Grabe's "Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning"

Ok, I can begin this post by agreeing that this article is pretty old-copyright 1998, and there are many parts that are so outdated one can only be amused. For example, Grabe writes about educational access and uses the Clinton Administration to reference the commitment to connect schools to the internet. Grabe even writes of Gore's vision in 1994 for a "different kind of superhighway that can...give every American, young and old, the chance for the best education available to anyone,anywhere."(p.190) Does this reinforce Gore's belief that he created the Internet?

Despite the "old news" about technology in this article, Grabe discusses some of the exact ideas and principals we've been reading in K&L and Kajder. Grabe's "internet resources" segment repeats similar strategies featuring the different types of tools available, email activities, how teachers structure projects to engage students, and how to find "course-relevant"resources on the internet. However, Grabe goes into so much technical detail that he loses me. It reminds me of my television and how it's connected to digital cable, a dvd player, and surround sound but I don't want or need to know how. I just want to be able to turn my tv on with the remote and watch a movie if I want to without knowing which cable and USB connections were needed, etc.... Just reading Grabe's description of the process of transferring files using FTP (file transfer protocol) and the UNIX operating system makes me wonder how obsolete this information is.

Ok, now that I told you what I didn't like, this is what I did: I liked how Grabe s-p-e-l-l-e-d everything out from "browsers" and "home pages" to differentiating links. When reading newer, more up to date texts, some writers assume everyone knows exactly what they are talking about and neglect to define or identify parts. No one can accuse Grabe of doing that because he/she defines everything. On page 209, for example, Grabe goes into graphic detail about web browsers and hypertext mark up language (HTML), helper applications and plug-ins. Again, this information may be so outdated but I found is useful to understand how a webpage was created because I had no clue.
When talking about "searching the web", I found Grabe's description of search engines being fed by "robots" continually roaming the internet and "web librarians" who examine web documents kind of silly.(p210) I imagined little robots and tiny librarians inside everyone's computers running around trying to keep everything functioning properly. But, I liked his breakdown of search engines descriptions; meta-index, concept, index searches, and personal indexes because he goes into detail the different strategies of the different search engines and explains how they produce different results. (p.211) But "Google" is never mentioned, which like Jason said, is the "big Daddy" of search engines, so it does question the information being relevant to today.
Once again, the "boolean" search strategy is mentioned, as in K&L, but Grabe tells of its origins in "Boolean logic in high school math class"(p.214) and goes into a whole page description of how to use boolean operators to refine your search, unlike the newer texts who mention it in one or two sentences. By the time I was done reading, I felt like an expert on Boolean operators. I also learned that typing in lower case letters for a search will find BOTH upper and lower case matches, but using upper case letters will produce only uppercase matches.
One last thing that I found useful and need to keep on file is how to cite internet sources. (p.220) I had a professor last year who had to look up the "proper" way to cite a website so I think including this information in the article is still very beneficial and useful even nine years later. So, even though the majority of the text is pretty outdated, I think there is still some beneficial information included that helps those of us likely to be called, "digital immigrants" to better understand the natives way of thinking.