College Students’ Uses and Perceptions of World Wide Web in an Information-Seeking Environment

From the standpoint of learning and academic research, World Wide Web provides teachers and students with easily accessible pools of rich and abundant information. However, the extent of the new technology in affecting students’ learning and cognition is still unknown and worthy of exploring. This study tries to investigate how undergraduate and graduate students view their information acquisition and how they perceive the quality of the information in terms of the open resource model, where information from diverse sources is retrieved through the use of the Web. A series of interviews with semi open-ended questions were conducted with twelve students who were selected as subjects from two universities. After the interviews, all data were analyzed in three stages: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing and verification. The results were presented in seven main themes and six issues. As the result of the investigation showed, it was clear that college students care more about completing their assignments quickly and easily than the quality of the source where they obtain their information on the Internet.