As educators we all create content and now place
that content on webservers with the hope others will find and use our
material. During the winter and spring of 2002 a group of K12 and Higher
Ed educators working with a HECA grant tried to find ways to make it
easier for classroom teachers find the content and resources they need.The
EdSeek portal project is a collaborative effort by Illinois educators
to provide a means by which the content that is currently stored on
educational organization web servers throughout the State can be located,
indexed and searched. Over 600 practicing educators responded to a survey
addressing their needs. Typical of all Internet users most depend on
public search engines to locate the resources they need, but with the
average time for finding that content often limited to 10 minutes. they
are not finding what they need.
In the first few weeks it became clear that much
of the problem is most webpage creators and even most webmasters have
little understanding of how the Internet content is found, indexed,
and prioritized by the public search engines. This results in much of
the content teachers are looking for being needlessly inaccessible or
else indexed under the wrong headings.
The direction of the volunteer group was refocused
on two complimentary goals. One to build an education specify search
engine to index only content found on university, museum, school and
other education organization webservers. The second goal being to inform
those creating and managing the Internet content how to make their websites
and webpages search engine friendly. Any success in educating the creators
and information managers will result in content being easier to find
and more appropriately indexed. Another benefit is it will also teach
the webmasters how to keep private information private when it should
not be shared.
