When less is more: a practical approach to selecting WWW resources for teaching IT hardware

The information needs of educators result from the necessity to stay current with new relevant IT developments and to find answers to student-centered questions. The volume of available information makes the task of rapidly identifying high-quality resources discouraging. Effective sources evaluate the rigor and relevance of information and summarize it in the form of systematic reviews and meta-analysis. These sources have the opposite focus of many other information tools in that they aim at providing less information rather than more. With the development of these sources a new search approach is needed to locate the information for courseware in which speed is the benchmark. The existing IT literature can be considered as a hierarchy, with the most useful information placed at the top. Use of this concept allows educators to navigate through increasing layers until they retrieve information with the highest relevance and validity with the lowest work.