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.
A Vision of the "New Education"
Survey of Distance Learning Instructors
Study of World Information Production
Protecting Visual Content on the Web
New Publication Features Multimedia Projects
A VISION OF THE "NEW EDUCATION"
"All signs indicate that we are on a path to creating a 'new education' analogous to the 'new economy.' . . . What is our vision of the 'new education'? Is it one of techno-dazzle for its own sake? Not at all. Computers and the Internet are simply tools, just as lectures, recitations, and homework are tools. . . . The goal is not to replace today's educational methods but to enhance them. . . . It's all about using technology for what it can do best so that people can be freed to do what they do best."
In "Darwin Goes to College: Educational Competition in the Dot-com World" (EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 35, no. 6 November/December 2000, pp. 12-17) Lehigh University's President Gregory Farrington and Provost Roland Yoshida share their vision of how new technologies may change traditional colleges and universities in the next few years. The article is available online at http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm00/articles006/erm0061.pdf
Another article in the same vein in this issue is "Technology, Higher Education, and a Very Foggy Crystal Ball," by Brian Hawkins (pp. 65-6, 68, 70, 72-3). It is available online at http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm00/articles006/erm0065.pdf
EDUCAUSE Review [ISSN 1527-6619] is published bimonthly by EDUCAUSE, 4772 Walnut St., Suite 206, Boulder, CO 80301-2538 USA; Web: http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm.html
Annual subscriptions are $24.00 (USA/Canada/Mexico); $48.00 (all other countries).
EDUCAUSE is an international, nonprofit association whose mission is to help shape and enable transformational change in higher education through the introduction, use, and management of information resources and technologies in teaching, learning, scholarship, research, and institutional management. For more information link to http://www.educause.edu/
SURVEY OF DISTANCE LEARNING INSTRUCTORS
A National Education Association (NEA) poll of over 400 instructors who teach distance learning courses found that "Faculty teaching distance learning courses and faculty teaching traditional courses hold positive opinions about distance learning, primarily because distance learning courses offer educational opportunities to students who would not otherwise enroll in courses. While faculty believe they will be hurt financially by distance learning, and financial considerations are very important to them, at the current time, their enthusiasm for offering an education to more students outweighs these concerns." The full report, "A Survey of Traditional and Distance Learning Higher Education Members," is available online at http://www.nea.org/he/abouthe/dlstudy.pdf
The NEA is America's oldest and largest organization committed to advancing the cause of public education, with more than 2.5 million members who work at every level of education, from pre-school to university graduate programs. For more information link to http://www.nea.org/
STUDY OF WORLD INFORMATION PRODUCTION
A study conducted by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley attempted to estimate how much information there is in the world to store and how much storage would be needed to store "everything." According to the researchers, the "world's total production of information [print, film, optical, and magnetic formats] amounts to about 250 megabytes for each man, woman, and child on earth." "How Much Information?" is available on the Web at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/
PROTECTING VISUAL CONTENT ON THE WEB
Protecting and controlling their intellectual property are major concerns for instructors putting their course materials on the Web. In "Protecting Content on the Web" (Content, issue 9, pp. 24-6), Tony Henning describes some of the methods for preventing users from copying and reusing images from your website: image "scarring", watermarking, public-key cryptography (example: Clever Content; http://www.alchemedia.com/), and server control of browsers (example: Vyoufirst digital rights management; http://www.vyou.com/). This article and others dealing with digital rights management are available on the Web at http://www.contentworld.com/magazine/currentissue.html
Content: Knowledge for the Global Digital Media Community is published
quarterly by Content World Ventures, 345 Northlake Drive, San Jose, CA
95117 USA; tel: 408-261-7200; fax: 408-261-7280; email:
info@contentworld.com; Web: http://www.contentworld.com/
To subscribe, complete the online form at
http://www.contentworld.com/regsub/regsub.html
Back issues are available online.
NEW PUBLICATION FEATURES MULTIMEDIA PROJECTS
Cultivate Interactive is a new Web magazine funded under the European Commission's Digital Heritage and Cultural Content (DIGICULT) program. This magazine publicizes DIGICULT and other multimedia projects. Projects featured in the first two issues include:
ARCHEOGUIDE -- an augmented reality (AR) reconstruction of the ruins of a cultural site's monuments
DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries -- an open context in which an international agenda for future research in the digital libraries domain can be developed and continuously updated
PROACTe (Promoting Awareness and Communication Technologies in Education) -- access to information about educational technologies and research across Europe
Other articles cover networked museums, virtual exhibitions, machine translation, and intellectual property rights.
Cultivate Interactive [ISSN 1471-3225] is a project of CULTIVATE, a pan-European network for the Digital Cultural Heritage community including IT staff, information professionals, researchers, managers, policy makers, libraries, museums, archives, galleries and non-profit making organizations. The online magazine is published by UKOLN, the UK Office for Library and Information Networking at the University of Bath. Issues are available at no cost on the Web at http://www.cultivate-int.org/
For more information about CULTIVAT, link to http://www.cultivate-eu.org/
For more information about DIGICULT, see http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/
For more information about UKOLN, see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/