January 1997 No. 43

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.

News for Educators in a Hurry
Classic Movies on the Web
Humanities Prize Winners
Music Resources Online
Comet Chasing on the Web
Celebrating Democracy Web Site
JavaScript Perks Up Student's Web Pages
Librarian's Links
Infobits Subscribers -- Where Are We in 1997?

NEWS FOR EDUCATORS IN A HURRY

Class IV Publications, Inc., was "created by teachers who were frustrated because they did not have time to keep up with the news related to the rapid changes in education." Rather than reading dozens of print sources or spending time searching the Internet for education news, educators can get free subscriptions to the online education newsletters USA Ed.Net Briefs or Washington Ed.Net Briefs. These newsletters, consisting of a collection of brief summaries of education news stories, are designed to be read in less than ten minutes, yet give the reader a reasonably complete overview of the week's important education news. For more information connect to http://www.classiv.com/

CLASSIC MOVIES ON THE WEB

The American Film Institute (AFI) is dedicated to advancing and preserving the art of film, television and other forms of the moving image. AFI's programs promote innovation and excellence through teaching, presenting, preserving, and redefining this art form. Starting on January 22, 1997, AFI is making several classic silent films available on the Web. The AFI OnLine Cinema service uses technology developed by VDOnet to enable viewers to watch the film without going through time-consuming downloading delays. The VDO player can be downloaded free of charge from the AFI Web site. AFI OnLine Cinema began with the Internet premiere of the Charlie Chaplin classic The Rink (1916), which will be presented through the month of January. The second feature, scheduled to run in February, is Buster Keaton's The Boat (1921). AFI OnLine Cinema is located at http://www.afionline.org/cinema/
For more information about this and other AFI activities, connect to their Web site at http://www.afionline.org/home.html

VDOnet Corporation develops and markets technology and products enabling Internet video broadcasting (VDOLive) and video telephony (VDOPhone) on the Internet and over regular telephone lines and private networks. For more information and links to other online videos, connect to VDOnet's Web site at http://www.vdo.net

HUMANITIES PRIZE WINNERS

The Frankel Prize commemorates the late Charles Frankel, a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for educational and cultural affairs in the 1960s and a long-time philosophy professor at Columbia University. Awarded annually since 1989, it recognizes people who have made outstanding contributions to the public's understanding of the humanities. This month, President Bill Clinton awarded the prize to the following five Americans:

Rita Dove, professor of English at the University of Virginia, was appointed the seventh Poet Laureate of the United States -- both the first African-American and the youngest person (at 41) ever to hold the position. Her third collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/faculty/dove.html
http://redbookmag.com:80/depts/relat/dovef1.htm

Arturo Madrid, a scholar of Latino literature, teaches modern Spanish and Latin American literature at Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas. From 1984 to 1993, he served as the founding president of the Tomás Rivera Center, a national institute on Latino issues that is affiliated with Trinity and with the Claremont Graduate School, in California. He has also served as director of the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education and the Ford Foundation's Graduate Fellowships Program for Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans.
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/modern_languages/faculty.htm
http://cgsweb.cgs.edu/inst/trc.html

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who formerly taught at Harvard University, has written about U. S. presidents and their families. Her works include The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987), and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976).
http://web-cr01.pbs.org/newshour/character/bios/goodwin.html
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/Special_Reports/ProJo_96/Goodwin.html

Daniel Kemmis, an activist and political philosopher, serves as director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana at Missoula.
http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/SAREP/NEWSLTR/v8n2/sa-8.htm
http://www.idahonews.com/news/barker/roc69.htm

Bill Moyers is a television journalist who has produced more than 200 hours of programming. Five of Moyers' books based on his televison series have become bestsellers, including: Listening to America, Joseph Campbell and the Power of the Myth, A World of Ideas, and Healing and the Mind.
http://www2.lucidcafe.com/lucidcafe/library/96jun/moyers.html

MUSIC RESOURCES ONLINE

As part of a Mellon Foundation-sponsored project on information technology and music scholarship, Institute for Academic Technology researcher Jane Duff Harris has compiled an annotated list of Web links that includes music departments and professional societies, digitized music libraries, musicology research and dissertations, authoring tools, composer information, and resources for music teachers. This resource is available at http://www.iat.unc.edu/technology/music/music.html

