Gopher

    You have learned that Gopher is a program that enables you to search through public access databases on computers all over the world. A wonderful thing about it is that you can do this right from your own computer. When it's too cold to go to the library (if you lived where I do, that has real meaning!), you can just log on and search library databases from your office, dormitory, home, or wherever you use the computer. The most used Gopher address in the world is gopher.micro.umn.edu because it is the address of the University of Minnesota's Gopher server -- the birthplace of Gopher. You might want to keep that in mind for future reference; many other publicly accessible Gopher sites exist, and they are probably not as busy. In this first exercise, you will see how to find a list of Gopher sites all over the world. The subsequent activities will also help you find some very useful information for foreign language teachers.

    Gopher Activity I

    1. Go to the Gopher menu at the University of Minnesota by typing:
     
      gopher gopher.micro.umn.edu

    at the prompt in your mail system, which is most likely where your gopher client is running.  Next, go to:
     

      Other Gophers and Information Servers.

    (Note: If you use the link provided here, you will be accessing the Gopher via the WWW and consequently will see a slightly different menu format than you would if you were to access the Gopher site via your gopher client on the mail system.  On the WWW page, each category will be preceded by a folder icon indicating it is a link. If you use your gopher client on the mail system, your menus will have numbers for the items.  These menus will look much like the ones in the "answer" below.)

    2. See if you can find the following entry by following the menu links in Gopher:
     

      2. ESPOL - Escuela Politecnica del Litoral, Guayaquil - Ecuador/
       
    [Give-up button]   Don't click on this until you have tried several times!

    3. Now see if you can find the KIDLINK menu and read the General Information file in your L2 (or L3 or L4 . . . .). Hint: KIDLINK is an International Organization.

    4. The General Information file is offered in languages.

    [Give-up button]

    Gopher Activity II

    Wouldn't you know it?  After I developed all my nice Gopher activities and pages, Gopher began to be phased out of many places. (Of course, if this is your first time here, you wouldn't know that, but trust me, I really had to change this page.  **:-)  With the World Wide Web becoming more and more prevalent (just like in the first activity, where you can use gopher through your email program OR access it via the WWW), many sites are turning their gopher-based information systems into WWW servers.  So . . . even though this next activity does not strictly use Gopher, it will still help you find useful information for FL teachers.  For this exercise, we will be using the address for the ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics. Please keep in mind that other places still do offer public access to the ERIC database as well. For example, the University of Saskatchewan Library System offers the ERIC database from 1983 to the present. Harvard University offers the ERIC database, 1989 to the present.

    1. First, access the home page of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics.

    2. From this menu, select ERIC Digests

    which will take you to another page that has a listing of many ERIC Digests with topics germane to your specialization.

     

    3. Pick a Digest, read it, and summarize it for your foreign language methods class.

    Gopher Activity III

    Follow the same steps as above, but find the list of Minibibs offered by the ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics (ERIC/CLL).

    1. Look over the list and select one of interest to you. Follow the path to the minibib, select a recent article or ERIC document, and read it. You can probably find it in your local university library, but you might be able to find it on-line by doing a search of the ERIC database using Gopher. Summarize the article for your foreign language methods class.

    2. Suggest three additional topics which you would like to see researched and catalogued as ERIC/CLL minibibs in the future.

    [Learning the basics]