Shopping the WWW

Shopping the World Wide Web is the final “class” that I can attend.  Luckily it was not canceled from a lack of interest as the only attendees were two older gentlemen.   I guess I was a little disappointed by the subject matter although I don’t know what it was that I expected the class to cover.  Like Learning the WWW, I guess I expected a little more advanced class and not one that was so “practical.”  The only issues the instructor presented involved security and safety in making exchanges, as well as informative consumer websites.  I guess I expected something to remind me of what we have covered in class; however, for the students attending, this seemed the logical subject matter. 

There was not much opportunity to help, despite the fact that there were only two students, and so, one would expect, an opportunity for more in depth instruction.  However, the class was mainly lecture and a walk thru of various sites — which seemed to focus on eBay, the apparent feature of the class.  Perhaps it was an interest of the librarian but we spent an extraordinary amount of time on eBay.  We also visited Amazon.com, Macy’s, the Steelers website, as well as various smaller “mom and pop” sites — and PayPal.  The students were shown how to navigate these sites, their special features, security features, etiquette, and how to enter their information to create wishlists as well as to make purchases.

As most of the class was lecture, there was not much “hands on” time, and so not much opportunity to help in the basics that were lacking in one of the two students.  This student sometimes had trouble trying to scroll to the top of a page by clicking on the down arrow.  He also struck me with something he said.  The night before he was trying to locate a person he had known  about twenty years ago and spent forty bucks on the online service to get in touch.