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.
The Wired Professor
Video Conferencing Cookbook
Journal of Statistics Education Available Online
Literature on Electronic Sources of Information
Elementary and Early Childhood Education Journal Debuts
Papers on Museums and the Web
The New Age of the Book
Images of Physicists Online
Recommended Reading
Editor's Note
The Wired Professor: A Guide to Incorporating the World Wide Web in College Instruction [New York: NYU Press, 1999; ISBN: 0814747256)], is intended as a "hands-on guide on how to build and manage instruction-based web pages and sites" for teachers with limited experience on the Internet. The book is written by Anne B. Keating, Curriculum Coordinator for Instructional Technology for the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at New York University, and Joseph Hargitai, instructional technology specialist at the Innovation Center of the Academic Computing Facility, New York University.
In conjunction with the book, the authors are providing a Web site, "The Wired Professor: Book Companion Web Site," which includes excerpts from the book, examples of "outstanding" faculty Web sites, HTML and multimedia tips, and links to distance education resources.
The Wired Professor's companion site is available at http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/professor.html/
The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) Video Development Initiative has published the "Video Conferencing Cookbook," an online manual providing detailed information and suggestions to help institutions select video hardware and software, create videoconference spaces, and conduct videoconferences. The authors include faculty and staff from the Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The manual is available on the World-Wide Web at http://sunsite.utk.edu/video_cookbook/
SURA, a consortium of forty-four U.S. universities in thirteen southeastern states and the District of Columbia, was established in 1980 as a nonprofit corporation "through which colleges, universities, and other organizations may cooperate with one another and with government and other organizations in acquiring, developing, and using laboratories, machines, and other research facilities and in furthering knowledge in the physical, biological, and other natural sciences and engineering." For more information about SURA, contact: SURA, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 710, Washington, DC 20005-3298 USA; tel: 202-408-7872; fax: 202-408-8250; email: surahq@sura.org; Web: http://www.sura.org/
JOURNAL OF STATISTICS EDUCATION AVAILABLE ONLINE
The Journal of Statistics Education (JSE), a refereed publication sponsored by the American Statistical Association (ASA), seeks to improve "statistics education at all levels, including primary, secondary, post-secondary, postgraduate, continuing, and workplace education. . . . The intended audience includes anyone who teaches statistics, as well as those interested in research on statistical and probabilistic reasoning." Issues published from 1993-1998 are available free to the public on the Web at http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/index.html
Access to issues published in 1999 will require a subscription; the annual subscription price is $10 (US). To subscribe to JSE, fill out the online form at https://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/JSEForm.htm
For more information about the ASA, contact: American Statistical Association, 1429 Duke St., Alexandria, VA 22314-3402 USA; tel: 888-231-3473; fax: 703-684-2037; email: asainfo@amstat.org; Web: http://www.amstat.org/
LITERATURE ON ELECTRONIC SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Marian Dworaczek's "Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information" and the accompanying "Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography" have been updated this month. The documents "deal with all aspects of electronic publishing and include print and non-print materials, periodical articles, monographs and individual chapters in collected works. Approximately 680 items were identified and indexed in great detail for this project."
The Index is available at http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUBJIN_A.HTM
The Bibliography is available at http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/BIBLIO.HTM
For more information, contact: Marian Dworaczek, Head, Acquisitions Department and Head, Technical Services, University of Saskatchewan Libraries, Room 24, Main Library/Murray Building, 3 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A4 Canada; tel: 306-966-6016; fax: 306-966-5919; email: dworaczek@sklib.usask.ca; Web: http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/
ELEMENTARY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION JOURNAL DEBUTS
In February the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education (ERIC/EECE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced the publication of the first peer-reviewed, Internet-only journal in the field of early childhood education.
Early Childhood Research & Practice (ECRP) contains "articles, commentaries, reviews, and important announcements that address the entire range of current, practice-related issues. The journal emphasizes articles on research and development related to children and parents, such as early childhood curriculum, parent participation, teacher and caregiver development and education, and policy."
Two issues are planned for 1999; the journal will become a quarterly publication in 2000. The first issue of ECRP is available at http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/
ERIC/EECE is one of sixteen clearinghouses in the ERIC system, which is part of the National Library of Education and is funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education. ERIC/EECE contributes to the ERIC database in the areas of child development, the education and care of children from birth through early adolescence, the teaching of young children, and parenting and family life. The clearinghouse also operates the Parents AskERIC question-answering service, which is part of the AskERIC systemwide project to provide electronic information services over the Internet.
