CIT Infobits - June, 2000
Issue 24
ISSN 1521-9275
About INFOBITS
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.
Combating the Crisis in Scholarly Communication
More Scholarly Communication Activity
New Higher Education News Service
Calculating the Costs of Online Education
Internet Dependency Among College Students
Condition of Education Report
Search Education Web Pages and Electronic Books
Recommended Reading
COMBATING THE CRISIS IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
"Scholarly communication is under siege. Scholars are losing control of a system that has served them well but is now on the verge of collapse. The free flow of scholarly information, the lifeblood of scholarly inquiry and creativity, is being interrupted." To combat this crisis the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have launched the Create Change website. Create Change provides:
- in-depth statistical data, summaries, and background on the current state of scholarly communication;
- content that can be used to create a local Create Change Advocacy Kit;
- a database listing of the 100 most expensive journals, with editors and editorial boards, as well as a listing of SPARC-friendly journals;
- tips on how scientists and other faculty members can take leadership roles on campus to change the publication status quo;
- templates for letters librarians and scholars can write to commercial publishers to express their dissatisfaction with pricing trends.
Create Change is on the Web at http://www.createchange.org/
SPARC is a worldwide alliance of research institutions, libraries, and organizations that encourages competition in the scholarly communications market. SPARC introduces new solutions to scientific journal publishing, facilitates the use of technology to expand access, and partners with publishers that bring top-quality, low-cost research to a greater audience. SPARC strives to return science to scientists. For more information, link to http://www.arl.org/sparc/
ARL is a not-for-profit membership organization comprising the leading research libraries in North America. Its mission is to shape and influence forces affecting the future of research libraries in the process of scholarly communication. For more information, link to http://www.arl.org/
ACRL, a division of the American Library Association, is a professional association of academic librarians and other interested individuals. It is dedicated to enhancing the ability of academic library and information professionals to serve the information needs of the higher education community and to improve learning, teaching, and research. For more information, link to http://www.ala.org/acrl/
MORE SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION ACTIVITY
In March a meeting was sponsored by the Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Merrill Advanced Studies Center of the University of Kansas "to facilitate discussion among the various academic stakeholders in the scholarly publishing process and to build consensus on a set of principles that could guide the transformation of the scholarly publishing system." From this meeting came "Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing," a set of nine principles that address cost containment, electronic access to publications, permanent archiving, evaluation of scholarly works, and copyright and fair use. The entire report is available on the Web at http://www.arl.org/scomm/tempe.html
NEW HIGHER EDUCATION NEWS SERVICE
Academic Partners, the publishers of Lingua Franca and University Business magazines, have announced a new publication, University Business Daily. Each weekday UBDaily selects and provides synopses for four of the top news stories that relate to higher education. Links to the original news article are also included. The news service is available at no charge on the Web at http://www.ubdaily.com/
For more information about Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life, see http://www.linguafranca.com/
For more information about University Business, see http://www.universitybusiness.com/
CALCULATING THE COSTS OF ONLINE EDUCATION
"Even though there are dozens of methods of delivering courses through distance education, the offering of online courses through the World Wide Web has existed for less than a decade. Because of this recent evolution, many institutions may not realize the full impact of the cost of online education." Brian M. Morgan, director of the Center for Instructional Technology at Marshall University, has developed an online interactive worksheet to help administrators calculate the price tag for creating an online program. The worksheet is on the Web at http://webpages.marshall.edu/~morgan16/onlinecosts/
An accompanying paper, "Is Distance Learning Worth It? Helping to Determine the Costs of Online Courses," discusses "what areas must be considered, what effects online courses may have on an institution, what costs are involved in the establishment of this type of venture, and also examine[s] costs and possible problems that may be encountered with ongoing course offerings." The paper, in PDF format, is available at http://multimedia.marshall.edu/onlinecosts/distancelearning.pdf
For more information, contact Brian M. Morgan, Center for Instructional Technology, 400 Hal Greer Boulevard, Marshall University, Huntington, WV 25755-2066 USA; tel: 304-696-6469; email: brian.morgan@marshall.edu; Web: http://multimedia.marshall.edu/cit/
INTERNET DEPENDENCY AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS
At the annual conference of the American College Health Association, Keith J. Anderson, a staff psychologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Counseling Center, reported on a study to determine Internet dependency among 1,300 college students. "As part of the study, students were asked to rate the degree to which their Internet usage affected their real-life relationships, academic success, participation in extracurricular activities, sleep patterns, and meeting new people." Students identified as Internet dependent, spending an average of 229 minutes a day using the Internet for nonacademic reasons, experienced declining attendance and grades, loss of sleep, and social isolation. Anderson plans to publish the study in The Journal of American College Health. An article about the study was published in The Chronicle of Higher Educaiton ("10% of Students May Spend Too Much Time Online, Study Suggests," by Leo Reisberg, June 16, 2000, p. A43) and is available on the Web at http://chronicle.com/free/2000/06/2000060501t.htm
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary U.S. agency for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the United States and other countries. Each year NCES produces The Condition of Education, a report summarizing the health of education and showing changes and trends over time, regions, populations, or countries. The edition for 2000 is available at no charge on the Web at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2000062
For more information about NCES, see their website at http://nces.ed.gov/
SEARCH EDUCATION WEB PAGES AND ELECTRONIC BOOKS
MaxBot.com is a developer of advanced Internet search engine technology focused on improving the searchability of online content. SearchEdu.com indexes Web pages in the .edu domain. SearcheBooks is a search engine that indexes the full text of thousands of online books. Both services allow simple keyword searching. SearcheBooks' searches return a URL for the provider's Web page and a URL for the full text of the book.
SearchEdu.com is on the Web at http://www.searchedu.com/
SearcheBooks is on the Web at http://www.searchebooks.com/
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful. Send your recommendations to kotlas@email.unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.
NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web by Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin [New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. ISBN: 0-07-135243-0]
Have you ever felt envious of all the people working in Internet business making huge salaries with millions of dollars worth of stock options? Then, according to the authors, you've bought into the Net's "Universal Success Myth" -- "the idea that winners predominate in this business and losers are the exception." Lessard and Baldwin set out to debunk the mythology and provide evidence that "most Internet careers are nasty, brutish, and short." Workers live from paycheck to paycheck with no health benefits and little job security, putting up with long hours, crazy schedules, and insane management. The authors also have a website, "Net Slaves: Horror Stories of Working the Web," at http://www.netslaves.com/
Web Wisdom: How to Evaluate and Create Information Quality on the Web by Janet E. Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate [Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. ISBN: 0-8058-3123-1]
"The book includes easy to use checklists for step-by-step quality evaluations of virtually any web page. The checklists can also be used by web authors to help them ensure quality information on their pages. In addition, Web Wisdom addresses other important issues such as understanding the ways that advertising and sponsorship may affect the quality of web information"(Publisher's note). The authors are librarians in the Wolfram Memorial Library at Widener Library. Their evaluation checklists and other related information are on the Web at http://www2.widener.edu/Wolfgram-Memorial-Library/webeval.htm
