click on the "My logfile" link and you should see the page with the date on it. If not, hunt me down and we'll straighten out the problem.

This log.html page is where you will keep track of what you do as you search --it's your working space, a place to cache URLs and comments and so on --an electronic lab notebook cum diary, in which you record process as you learn more. I (and your faculty mentor) will look at it to see what you've been up to and what you THINK about what you've found, so don't hesitate to go into detail.

Part 2: Try some searches on and around your topic in

  1. Annie (annie.wlu.edu),
  2. Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), and
  3. Science (www.sciencemag.org) and Nature (www.nature.com/nature/)
and write a narrative of your search process and findings in your log.html file. Be sure to report what terms you tried in each resource. Always DATE your log entries.
The idea this week is to use different tools to begin to develop more terminology for your topic, to record promising leads you happen upon, and to gain facility with editing your Web pages. You could spend many hours, but I'd suggest that you figure that 2 hours is a reasonable max. Finding nothing with a search isn't necessarily a bad thing --it does suggest that you may want to reformulate the question (often by BROADENING --asking a more general question)

Your task is not just to find resources: you need to read them, and extract whatever value each may contain. That's not necessarily easily or quickly done, so having pointers in your log.html file to things you find will turn out to be very useful later.