USES OF LINKS TO PROMOTE LEARNING (continued)

Links as lead-in for discussion and debate
External links can help support discussion and debate in your class. Most disciplines have at least one or two controversies with substantial Internet resources available (e.g., reintroduction of wolves into western habitats, methods of health care, cloning, gun control). As students explore controversies, they learn to evaluate good information from misinformation and to develop sound arguments and reasoning for a point of view.

The sample links below were collected over a period of 3 hours to support a student debate about logging national forests. The links vary in quality from business web sites that have little information regarding the controversy to "issue" sites that discuss the controversy exclusively. Sufficient numbers of external links were selected to support both sides of the debate. Students were assigned to support one side of the controversy. Students mostly gathered resources to support their position, but they were also required to summarize points for the other side with plans for countering those points. The resources were not organized meaningfully, but rather, were presented as shown below to allow students the opportunity to sort resources into categories they felt were most relevant (e.g., timber roads, animal issues, clearcutting issues, employment factors).

• Forest Industry
• National Wildlife Federation
• Northern Spotted Owl
• Logging Engineering International
• B.C. Logging Fatalities
• Salvage Logging
• Alaska Forest Association
• Alaska's Starving Timber Industry
• Federal Roads Moratorium
• Headwaters
• Timber Sales Lose Money, Supporters
• Forest Service Timber Roads
• A Modest Proposal
• Forest Guardians
• Clearcutting the Valley
• Do Chip Mills Promote Clearcutting
• Clear Cutting in Nopiming Forest
• The Lorax
• National Resources Defense Council

• Forest Service Roads Proposal
• Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health
• Forestry Australia
• Survivors in Timber Industry Tally Woes
• Save America's Forests
• Forests, Timber, and the Greenhouse Effect
• Ending Timber Sales on National Forests
• Yet Another Timber Sale
• Evaluation of the Effects of Forest Roads
• Roads in the National Forests
• Effects of the 1996 Flood
• American Land Rights Association
• The Infamous Wood-Chip Mill
• Umpqua Watersheds