Abstract
ISSUE: A diversity of useful electronic information is available to interior design educators on the Internet.
APPLICATION: Interior design educators and practitioners can use their computers and terminals to find electronically stored information that is useful for lectures and presentations, course reading materials, advising, research, and travel.
GOAL: The Internet may be used to improve the efficiency of acquiring information for teaching and research.
DESCRIPTION: The Internet is a vast electronic network that has been developing for the last 20 years and it is becoming more user–friendly with more data useful to design and education than in years past. It is becoming a very valuable information source for educators from all disciplines, and it is free through most school computer networks.
CONCLUSION: Learning how to use the Internet can save a teacher time, money, and energy. An electronic search through the world's finest libraries takes hours instead of days and can reveal references that might be missed in a manual search. To find travel information an educator can sit in an office and search on–line data bases. There is no need to walk or drive to the library. Telecommuting can become a reality, leaving more time for interaction with students.
Summary
Interior designers within the university community need to keep in step with today's changing technology as we move ahead into the twenty–first entury. The Internet is one area of technology that has the potential to improve the job environment and performance of all educators. Email messages and text files can be sent to research colleagues and friends in other parts of the United States and in other countries with no cost and very little time (minutes instead of days). In three to five minutes a listing of scheduled art exhibits of a museum can be downloaded and run off for students. Electronic pictures can be obtained for multimedia presentations within 30 minute. In the future even faster ways to gather information from the Internet will be provided.
There is a down side to using the Internet. Often university systems become so clogged with users that logging on to explore is impossible. Occasionally remote systems “hang (stop working) and an explorer has to restart a search. The learning curve is steep, especially for people who have little experience with computers. It is an understatement to say that the system is not yet user friendly. In addition, there are so many servers on line that it is sometimes difficult to find the one with needed information. Figure 4 lists a menu of server locations. Selecting number 6, “California Gophers, revealed 114 server sites. This diversity, however, is also an indicator of the value of the Internet. The enormous body of information already available makes learning to access the Internet a very valuable tool for knowledge acquisition.
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