Infobits is an electronic service of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and Learning's Center for Instructional Technology. Each month the CIT's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a number of information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators.

Online Teaching and the 24-Hour Professor
Papers from Reading and Writing Technologies Conference
Creative Commons Copyright Clearinghouse Launched
Scholarly Journal Boycott a Bust
Papers from Digital Communities Conference
The True Value/Cost of Web-Based Information
More About ADL and SCORM
Recommended Reading

ONLINE TEACHING AND THE 24-HOUR PROFESSOR

"It's rewarding and it's exciting. . . . But I think it's exhausting. You're essentially teaching every day of the semester."

"If you teach in distance learning, the expectation is that you will be online every day checking the discussion threads."

"People think that online teaching is more work, but it's just more often."

"I think it's made me a better instructor, because when you don't have the face-to-face, you're forced to really focus on what you're saying to the student or what you're typing to the student."

"The 24-Hour Professor" (by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31, 2002) follows Lee M. Grenci, meteorology instructor at Pennsylvania State University, through one of his typical days of teaching an online and a traditional college course. His schedule is almost non-stop from dawn to 8 p.m.: answering email, holding office hours, and conferring with his co-instructor. It is a daunting schedule that may make many faculty reluctant to teach online classes, fearing that they will lose time from their other teaching duties, their research, and their personal lives. The article also offers commentary on this online teaching model and presents alternatives. Read the article on the Web at http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i38/38a03101.htm

The Chronicle of Higher Education [ISSN 0009-5982] is published weekly by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc., 1255 Twenty-third Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037 USA; tel: 202-466-1000; fax: 202-452-1033; Web: http://chronicle.com/

At many institutions, online teaching has arrived sooner than policies related to it have been formulated. The American Association of University Professors Special Committee on Distance Education and Intellectual Property Issues has a set of suggestions and guidelines for creating policies to govern distance education programs. The guidelines cover faculty working conditions, workloads, office hours, compensation, technical assistance, and ownership of intellectual property. The document is available online at http://www.aaup.org/govrel/distlern/deguide.htm

The mission of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is to advance academic freedom, to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education's contribution to the common good. For more information, see the AAUP website at http://www.aaup.org/

PAPERS FROM READING AND WRITING TECHNOLOGIES CONFERENCE

The latest issue of Currents in Electronic Literacy (Spring 2002, Issue 6) covers presentations from the ninth annual Spring Colloquium of the Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL) at the University of Texas at Austin. The theme of this year's conference was "Reading and Writing Technologies." Papers in this issue include:

"Collaborative Teaching in the Computer Classroom," by Alexandra Barron, Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at The University of Texas

"Comparing Traditional and Computer-assisted Composition Classrooms," by Sarah R. Wakefield, Ph.D. in English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin

"Converting to the Computer Classroom: Technology, Anxiety, and Web-based Autobiography Assignments," by Miriam Schacht, graduate student of Ethnic and Third World Literatures at The University of Texas at Austin.

"The Imagination Gap: Making Web-based Instructional Resources Accessible to Students and Colleagues with Disabilities," by John Slatin, the founding Director of the Institute for Technology and Learning (ITAL) at The University of Texas at Austin

The issue is available on the Web at http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/

Currents in Electronic Literacy [ISSN 1524-6493] is published two times a year, in the spring and fall. For more information, contact Currents in Electronic Literacy, c/o Computer Writing and Research Lab, Parlin 3, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 USA; email: ejournal@lists.cwrl.utexas.edu

The CWRL, established in 1986, is a group of graduate students and faculty collaborating, exploring and developing innovative ways to use computers in teaching and learning about writing and literature. For more information about the CWRL, go to http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/

CREATIVE COMMONS COPYRIGHT CLEARINGHOUSE LAUNCHED

The Creative Commons, launched this month, "seeks to counteract the barriers to creativity that its founders believe current copyright protection law fosters." The non-profit online clearinghouse, based at Stanford University, will provide a free set of tools to enable creators to share aspects of their copyrighted works with the public. In Fall 2002, the clearinghouse plans to launch a search application so that potential users can search for works based on permitted uses (for example, noncommercial copying and redistribution). For more information see http://www.creativecommons.org/

SCHOLARLY JOURNAL BOYCOTT A BUST

Last year, as a protest against the steeply-rising costs of scholarly journal subscriptions, a group of scientists signed a pledge that they "would not publish in, subscribe to, or serve as an editor for any journal that didn't offer 'unrestricted free distribution rights . . . within 6 months of their initial publication date.'" However, few of the signers followed through with their intentions, and there has been no detectable effect from the boycott among publishers. "If all of those scientists had lived up to the pledge, they could have seriously disrupted the current journal publishing system, sapping the content and labor of many journals. But doing so might have also disrupted those scientists' careers, since very few journals follow the practices called for in the boycott, and academics need to publish to survive."

