Teaching of Web Information Retrieval: Web first or IR first?

When teaching Web Information retrieval (IR), a teacher has two alternatives: (i) to teach the classical pre-Web IR issues first and present the Web specific issues later; or (ii) to teach directly the Web IR discipline per se. The first approach has the advantages of building on prerequisite knowledge, of presenting the historical development of the discipline, and probably appears more natural to most lecturers, who have followed the historical development of the field. Conversely, the second approach has the advantage of concentrating on a more modern view of the field, and probably leads to a higher motivation in the students, since the more appealing Web issues are dealt with at course start. I will discuss these issues, I will mention the approaches followed in the (rather few) Web IR books available, I will make some comparisons with the teaching of related disciplines, and I will also summarize my experience and some feedback from my students (I have been teaching a Web IR course for two Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Information Technology at Udine University for the last two years; I had about twenty students each year; and I followed the first approach).