For more information about ERIC/EECE and its other publications and services, contact: The ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education (ERIC/EECE), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Children's Research Center, 51 Gerty Drive, Champaign, IL 61820-7469 USA; tel: 800-583-4135; fax: 217-333-3767; email: ericeece@uiuc.edu; Web: http://ericeece.org/
For more information on ERIC and its sponsoring organizations, go to the ERIC Web site at http://www.accesseric.org:81/
"Museums and the Web 1999," an international conference devoted to the impact of the Web on museums and museology, was held in New Orleans this month. Over fifty presentation and demonstration papers from the conference are available on the Web. Many of the papers cover areas of interest to humanities scholars, librarians, and others involved in creating digital collections of research materials. Conference sessions included "Enabling Scholarly Research on the Web," "Tools for Teachers," "Large-Scale, High-Precision Web Retrieval," and "Academic Users of Museum Web Sites." To access the papers, link to http://www.archimuse.com/mw99/speakers/
"Museums and the Web" conferences are sponsored by Archives & Museum Informatics (A&MI), a firm that provides consulting for archives, museums, libraries and cultural heritage networks. For more information about A&MI, see http://www.archimuse.com/
A&MI provides management services for the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), a not-for-profit association of institutions with collections of art, that have come together to enable educational use of the digital documentation of their collections by building a joint digital library documenting their collections. This library will be available to all levels of the educational community. For more information about AMICO, visit their Website at http://www.amico.net/
"If the future brings newspapers without news, journals without pages, and libraries without walls, what will become of the traditional book? Will electronic publishing wipe it out?" Robert Darnton, professor of history at Princeton University and the president of the American Historical Association, asks these questions in his article "The New Age of the Book" (The New York Review of Books, March 18, 1999). Darnton believes that the traditional scholarly book could survive by being transformed into or supplemented by the electronic monograph. Follow his reasoning by reading the article which is available online at http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?19990318005F
Other articles from The New York Review of Books are available online at http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/index.html
The American Institute for Physics (AIP) has a searchable collection of more than 1,500 images and biographical information available online. These images are part of the 25,000 historical photographs, slides, lithographs, engravings, and other visual materials that make up the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, which is part of the Niels Bohr Library of the Center for History of Physics at the AIP. The collection focuses on American physicists and astronomers of the twentieth century, but includes many scientists in Europe and elsewhere, in other fields related to physics, and in earlier times. The collection is located at http://www.aip.org/history/esva/
For more information about the AIP and its other collections and activities, contact: American Institute of Physics, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3843 USA; tel: 301-209-3100; fax: 301-209-0843; email: aipinfo@aip.org; Web: http://www.aip.org/
"Recommended Reading" lists books that have been recommended to me or that I have found particularly interesting and/or useful. Send your recommendations to kotlas@email.unc.edu
Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace
by James Joseph O'Donnell
Harvard University Press, 1998; ISBN: 0-674-05545-4
"This book is for people who read books and use computers and wonder
what the two have to do with each other . . . . This book is an attempt
to think about how we rework some of the connections among speaking and
writing and reading today."
For links to the book's supplementary materials and more about
O'Donnell and his other publications, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/jod.html
Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, + Mysticism in the Age of Information
by Erik Davis
Harmony Books, 1998; ISBN: 0-517-70415-3
"Davis marshals an impressive, even exhausting, amount of evidence from
Eastern and Western literature, history, philosophy, scripture and
popular culture to support his sometimes opaque position on the matter
of technology's impact on human spirituality and vice versa."
(Publisher's Weekly review)
For an excerpt from the book, see
http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/bookSearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0517704153
These books were recommended by Paul Gilster, in his keynote speech at the Special Libraries Association South Atlantic Regional Conference held in March in Charleston, SC. Gilster is the author of Digital Literacy [John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0-471-24952-1], and a columnist and correspondent for the Raleigh, NC News and Observer who specializes in information technology. You can read Gilster's columns at http://news-observer.com/biz/columns/gilster/
Ever wanted to start your own electronic newsletter? On March 11, 1999, Carolyn Kotlas, Editor of CIT Infobits, shared her experiences in "Self-Publishing Electronic Newsletters," a presentation given at the first Special Libraries Association South Atlantic Regional Conference in Charleston, SC. Notes and references from Carolyn's talk are available online at http://www.unc.edu/~kotlas/sarc99.html