In response to the boycott's failure, the boycott's leaders are now planning to start a series of journals to compete with traditional publishers. Read more about the proposed journals in "Journal Boycott Over Online Access Is a Bust," by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2002; http://chronicle.com/free/2002/05/2002051601t.htm

PAPERS FROM DIGITAL COMMUNITIES CONFERENCE

Papers from "Building Digital Communities: Web-Wise 2002," the Third Annual Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World, sponsored by the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and Johns Hopkins University, was held March 20-22, 2002 in Baltimore, MD. Papers from the conference are reprinted in First Monday (vol. 7, no. 5, May 6, 2002; http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_5/).

Papers include:

"Digital Collections, Digital Libraries and the Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information," by Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

"Voices: Bringing Multimedia Museum Exhibits to the World Wide Web," by Matthew Nickerson, Professor of Library and Information Science at Southern Utah University

"Creating a Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections," by Timothy W. Cole, Mathematics Librarian and Associate Professor of Library Administration at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

First Monday [ISSN: 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA; email: ejv@uic.edu; Web: http://firstmonday.dk/

THE TRUE VALUE/COST OF WEB-BASED INFORMATION

The idea that "everything is on the Web and it's free" is a student belief that faculty and librarians have long had to contend with when trying to steer students to traditional information sources. Now a study of over 6,000 knowledge workers confirms that this impression is also prevalent in business with 62% believing "any information is on the Web." The study showed that, just as in the scholarly arena, there is no factual basis for this belief: "more than two-thirds of publications used most often by knowledge workers either do not have Web sites or do not offer their material on the Web for free." And, in cases where there is no fee for the Web-based information, it still isn't free. The study estimated that it costs $30 per hour of worker time spent in searching for and evaluating information, translating into an annual cost to business of $107 billion.

The study's white paper, "Free, Fee-Based and Value-Added Information Services," was conducted by Outsell, Inc. and commissioned by Factiva, Dialog, and KPMG. You can read the complete report on the Web at http://www.factiva.com/collateral/files/whitepaper_feevsfree_032002.pdf

Outsell, Inc. is a research and advisory service dedicated to the information content industry. For more information, see http://www.outsellinc.com/

Factiva is a Dow Jones & Reuters Company that provides global news and business information. For more information, see http://factiva.com/

Dialog is the world's first online information retrieval system, providing online-based information services in such fields as business, science, engineering, finance, and law. For more information, see http://www.dialog.com/

KPMG is a global network of professional assurance, tax, legal, and financial advisory firms. For more information, see http://www.kpmg.com/

MORE ABOUT ADL AND SCORM

After the article "Learning Technology Standards and SCORM" (in CIT Infobits, April 2002, http://its.unc.edu/tl/infobits/bitapr02.html#7), Judy Brown, Executive Director of Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab, sent the following information (with some minor editing by the Infobits editor):

I just read your April Infobits and was pleased to see the reference to ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) and SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) and the recognition of the importance to academia. Please be advised that there is an academic side to the ADL/SCORM initiative. There are three Co-Labs -- one administrative in Alexandria, one military in Orlando and one academic in Wisconsin. (There recently was also a partnership lab announced in the UK.)

The Academic ADL Co-Lab is located in Madison, WI, on the University of Wisconsin campus and is the focal point for academia in this important initiative. It initiated originally as a partnership between the U.S. Department of Defense, the University of Wisconsin System, and the Wisconsin Technical College System, but has grown globally over the past two years. We were the academic participant in Elliott Masie's S3 initiative and worked with Nishikant Sonwalkar on his Syllabus articles [links to the articles are at http://its.unc.edu/tl/infobits/bitapr02.php#7].

Accredited institutions representing over 500 campuses are already involved with us. For further information, please visit http://www.academiccolab.org/. There is a also link to the academic co-lab from the http://www.adlnet.org/ site. Participation in the Academic ADL Co-Lab is open to all accredited institutions who are willing to share their experiences with these important interoperability and reusability initiative. A sample agreement is on our site under "Partners" (http://www.academiccolab.org/partners/index.html). There is no charge to participate other than to agree to share experiences and best practices. Many of the partners are participating in joint projects and we are working with AAP (Association of American Publishers) on a network of repositories.

For more information or to participate, contact Judy Brown at jbrown@uwsa.edu

Information Technology Services at UNC-Chapel Hill

Teaching and Learning

CIT Infobits - May, 2002

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