IAT Infobits - November, 1994
No. 17
ISSN 1071-5223
About INFOBITS
Infobits is an electronic service of the Institute for Academic Technology's Information Resources Group. Each month we monitor and select from a number of information technology and instruction technology sources that come to our attention and provide brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators.
Scholarly Societies Project
New Tools for Teaching
INCLASS -- Internet in the Classroom Mailing List
CAUSE Releases Professional Paper #13
Assistive Technology for Disabled Computer Users
Technology Refusal
Electronic Teaching and Learning
The University of Waterloo Library has announced the Scholarly Societies Project, a set of World-Wide Web pages designed to facilitate access to various kinds of electronic resources maintained by or for scholarly societies across the world. The pages include links to over 70 Web pages, pointers to over 100 Gophers associated with scholarly societies, a collection of 29 subject guides, and a set of links to full-text archives of over 40 serial publications by scholarly societies.
To access the site, point your Web browser to http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/society/overview.html
For more information, contact
Christine Jewell (Humanities & Social Sciences) at cjewell@library.uwaterloo.ca
or Jim Parrott (Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine & Science) at jrparrot@library.uwaterloo.ca
The IAT will be sponsoring a satellite broadcast, "Hi-Touch Technology: Authenticity in the Learning Environment," on February 23, 1995. One of the participants will be Jim O'Donnell, Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania. O'Donnell is author of "New Tools for Teaching," a series of World-Wide Web pages devoted to describing and demonstrating some of the things that can be done today to improve teaching through the use of networked information. The emphasis is on humanities teaching, especially on classical/medieval studies. Point your WWW browser to http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/teachdemo
For more information on "New Tools for Teaching" contact Jim O'Donnell at jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
INCLASS -- INTERNET IN THE CLASSROOM MAILING LIST
Under the host sponsorship of Canada's SchoolNet, INCLASS is a moderated Internet discussion list about using the Internet in the classroom for educators, scientists and education sector marketers. The list "promotes the use of the Internet as a means to keep students interested in life-long learning, focusing on adapting successfully and creatively to change, concentrating on aiming for personal excellence."
To subscribe send an email to listproc@schoolnet.carleton.ca with the message:
subscribe INCLASS your_firstname your_lastname
If you have questions, contact the list owner Doug Walker, at dewalker@schoolnet.carleton.ca
CAUSE RELEASES PROFESSIONAL PAPER #13
"Organizational and Technological Strategies for Higher Education in the Information Age" by David J. Ernst, Richard N. Katz, and John R. Sack, examines five key trends impacting higher education administration and strategies for responding to them. The trends include: (1) flat or decreasing funding sources, (2) public expectations and state mandates calling for more accountability, (3) consumer expectations demanding more sophisticated services, (4) evolving organization structures which will change traditional hierarchies, and (5) sophisticated knowledge workers who require increased technical and consulting support.
Copies may be purchased for $12 (CAUSE members) and $24 (non-members), by sending email to orders@cause.colorado.edu or by calling 303-939-0310.
Abstracts of this and other titles in the CAUSE Professional Papers series are available from the CAUSE Gopher server at cause-gopher.colorado.edu or on CAUSE's new Web server at http://cause-www.colorado.edu/
CAUSE is an association for managing and using information in higher education. Its international membership includes colleges and universities, corporate members, and several higher education associations.
ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY FOR DISABLED COMPUTER USERS
The IAT Information Resource Guide, "Assistive Technology for the Disabled Computer User," has been recently updated. The purpose of the paper is to introduce administrators and staff of colleges and universities to the assistive technology that helps physically disabled students use computers; and to refer those who need more specific information -- whether on products and prices, or on agencies that work with and assist the disabled -- to resources in their area. Along with specific product information, the document includes addresses of listservers that discuss related topics and references to further readings.
You can get a copy from our Web site at URL http://www.unc.edu/cit/guides/irg-20.html.
In "Technology Refusal and the Organizational Culture of Schools," Steven Hodas maintains that "analyses of the deployment of technology in schools usually note its lack of impact on the day-to-day values and practices of teachers, administrators, and students. This is generally construed as an implementation failure, or as resulting from a temperamental shortcoming on the part of teachers or technologists. It is predicated on the tacit assumption that the technology itself is value-free. This paper proposes that technology is never neutral: that its values and practices must always either support or subvert those of the organization into which it is placed; and that the failures of technology to alter the look-and-feel of schools more generally results from a mismatch between the values of school organization and those embedded within the contested technology."
At the time of the paper's publication, Steven Hodas was on the staff of the University of Washington's School of Education. He is now the K-12 Internet Consultant for NASA and can be reached by email at: hodas@nsipo.nasa.gov To get a copy of Hodas' paper, send email to listserv@asu.edu with the message: get hodas v1n10 f=mail
The paper is an issue in the Education Policy Analysis Archives(EPAA), a peer-reviewed electronic journal published irregularly by the College of Education at Arizona State University. As articles are accepted for publication they are sent simultaneously to subscribers and to the archive.
To subscribe to EPAA, send email to listserv@asu.edu
with the message: subscribe edpolyar your_firstname your_lastname
The EPAA articles are also available by
(1) World-Wide Web at URL http://info.asu.edu/asu-cwis/epaa/welcome.html
(2) gopher at URL gopher://info.asu.edu:70/11/asu-cwis/epaa
(3) ftp at URL ftp://info.asu.edu/pub/cwis/epaa
To receive a publication guide for submitting articles,
send email to listserv@asu.edu
with the message: get edpolyar pubguide f=mail
General questions may be addressed to: Gene V. Glass, EPAA Editor, College of Education, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2411 USA; tel: 602-965-2692; email: glass@asu.edu
Another article of interest in the same vein is "Why Teachers Fear the Internet" by Crawford Killian (Internet World, vol. 5, no. 8, November/December 1994, pp. 86-87). Killian writes from the perspective of the classroom teacher trying to use and incorporate online technology in the classroom. His experiences confirm many of the premises in Hodas' paper.
Internet World [ISSN 1064-3923] is published 10 times a year by Mecklermedia Corporation. Subscriptions are available from Internet World, P. O. Box 713, Mt. Morris, IL 61054 USA (North & South America) or Mecklermedia Ltd., Artillery House, Artillery Row, London SW1P 1RT, UK. Cost is $29/year (US), $41.73/year (Canada, Central & South America), £29/year (all other countries).
ELECTRONIC TEACHING AND LEARNING
Electronic Teaching and Learning: Trends in Adapting to Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Networks in Higher Education, by Robert E. Jensen and Petrea K. Sandlin, Trinity University. "The spotlight of this book is on emerging technology options for educators seeking to author or otherwise modify teaching and research materials with only a modest starting investment." Jensen and Sandlin focused their study on accounting faculty, surveying over 1,300 educators in colleges and universities in the US, Canada, UK, Hong Kong, Norway, and Australia. However, most of their information is applicable to any discipline. Chapters in the book cover the paradigm shift in computer-aided teaching, how to get started in authoring computer-aided materials, and speculations in what the future holds for educators using computer-assisted learning technologies. Several appendices provide lists of journals and newsletters of interest to teachers and researchers, sources of hardware and software for academic applications, and the answers the authors received from their faculty questionnaire.
A copy on diskette in Word for Windows version 2.0 is available for $5.00 postage/handling fee from: CETA, P.O. Box 13677, College of Business Administration, The University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-6677 USA.
URL: http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitnov94.html
Infobits editor: Carolyn Kotlas
© Copyright 1994, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.
May be reproduced in any medium for non-commercial purposes.
Center for Instructional Technology
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
