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.
Online Teaching Survival Tips
Education Statistics Resources
Thinking about Assessment
Digital Deterioration
Recommended Reading
What does it mean to be a distance teacher in the online environment? At a recent Association for Continuing Higher Education (ACHE) regional training workshop, Michael G. Moore answered this question using a three-part model of distance teaching activities: (1) Preparation, (2) Presentation, and (3) Participation.
"Preparation is what happens long in advance of the learners' enrollment. . . . The teacher prepares by setting learning objectives, structuring the content into chunks according to a budget of students' time, thinking how to stimulate and support the students' interaction with that content and with other students, and deciding how learning will be evaluated."
In Presentation phase "the teacher presents this information to the learners, through a technology that can be either synchronous or asynchronous -- i.e., real-time or recorded."
"It is at the time of Participation that the information thus prepared and presented is wrestled with by each individual learner and processed into personal knowledge . . ."
A fuller explanation of his model, along with tips to help distance teachers survive the experience, is available in "Surviving as a Distance Teacher" (The American Journal of Distance Education, vol. 15, no. 2, 2001, pp. 1-5). The article is on the Web at http://www.ed.psu.edu/acsde/ajde/ed152.asp
The American Journal of Distance Education (AJDE) [ISSN 0892-3647] is
published three times a year by The American Center for the Study of
Distance Education (ACSDE), The Pennsylvania State University College
of Education, 110 Rackley Building, University Park, PA 16802-3202 USA;
tel: 814-863-3764; fax: 814-865-5878; email: ACSDE@psu.edu; Web:
http://www.ed.psu.edu/acsde/
AJDE subscription information is available at
http://www.ed.psu.edu/acsde/ajde/jour.asp
EDUCATION STATISTICS RESOURCES
Several recently-published reports provide data, indicators, and projections on the state of education in the U.S. and other countries:
Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, 2001 Edition
Published by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development
(OECD) Directorate for Education, Employment, Labour and Social Affairs
http://www.oecd.org/els/education/ei/eag/
The report includes information on:
-- the human and financial resources invested in education;
-- how education and learning systems operate and evolve;
-- how the levels and distributions of student achievement have evolved;
-- the incentive structures governments offer to attract and retain
qualified teachers; and
-- the availability and use of information and communication
technologies in the teaching-learning process.
For more information about the report and related publications and activities, contact: OECD Directorate for Education, Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, 2, rue André Pascal, 75775 Paris Cedex 16 France; fax: +33 (0)1.44.30.90.98; email: els.contact@oecd.org; Web: http://www.oecd.org/els/
"The OECD brings together 30 countries sharing the principles of the market economy, pluralist democracy and respect for human rights. The original 20 members of the OECD are located in Western countries of Europe and North America. Next came Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Finland. More recently, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Korea and the Slovak Republic have joined." For more information about the OECD, link to http://www.oecd.org/
Projections of Education Statistics to 2011, August 2001
U. S. National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES)
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfor.asp?pubid=2001083
This publication includes:
-- statistics on enrollment, graduates, teachers, and expenditures in
U.S. elementary and secondary schools;
-- enrollment and graduates of U.S. degree-granting institutions for
the past 14 years and projections to the year 2011.
NCES is the primary U.S. agency for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the United States and other countries. For more information about NCES and their other reports, link to http://nces.ed.gov/
The Changing Faces of Virtual Education, July 2001
The Commonwealth of Learning (COL)
http://www.col.org/virtualed/
This report, a follow-up on the COL's 1999 study on the "virtual"
delivery of higher education, tracks several trends in online
education, including:
-- new venues for learning;
-- the use of "learning objects" to define and store content;
-- new organizational models;
-- online learner support services; and
-- quality assurance models for virtual education.
The Commonwealth of Learning is an intergovernmental organization created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. For more information, link to http://www.col.org/
"Assessment is education's new apple-pie issue. . . . Unfortunately, the devil is in the details," writes Kenneth C. Green in "Thinking About Assessment" (Converge, v. 4, issue 8, August 2001, pp. 62-3). In this opinion piece, Green compares the public debate on educational assessment with the public discourse on the role of technology in education. He sets out a series of "hard questions" that need to be addressed and argues for more rigorous research to replace the anecdotal information that is the basis for much assessment public policy. The article is online at http://www.convergemag.com/magazine/story.phtml?id=3030000000002596
Green is the Director of The Campus Computing Project, national survey of desktop (personal computers and workstations)computing and information technology in American higher education institutions. The survey, now in its eleventh year, enables colleges and universities to compare their academic computing capabilities with similar institutions. The data also show current patterns and future trends that can assist campus administrators in planning for technology innovations and growth. For more information about The Campus Computing Project and its reports, see http://www.campuscomputing.net/
Converge: Education >> Technology >> Fast Forward [ISSN: 1530-3357] is published monthly by e.Republic, Inc., 100 Blue Ravine Rd., Folsom, CA 95630 USA; tel: 916-932-1300; fax: 916-932-1470; email: oamador@convergemag.com; Web: http://www.convergemag.com/
"Every October, a centuries-old Buddhist sect [at the Daioh Temple] in Kyoto, Japan, prays for our culture -- hoping in a special 'information service' that today's history and records will be open to future generations, and not fade away like the ghosts of so many failed dot-coms." In "Fading Bits of History" (ABCNews.com, July 9, 2001), Michael S. James discusses what other groups are doing to halt the deterioration of digital media and to preserve records for future researchers. The article is on the Web at http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/preservation010708.html
ABCNews.com is produced by ABC, Inc., 500 S. Buena Vista Street, Burbank, CA 91521 USA; Web: http://abc.go.com/
For more information about the Daioh Temple of Daioh Mountain and its memorial services for lost information link to http://www.thezen.or.jp/
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to kotlas@email.unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.
The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us
by Michael L. Dertouzos
New York: HarperCollins, 2001; ISBN: 0-06-662067-8
"You are serving the inhuman machine, and its inhuman owners who got away saving a few dollars of operator time by squandering valuable pieces of your life and that of millions of other people. What glory: The highest technology artifacts in the world have become our masters, reintroducing us to human slavery more than a century after its abolition," writes Dertouzos, late director of M.I.T.'s Laboratory for Computer Science. The true goal, he says, should simply be that "information technology should help people do more by doing less." Accomplishing this goal requires that computers adapt to the way people best function, rather than making people change and adapt to the machine's requirements.
The book describes one of the projects Dertouzos was working on -- M.I.T.'s Project Oxygen, a system of hardware, software, and communications designed to fulfill his vision that "[i]n the future, computation will be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe." For more information about Project Oxygen, see http://oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/
[Editor's note: Michael Dertouzos died on August 27, 2001, after an extended illness. For more information on Dertouzos's many accomplishments, see http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/dertouzos.html]