Submission for Short contribution, Teleteaching 98, IFIP 98

Current Status of Guidelines for Web Page Design:
A Survey of Internet Resources for School Web Masters.

Hisashi Ichikawa & Katsuaki Suzuki
Graduate School of Human Informatics
Tohoku Gakuin University
Sendai, Japan, 981-31

This short paper reports current status of Web guidelines for educational uses, by searching and analyzing popular guidelines in both Japan and USA.

Keywords: 2. School and Education, WWW, guidelines, survey and synthesis.

The authors have been investigating the uses of WWW by Japanese schools
through three nationwide whole sample surveys in the past.  The results
from these survey were reported at WebNet 97 in Tronto.  The purpose of
their study is to help creators of school Web sites so they can utilize
this new educational tool in  a safe and effective way.  "School Web
Master's Guide (SWMG)" should include guidelines and suggestions in such
various aspects as educational aims of Web uses, popular contents,
information structure design, document design, copyright issues, privacy
and child protection, technical possibilities and limitations, etiquette,
among others.  A synthesis of existing on-line guidelines and adaptation
for school uses are needed as a critical step toward formulating SWMG, if
any of a single existing guideline is insufficient by itself.

In this study, keyword search was first conducted to locate guidelines for
educational uses of WWW, using such search engines as goo (Japanese,
http://www.goo.ne.jp/), Infoseek Japan (http://japan.infoseek.com/), Alta
Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com/), and exicite
(http://www.excite.com/).  Many books were also sought for existing
guidelines on line.  69 guidelines were found on line that contain some
useful information for school Web masters.

The guidelines were then classified into 4 categories (companies,
non-profit organizations, universities, and individuals), and the most
popular guideline was identified in each category based on the number of
other guidelines referred to that guidelines: Sun Microsystems's "Guide to
Web Style" by Rick Levine, W3C's "Style Guide for online hypertext" by Tim
BL, 1995, Yale University's "Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide", and  Jakob
Nielsen's "The Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability", respectively.

Analyses of these guidelines and adaptations for school Web masters are
being undertaken, some of which should be available at the time of the
conference.  A tentative structure of SWMG will also be proposed.

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End of Submission