Online Teaching and Copyright
Distance Education Best Practices
Computer Literacy in Schools: How Much Has Changed in 30 Years?
E-Journals and Reading Behaviors
Golden Age of Publishing
Halloween Links: Poe, Monsters
Recommended Reading
The provisions of the Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH), which are likely to be passed this fall, would amend the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 to give schools and higher education institutions new rights to use copyrighted materials for distance education. The bill would give educators "fair use" rights that are already in place for regular classroom use.
New rights covered include:
-- "Expanding the range of works that may be transmitted over electronic systems to nearly all types of materials -- although only portions of some works could be transmitted."
-- "Allowing the content to be transmitted to students at any location, rather than just to classrooms, as is legal under current law."
-- "Allowing educators to store transmitted content and give students access to it, if only for short periods."
-- "Allowing the conversion to digital form of analog works, such as printed or videotaped material, but only in cases where the material is not already available in digital form, such as on DVD."
For more information about TEACH, read Andrew Trotter's article, "Bill Would Ease Copyright Limits For E-Learning" (Education Week, October 30, 2002), available online at http://edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=09copyright.h22
Education Week [ISSN: 0277-4232] is published by Editorial Projects in Education, the non-profit organization that founded The Chronicle of Higher Education. For more information, contact: Editorial Projects in Education Inc., Suite 100, 6935 Arlington Road, Bethesda, MD 20814-5233 USA; tel: 800-346-1834; fax: 301-280-3200; Web: http://edweek.org/
DISTANCE EDUCATION BEST PRACTICES
"The Best of the Best -- From a Distance: A Report on the MIT Conference on Distance Education and Training Strategies" (eLearn magazine, October 2002) shares some of the conference panelists' best practices. Their advice includes:
-- Begin with a clear and worthy strategic mission
-- Deliver content in multiple modes
-- Design from the audience perspective.
The complete article is available online at http://www.elearnmag.com/
eLearn magazine is published by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.), a not-for-profit educational association serving those who work, teach, and learn in the various computing-related fields. For more information, contact: eLearn magazine, 1515 Broadway, 17th Floor, New York, NY 10036 USA; Web: http://www.elearnmag.com/
The theme of the September 2002 MIT Office of Corporate Relations Industrial Liaison Program's Series on Technology and the Corporation conference was "Distance Education and Training Strategies: Lessons from Best Practices." For more information about the MIT Office of Corporate Relations Industrial Liaison Program, go to http://ilp.mit.edu/ilp/
COMPUTER LITERACY IN SCHOOLS: HOW MUCH HAS CHANGED IN 30 YEARS?
Arthur Luehrmann, publisher of Computer Literacy Press, spoke on computer literacy in schools at a 1972 Boston educational conference. His comments were published as "Should the Computer Teach the Student, or Vice-Versa?" in Robert Taylor's edited collection, The Computer in School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee.
Luehrmann was recently asked by the editors of CITE to revisit this topic this year. In "Should the Computer Teach the Student . . . ' -- 30 Years Later" (CITE, vol. 2, issue 3; http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss3/seminal/article2.cfm), he returns to Taylor's images of the computer as tutor, tool, and tutee. Luehrmann writes that:
". . . teaching tool use is just about the only impact that computers have had on schools."
"The computer as tutor (then called CAI) is today limited to a few useful keyboarding tutorials and some drill-and-kill programs still inflicted on kids in mainly inner-city schools."
". . . the computer as tutee (programming) is limited to a tiny fraction of students aiming for careers in computer science."
Although he is discouraged by how many uses for computers in schools predicted thirty years ago did not flourish, he concludes on a somewhat hopeful note: "Force schools to compete for students, however, and you provide the incentive for massive change: online course schedules and descriptions; class Web sites with resources, problem sets, and solutions; virtual study groups; Web access and e-mail for communicating with parents. Only in such an environment, rich with computer tools, will any of the other computer uses we envisioned 30 years ago become possible."
