From July 1993 to June 1998, the title of this newsletter was IAT Infobits, reflecting its affiliation with the former UNC-Chapel Hill Institute for Academic Technology. The CIT in CIT Infobits refers to the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for Instructional Technology. However, due to reorganization and realignment of our staff, once again, a title change is in order. With the July 2006 issue, the newsletter will be re-titled TL Infobits to reflect its association with UNC-Chapel Hill's Information Technology Services Teaching and Learning division (ITS-TL).

Other related changes:
the newsletter's ISSN
the URL where back issues will be kept
(Pointers will be put in place to direct users from the old URL to the new one so that subscribers' will have time to update their bookmarks.)

What won't change:
the newsletter's focus
intended audience
editor
frequency of publication
UNC-Chapel Hill's commitment to the continuation of this publication

TABLET PCS AND FACULTY USERS

Many recent studies on tablet PCs in higher education have focused on student users. The purpose of the Seton Hall University project described in "The Tablet PC For Faculty: A Pilot Project" (by Rob R. Weitz, Bert Wachsmuth, and Danielle Mirliss in Journal of Educational Technology & Society, vol. 9, issue. 2, 2006, pp. 68-83) "was to test and evaluate faculty applications of tablet PCs apropos their contribution to teaching and learning. Put another way, how would real faculty teaching actual classes use tablets, and how would they evaluate the utility of doing so?"

Some of the study's findings:

-- "only a fraction of faculty are motivated to use tablet technology: roughly a third of faculty expressed an interest in replacing their notebook computer with a tablet computer"

-- "generally, participating faculty did indeed use tablet functionality in their classes and were convinced that this use resulted in a meaningful impact on teaching and learning."

The paper is available online at http://www.ifets.info/journals/9_2/6.pdf.

The Journal of Educational Technology & Society [ISSN 1436-4522 (online), ISSN 1176-3647 (print)] is a peer-reviewed quarterly online journal published by the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS). Current and past issues are available in HTML and PDF formats at no cost at http://www.ifets.info/.

A REPORT ON THE SUCCESS OF ONLINE EDUCATION

Each year the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) conducts an annual survey on the state of U.S. higher education online learning. This year, the Consortium published its first annual special edition, "Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005 - Southern Edition." Some of the findings reported include:

"Online learning is thriving in the southern states. The patterns of growth and acceptance of online education among the 16 southern states in this report are very similar to that observed for the national sample, with one clear difference: online learning has made greater inroads in the southern states than in the nation as a whole."

"[S]chools are offering a large number of online courses, and there is great diversity in the courses and programs being offered:

-- Sixty-two percent of southern schools offering graduate face-to-face courses also offer graduate courses online.

-- Sixty-eight percent of southern schools offering undergraduate face-to-face courses also offer undergraduate courses online."

"Staffing for online courses does not come at the expense of core faculty. Institutions use about the same mixture of core and adjunct faculty to staff their online courses as they do for their face-to-face courses. Instead of more adjunct faculty teaching online courses, the opposite is found; overall, there is a slightly greater use of core faculty for teaching online than for face-to-face."

You can download the complete report at http://www.sloan-c.org/.

Sloan-C is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information go to http://www.aln.org/.

OPEN ACCESS/SOURCE CONFERENCE PAPERS

The June 2006 issue of First Monday features selected papers from "FM10 Openness: Code, Science, and Content," a conference held in May and sponsored by First Monday journal, the University of Illinois at Chicago University Library, and the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT). The theme of the conference was open access (in journals, communities, and science) and open source. Links to the online papers, along with citations to those not available online, are available at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/.

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: c .

FAIR USE NETWORK

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has created the Fair Use Network website "to support fair use and other free expression safeguards within the law, because free expression is essential to creativity, culture, and a healthy democracy." The site does not provide legal advice or act in place of an attorney. It does, however, provide answers to questions regarding intellectual property rights, such as

-- "How much can you borrow, quote, or copy from someone else's work?"

-- "What happens if you get a 'cease and desist' letter from a copyright owner?"

The site also contains basic legal guides and a selection of legal reference resources. The Fair Use Network is at http://fairusenetwork.org/.

VIRTUAL REALITY-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

"As with any other technological advancement, the introduction of this technology [virtual reality] brings about excitement and high expectation among educators of its capabilities. However, it is important to note that this technology is merely a tool, as is a chalkboard, television, overhead projector, or an Internet connection. Tools by themselves do not teach. They have to be carefully and effectively implemented to assist in the learning process."

In "The Design, Development and Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Based Learning Environment" (Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 22, no. 1, 2006, pp. 39-63), Chwen Jen Chen used a virtual reality project to construct an "instructional development framework for VR based learning environments. . . [and to develop an] understanding of the educational effectiveness of such a learning environment and its effect on learners with different aptitude." The paper is available online at http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet22/chen.html.

The Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET) [ISSN 1449-3098 (print), ISSN 1449-5554 (online)], published three times a year, is a refereed journal publishing research and review articles in educational technology, instructional design, educational applications of computer technologies, educational telecommunications, and related areas. Back issues are available on the Web at no cost. For more information and back issues go to http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/.

TEACHERS SELL LESSON PLANS ONLINE

Entrepreneur and former public school teacher Paul Edelman has created Teacherspayteachers.com, an website where teachers can sell lesson plans that they have created. Sellers pay an annual fee, set their own prices, and 15% of each sale goes to Edelman. Currently, almost all of the lesson plans cover K-12-level subjects, but the site already includes some university-level materials covering math, history, and criminology. To view the site's lesson plan collection, go to http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/.

For more information, read "High-School Teachers Can Buy and Sell Lessons at an eBay-Like Website."
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17043.

For critical comment on the service, see TeachBay.
http://dhawhee.blogs.com/d_hawhee/2006/02/teachbay.html

GOOGLE VS. LIBRARIES

In "Libraries and Google/Google Book Search: No Competition!" (Google Librarian Newsletter, issue 4, June 21, 2006), Walt Crawford, provides four reasons that Google services can complement, but not replace, traditional libraries:

-- Locality Good libraries -- even large university libraries -- reflect the interests and needs of their communities.

-- Expertise The professional education of librarians enables them to pick up where web searching leaves off.

-- Community "'Cybercommunities' can be fascinating -- but the physical community continues to be vital."

-- Resources "Google Book Search helps people DISCOVER books. Libraries help them READ books."

You can read the article online at http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0606_03.html. Google Librarian Newsletter is a free online newsletter published by the Google Librarian Center. For more information, to read current and past newsletters, or to receive newsletters by email, go to http://www.google.com/librariancenter/. Walt Crawford, a senior analyst at the Research Libraries Group, Inc., is publisher of CITES & INSIGHTS: CRAWFORD AT LARGE [ISSN 1534-0937], a free monthly online journal of libraries, policy, technology, and media. Current and back issues are at available on the Web at http://cites.boisestate.edu/.