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WEB RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS
Books, bush and brains
The ACQ Internet Column February 2000
Caroline Bowen

Books
Is your image of a student a person with a book? It's a pleasing one that many of us share, and it fits with a love of language, reading, writing and scholarship. Perhaps it is only natural for speech and language professionals to have strong interests in, and affinities with, the written as well as the spoken word. The Internet provides rich pickings for we bibliophiles. Rare, used and out-of-print books can be located through TomFolio or Book Search. We can frequent the Internet Public Library and browse the shelves of great bookshops like Blackwells, Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

I parted with $AU14.95 not so long ago in exchange for a content-rich little book called Get Great Information Fast. Its authors, John Germov and Lauren Williams, both lecturers at The University of Newcastle, NSW, have produced an excellent resource for students, academics and researchers, covering in reasonable depth and detail the use of WWW search engines and CD-ROM and on-line data bases. It came as no surprise to find that Germov and Williams' favourite one-stop reference web site is the astounding My Virtual Reference Desk.

Seeking out reliable reference materials on the Internet has been likened to a mystery tour on a bus. You don't quite know where the bus will take you or how well it will work. It can be a very time consuming pursuit and it is easy to become distracted by  links that are not precisely on-topic. Focused and more efficient searching can be facilitated with the use of Key Word Assisted Searches such as the ones offered by The Communication Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS) the Educational Resources Information Center and PubMed in far away Bethesda, MD.

Bush
Speaking of far away, now and again I correspond with Joe Dodds a Senior Speech Pathologist in central Australia. Joe and his colleague Lyndal Sheepway work in Broken Hill, New South Wales, in a service area larger than the United Kingdom! Joe always has something interesting to contribute on the use of IT in providing "distance" speech pathology services. One of his great concerns is the management of recruitment and retention issues for Speech Pathologists working in remote areas.

Students can take advantage of many of the websites designed to cater for rural and remote health care delivery. There is, for example, the sprawling collection of links to rural and distance education resources on the National Rural Health Alliance (NRHA) and the Rural Health Unit sites. Of course, university web sites, particularly their libraries, often repay exploration yielding good sources of reference data for students and other researchers.

Brains
Speech-Language Pathology at Australian Universities

There is a vast array of resources by and for students of all sorts on the Internet, from the orderly pages of the Co-Op Bookshop, to the latest theses, which can be found by using Digital Dissertations, and Australian funding opportunities at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

There are informational sites especially for students too. In the United States the 18,000 members strong National Student Speech Language Hearing Association (NSSLHA) serves as the national organization for graduate and undergraduate students interested in the study of normal and disordered human communication. It is the only official national student association recognized by the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA). It has chapters in more than 285 colleges and universities. 

With all this talk of digital libraries and electronic references you might think I would be tempted to overwrite my image of a student as a person with a book and replace it with a person with a laptop. 

But you would be wrong!

Webwords Index

Academic Writing 
Academic Writer

Avoiding plagiarism
Copy-cats, Copyright & Clones
A few MORE words about plagiarism

Writing up your research
using the IMRaD format 
Clinicians who do research: Hands-on scientists
 

Page updated 12 May, 2009 

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