- guardian.co.uk,
- Tuesday May 11 1999 17:50 BST
Even a child can use a mouse to click round the internet, so who needs a guide book? But the internet offers much more than the world wide web, and it's not so easy to learn how to use other features.
What about electronic mail and mailing lists, FTP (the file transfer protocol), Usenet newsgroups, instant messaging and chat? How can you listen to the radio, make phone calls and send faxes too? Even if you start with a working internet connection and a modern web browser, there are lots of useful things to learn about finding the best sites, organising 'bookmarks' so you can find them again, and exploiting the net for educational use. All this means is that a good, non- technical how-to book for teachers and students should find a wide market.
Unfortunately no such book exists. However, you can get a reasonable approximation by buying two or three.
The Guardian Guide To The Internet by Jim McClellan (4th Estate, 1998) is the best beginner's guide in this particular bunch. McClellan writes from personal experience and his selection of sites, while smaller than some, is far sharper than the average. The book does have the odd mistake (inevitable in this field), the CD-Rom in the back is obsolete (it connects users to the BT Click Internet service not, say, Dixons' FreeServe), and, reprehensibly, it lacks an index. But it's very readable, and excellent value for £6.99.
The same cannot be said for Becta's slim guide From Chalk Board To Internet, which costs £7.50 for 52 pages. Worse, the typography and layout suggest it has been designed for looking at, not for reading. Given the brevity of the content, the struggle is hardly worth the effort.
For the educational element, readers can turn to Exploiting The Internet As An Information Resource in Schools by James E Herring (Library Association Publishing, 1999). The dull title, unimaginative cover, formal prose, pedagogic approach and high price (£24.95) will surely prevent this book from reaching a wide market. However, it's worth seeking out because it does what it says on the cover.
The Complete Idiot's Guide To The Internet: UK Edition 1999 by Peter Kent and Rob Young (Que, pounds 18.49) is also worth a look, and comes with a CD-Rom that gets you online with Virgin.net. The book's larger format, prolific use of illustrations and willingness to be a touch more technical than McClellan help this guide do a good job of covering parts of the net beyond the web.
The same cannot, alas, be said for Ingo Lackerbauer's Internet Basics: In No Time (Prentice Hall Europe, £12.99), which seems to be dominated by pictures of Microsoft wizard routines and tabbed dialogue boxes. There are people who need something this simplistic, but how many of them are capable of handling money? In a field as new as this, it's comforting to find an old friend like a Teach Yourself book, and Chris Wright's Teach Yourself The Internet For Students (Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99), ought to be a winner. Unfortunately the middle half of the book is just thematic lists of websites with brief reviews, and there are plenty of those on the net. This waste of space doesn't leave Wright much room for the useful stuff, and the result is a missed opportunity.
In fact, 'missed opportunity' sums up most of this bunchof books. And with the government determined to get every teacher and pupil online by 2002, the opportunity must be a large one.
