Help for Forest M&M
ANU

 Help
Forest Measurement and Modelling.

Make yourself comfortable, and ready to be efficient! It is most important that you are prepared before you do any WWW research! Without proper preparation, you will waste a lot of your time and you may end up stiff, sore and sorry.

Recommended steps:
  1. Make yourself comfortable. Adjust you seat, and make sure the computer screen is easy to read. Use the View / Font sizeMenu Commands to make sure the text is big enough to comfortably read and with a good colour contrast.

  2. Make sure to dont waste time when you actually find something of interest when you are searching the WWW - make sure the information you find can be captured for future use, e.g.
    • Bookmark the page address.

    • Copy and paste relevent paragraphs etc into a wordprocessor.

    • Save the file.

  3. Don't waste time searching for information. Have a plan of attack:

    • Get colleagues to suggest some starting pages.

    • Find the "related links" pages on pages maintained by authorities. For example, http://www.metla.fi/info/vlib/Forestry/

    • Get a list of key words and use a WWW search engine. If possible, use boolean commands in your search (e.g. ecology AND maps) to reduce the huge set of data that a general search might produce.

  4. Dont trust everything you read:

    • Look for author or authorisation links. If no organisation "owns up" to producing the information, then it may be unreliable.

    • Look for "last updated" details. Data can quickly become outdated.

    • Look at the domain name to determine if the page owner is a commercial company (com), government body (gov), educational institute like a school or university (edu), or other organisation (net, etc). Then treat the information provided appropriately.

    • Many organisations use the special tida character ~ in the name of any page that is designed to be a temporary page. Treat temporary pages as if they were personal communications - you may never be able to prove to anyone else that the information provided was reasonable.

    • Look for evidence of peer review, e.g. comments indicating peer review or just simple evidence of good grammer, spelling, etc.

    • Know how to reference or address the information if you intend using it. Your references in a report etc should at least include the full WWW addrsss of the page and the date you last referenced it. This will allow other readers to check on the data at a future time.

  5. Set a time limit for searching. Don't spend too long or you will never do anything with the information you gathered!

Formatting These resources have been designed to run under Netscape 4 or Microsoft Explorer. General control and navigation throughout the resources therefore use the [common navigation tools] available under these programs.

Users can easily become lost when following links throughout these resources. One of the common problems is that the user does not know if the link jumps to a new position in the current page or to a new page. To help overcome this problem, links to another position in the current page will be indicated by enclosing square brackets [ ].

Curly bracket { } enclose links to pages that are not part of these resources. These links were valid at the time these resources were compiled, but their on-going maintenance and existence are beyond local control.

A link may cause a new browser window to open. This second window is provided to allow you to follow a different thread without loosing your original page. When finished with the seond window, you can close it and return to your original browser window, or use the Browser menu bar to swap between windows. The new window can also be resized and moved to allow the original window to be seen. For example, this link will open a separate window with a picture of the author. You can close the new window in the normal fashion for your browser or just click back in the original window to continue where you left off.
Activities Throughout these resources, the user is asked questions or suggestions for further reading or analyses are made under the label "Activities". The activities are designed to test understanding of the concepts. Where there are questions, multiple choice answers may be provided as links. Selecting the link that corresponds to your answer will move you to either a confirmation or a suggestion for further work. These activities may be restricted to students who are enrolled in a course at the Australian National University.

Some of the activities will ask a question and provide you with radio buttons to select the appropriate response. Clicking on the radio button will cause a pop-up window to appear which will contain some feedback. For example:
What is the result of the calculation 1+3? (click the one correct dot)
For
Four.
Fore.
Navigation Words or phrases that are underlined indicate hyperlinks. Click on these links to move to different documents or different places within a document.

Back arrow. Click on this arrow to go to the previous link.

Forward arrow. If you have used the back arrow, clicking on the forward arrow will go to the next link in your current chain of links.

[help.htm] Revision: 6/1999
Cris.Brack@anu.edu.au