Luehrmann's original essay "Should the Computer Teach the Student, or Vice-Versa?" (in Taylor, Robert, ed. The Computer in School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee. New York: Teachers College Press, 1980. pp. 129-135) has been reprinted online at http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss3/seminal/article1.cfm
CITE (Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education) [ISSN: 1528-5804] is a free, online publication of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). It was established as an electronic counterpart of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education and funded by a U.S. Department of Education Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) catalyst grant. For more information, contact: Lynn Bell, Managing Editor of CITE, c/o Center for Technology and Teacher Education, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, 1912 Thomson Road, PO Box 400279, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4279 USA; email: publisher@citejournal.org; Web: http://www.citejournal.org/
E-JOURNALS AND READING BEHAVIORS
From 1977 through 2001 Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King surveyed nearly 15,000 scientists in all disciplines to get answers to several questions: "Do scientists value electronic journals as much and for the same reasons as print journals? Do scientists in all academic disciplines use electronic and print journals in the same way? Will electronic journals or collections of electronic articles make print journals obsolete? Will e-print server collections replace traditional journals?" Their findings are presented in "Reading Behaviour and Electronic Journals," Learned Publishing, vol. 15, October 2002, pp. 259-65. The complete article is available online at http://www.catchword.com/cgi-bin/linker?ini=alpsp&reqidx=/catchword/alpsp/09531513/v15n4/s3/p259
Learned Publishing [ISSN 0953-1513 ] is a quarterly publication of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). Full text of all articles from Volume 10 (1997) onwards is now available online; there is currently no charge or registration requirement. For more information, contact: The Editor, Learned Publishing, 7 High Street, Saffron Walden CB10 1AT, UK; tel and fax: +44 01799 522272; email: editor@alpsp.org.uk; Web: http://www.alpsp.org/journal.htm
ALPSP "represents the interests of all those involved in the publication of academic and professional information in all media. It was formed in 1972, as an association of learned and professional organizations involved in publishing." For more information see their website at http://www.alpsp.org/
See also:
"Print and Electronic Information: Shedding New Light on Campus Use"
by Daniel Greenstein and Leigh Watson Healy
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 37, no. 5, September/October 2002, pp. 16-17
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm02511.pdf
"Comparing Library and User Related Costs of Print and Electronic
Journal Collections: A First Step Towards a Comprehensive Analysis"
by Carol Hansen Montgomery and Donald W. King
D-LIB MAGAZINE, vol. 8, no. 10, October 2002
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october02/montgomery/10montgomery.html
"Doomsayers persist in the belief that the book world has been overrun by philistinism. They are wrong. Publishers can rejoice in unprecedented levels of both quality and quantity. We are living in a golden age of the book." In "Good Books" (Prospect, Issue 79, October 2002), Toby Mundy, managing director and publisher of Atlantic Books, provides an overview of past and the current states of publishing, deals with doomsayers' charges, and makes predictions of the industry's future directions, including electronic books. The article is available (temporarily) online at http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=11513
Prospect [ISSN: 1359-5024] covers current affairs and cultural debate in Great Britain. It is published monthly by Prospect Publishing, 4 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3RD, United Kingdom; tel: +44 (0)20 7255 1281; fax: +44 (0)20 7255 1279; email: editorial@prospect-magazine.co.uk; Web: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/
HALLOWEEN LINKS: POE, MONSTERS
This year our annual Halloween links include:
Heyward Ehrlich's "A Poe Webliography: Edgar Allan Poe on the Internet" is a "critical guide to electronic resources for Poe research on the World Wide Web and CD-ROM, including electronic texts, HTML-encoded texts, hypertexts, secondary works, commentaries, and indexes." Ehrlich is a professor of English at Rutgers University. His Poe website is at http://newark.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/poesites.html
MonsterZine [ISSN: 1530-9436] is a quarterly, online periodical edited and published by Pam Keesey. Keesey is a web designer, author of four books on film, folklore, and popular culture, and the former librarian at the Resource Center of the Americas. While MonsterZine is not a scholarly magazine, it takes a somewhat more scholarly approach to monster movies than most fanzines. You can read MonsterZine on the Web at http://www.monsterzine.com/
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to kotlas@email.unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.
Infobits subscriber Arun-Kumar Tripathi <tripathi@amadeus.statistik.uni-dortmund.de> recommends this article, which is part of his dissertation:
"Digital Promises" by Arun-Kumar Tripathi
Ubiquity: An ACM IT Magazine and Forum
vol. 3, no. 33, September 30, 2002
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/a_tripathi_4.html
"I question the notion of embodiment (bodily beings and presence) in cyberspace. We are physical beings, and known to the world through our bodies. We acknowledge that the natural body gives us extraordinary means of interacting with each other and with the world. But cyberspace has been built on the Cartesian ideals of metaphysical separation between mind and body. Is cyberspace creating a different world? Is cyberspace the extension of the real world? The making of cyberspace creates a problem with the notion of body and embodiment."