We faced such questions this year as we created a tutorial on finding and evaluating internet resources in economics. That tutorial, titled The Internet Economist, has just gone online, and this article explains what you and your students can get out of it, as well as some of the background. What it is The Internet Economist combines chatty text, examples and links into a tutorial on how the internet can guide economics learning, teaching and research. Structured in small chunks, it has optional self-test quizzes and exercises at the end of each section. It comprises four sections.
Tour presents key internet sites in different categories such as news, data and learning materials.
Discover introduces some ways to find economics resources on the web and discusses how you would choose between different strategies. Review discusses some issues of quality, for instance how you can tell whether a document found on the web is authoritative. Reflect summarises practical ideas for efficient use of the internet and gives some fictional scenarios illustrating internet advantages and pitfalls. Each section has areas aimed at teachers, researchers and students of economics. These three strands run through the whole tutorial.