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You know how you use the web, and you might even know how your best friends use the web, but do you know how other people - folks not like yourself - use the web?

I'm a college teacher most of the time (and an average educated guy, and dad, the rest). Most of my use of the Internet is centered around my job - teaching college - and though it might not be typical of college teachers, you might gain something from the insight. If you're a student, it might help you adjust to the side of the web that can be a good tool for education. Which is to say, I don't hop onto a search engine and type in "sex," "nudes," or "Britney Spears."

About half of my Internet use is for E-mail. I'm in contact with friends, students, and colleagues mostly, and occasionally relatives. I have "subscriptions" (they're free) to a few discussion groups (all teaching related) and I get the mail from those and occasionally post messages to them (but mostly I don't post anything to them - I just listen). I never ever send any E-mail to everyone in my address book. And if I get something from someone that looks like it went out to everyone in their address book (usually from a student), I glance over it and then trash it... usually thinking the student should know better than to foolishly send mail to everyone in their address list. If the E-mail suggests I'll be happier if I forward it to 20 people, I trash it; if the E-mail suggests I'll win a free cell phone, I trash it; if the E-mail promises me anything impersonal (lower interest rates or cheaper insurance or better sex), I trash it. Hey, there's a lot of junk out there and junk belongs in the trash. I check my E-mail maybe 5-10 times a day, depending if anything (such as a heated discussion) is going on or not. I don't have instant messaging and I don't let incoming E-mail signal its arrival.

Often I might have to look up something (some factual information) quickly, and the web is a great tool for that. For instance, if a student makes a (usually uninformed) claim that the government spends so many dollars on foreign aid, I'll want to check to see what the figures really are. Or if a student claims there's "a new way of treating it," I'll want to see what I can find out about this new therapy.

But how? It's usually quite simple: I go to google and type in a key phrase, and usually I get an answer with just a couple of clicks. Of course, you have to know how to search using a search engine like google, but if you get good at it, you usually get a close approximation to what you were looking for. But you also have to know which sites to trust and which to take with a grain of salt. If I were to look for information on foreign aid, for example, I might type in "foreign aid US government" into a google search box (without the quotation marks), and from the "hits" returned I'd look for ones produced by the government itself (our federal government is pretty good about supplying accurate information about things they know), but I might also check out a couple agencies that keep tabs on things like that. Those are the sites I'd be more inclined to trust for accurate information. The answer to my question might be one click away or I might have to dig a little from the initial site that I click on, but eventually I get it and usually try to find verification from some other site. I only use Wikipedia for easy, straightforward questions, but even then I'm likely to Google the issue for backup.

When I grade student papers I also have to make use of the web (at least some of the time) because some students cheat (they copy material from web sites illegitimately... and if students can find the sites, I can find them). I pop over to google again and insert the phrases I think are copied (you know, the parts that were copied but didn't have quotation marks around them to show they were copied) and I might get lucky and find the originals, in which case the student is in for a bad grade and deeper trouble for cheating. Or I might submit a few paragraphs of a student paper to a plagiarism detection service and let it do the searching for me. I get lucky with those things, too. It's sad that students cheat, but it's sort of fun doing the detective work.

Do I do any serious research on the web? Occasionally. Serious research is not a google search. It's a library search. To conduct serious research (for information that's available on a scholarly topic - that is, a topic covered in our courses) I log into the college library databases and search for full text articles on the topics I need. Again, this is a process that one gets better at with practice, resulting in more useful hits and fewer empty (complete-miss) searches. It takes a little more time than a google search (from home I have to log in, and the library search process works slower), but it uncovers text from various magazines and scholarly journals, which are a thousand times more reliable than much of the material found from a general web search.

Outside of my job I use the web to find information on other things that I might be interested in, which includes some news (from more reliable sources like the NY Times) and sports, but also product information (including prices) if I'm planning a purchase; I also do my banking and most of my investing over the Internet; a couple years ago I did some serious house-hunting (and bought one that I discovered over the Internet - even though the real estate agent insisted that anything on the Internet was old data); I check ticket prices against the offers I get from a local travel agent; I buy books; make hotel reservations; I might look up answers to household questions (google again); I read an article or two that some friend or colleague suggests; occasionally I look for software updates; I find out when the place is open and what the admissions charge is; I get government information about the town, the lakes, the trails, the licenses, or whatever; and I try to keep up my own web site, though I don't put much time into that.

Perhaps of equal interest is what I don't do on the web. I don't play games; I don't browse for porn; I don't chat; I don't look for arguments for or against whatever by whomever (because that usually leads to anyone saying anything about everything, and you may as well watch commercial television); I don't read blogs; I don't write blogs; I don't look for something "fun" to do on the Internet; I don't take health information seriously (most of what I've seen on the web is oversimplified and unreliable); I never respond to junk E-mail, or check out what it wants me to check out; I don't insert my name or any other truthful personal information unless absolutely required to do so (such as for a credit card purchase... and I only do that when there is an encrypted secure connection); I don't fill out surveys; I don't take personality tests; and I don't use any instant messenger program or automatic E-mail notification system because, basically, it can wait.

Some of this might be typical for my age group, of course, but some is typical for my position - that of a college teacher. The point is that unless you actually know what other people are doing, you might think your way is the only way, but if your way isn't helping you to succeed in college, then you need to know what some other way might look like. I hope it helps.

Michael S. Ofsowitz (2002/2005)