Abstract
This work-in-progress short paper describes the findings from three nationwide Web site surveys of the Japanese elementary and secondary schools. The purpose of the study was to investigate into current status and characteristics of Web uses among Japanese schools, in order to propose some guidelines for Web site construction and utilization for schools.
Whole sample surveys were conducted in August of 1995, January of 1996, and August of 1996, trying to locate all the Web sites of Japanese schools, via uses of Web site listings and search engines. It was found that 98, 251, and 603 Web sites were in presence at the time of each survey, respectively. The ratios of the site increases were one site per day and 1.7 sites per day, between each pair of the three surveys.
All of the pages were then examined by looking at them manually, to categorize the contents of each site into such preset frameworks as levels of information provided (administrative, instructional, private), kinds of information (general introduction of school, announcements of events, students work exhibitions, classroom activities, area information, links and learning guides, etc.), sources of information (staff, teachers, students), and subject matters concerned. Other statistics were also collected including language uses (Japanese and/or English), explicit indication of Web master, dates of last modified, and type of site management (school own, university affiliated, private providers). Since all pages were collected using an auto-pilot software in the third survey, more data analyses were made possible including the number of pages and total file size in each site.
Based on the results from these three surveys, typical home pages were hypothetically created by adopting most frequently used information categories for elementary, junior-high, and senior-high schools, that represent general characteristics of the Web uses by the Japanese schools. The purposes of Web page uses were also analyzed into a matrix, with the flow of information (giving, taking, and both; e.g., digital archives for providing, site lists for receiving, collaborative projects for exchanging information) as the columns and the sources of information (students, teachers, and others) as the rows. Frequencies of the sites utilizing each of the cells in the proposed matrix were counted to find the emphases when the Japanese schools use the Web.
Results of the surveys and analyses described above will be provided in the presentation, with some discussions for future direction of this research. The discussion will include a next step of the survey being a comparative study between the Web uses of Japanese and American schools, by conducting similar survey of (not all but) a selected American counterparts.
ichikawa@edutech.tohoku-gakuin.ac.jp