COMET CHASING ON THE WEB

Astronomers are predicting that Comet Hale-Bopp, the brightest comet in more than two decades, will deliver sensational views from anywhere on the planet. Science teachers interested in having their students take part in this observation activity can get information from several sources. Writing in Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column, Dr. Shawn Carlson, executive director of the Society for Amateur Scientists, provides instructions for observing and photographing Comet Hale-Bopp that can be used by amateur astonomers even with limited resources. Carlson's articles are available on the Scientific American's Web site: "Catch a Comet by Its Tail" from the January 1997 issue is at http://www.sciam.com/0197issue/0197amsci.html and "A Picture-Perfect Comet" from the February 1997 issue is at http://www.sciam.com/0297issue/0297amsci.html

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, encourages amateur astronomers who want to make a difference by contributing useful scientific data on comets. Selections from the Center's International Comet Quarterly and links to other comet Web sites around the world are available on their Web site at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/cfa/ps/icq.html

The Society for Amateur Scientists (SAS) is a nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to helping people enrich their lives by following their passion to take part in scientific adventures of all kinds. For more information, contact Society for Amateur Scientists, 4951 D Clairemont Square, Suite 179, San Diego, CA 92117 USA; tel: 800-873-8767 or 619-239-8807; email: info@sas.org; Web: http://www.thesphere.com/SAS/

The Scientific American's Amateur Scientist columns are a good source of ideas for classroom science activities. A complete index of the columns (April 1952 to present) are available on the Web at http://www.thesphere.com/SAS/SciAm/SciAm.html Some of the columns are also available online in full text, either at the SAS Web site or in the online back issues of Scientific American at http://www.sciam.com/

CELEBRATING DEMOCRACY WEB SITE

In conjunction with the 1997 Presidential Inauguration, Celebrating Democracy is a collaborative Web site project of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It features online presentations of presidential memorabilia, photographs and documents from past inaugurations and inaugural balls, and photographs of the 1997 inaugural festivities. The goal of the Web site is to encourage teachers, students, and lifelong learners to connect current events with American history by tapping into the vast resources now available online from Washington's national cultural institutions. The site is available at http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/celeb/celeb.html

JAVASCRIPT PERKS UP STUDENT'S WEB PAGES

"JavaScript is designed to complement and link to Java applets--small, standalone applications written by programmers and displayed on Web pages. The result is a full range of tools now available for easy selection by the computing and user community." University of North Florida professor Kenneth E. Martin, writes that "JavaScript is an important language for college students because it gives them, regardless of their major, the opportunity to significantly enhance their home pages beyond standard HTML. [They] can add interactive controls to their Web page . . . can validate input from forms . . . can take advantage of the power of JavaScript to personalize and provide interactivity to their home pages." ("A JavaScript Primer" by Kenneth E. Martin. Syllabus, vol. 10, no. 5, January 1997, pp. 38, 40.)

For more information about JavaScript check out these Web resources:

JavaScript Index
http://www.c2.org/~andreww/javascript/

JavaScript Unofficial FAQ
http://www2.bath.ac.uk/~ccsnad/java/jsfaq.html

Netscape's JavaScript Guide
http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/3.0/handbook/javascript/index.html

Introduction to JavaScript by Stefan Koch
http://rummelplatz.uni-mannheim.de/~skoch/js/index.htm

Teach Yourself JavaScript in a Week by Arman Danesh
http://www.mcp.com/sams/books/073-8/httoc.htm

Very Basic JavaScript Tutorial, v1.0 by B.S. Majewski
http://www.cs.newcastle.edu.au:80/Staff/bohdan/jscript/tutorial.html

Understanding and Using JavaScript Statements
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-1996/jw-12-javascript.html

JavaScript Sourcebook
http://gmccomb.com/javascript/

Kenneth E. Martin is professor of computer science and information sciences at the University of North Florida. Contact him by email at kmartin@unf.edu

Syllabus is published monthly by Syllabus Press, 1307 South Mary Avenue, Suite 211, Sunnyvale, CA 94087 USA; tel: 408-746-2000; fax: 408-746-2711; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/
Subscriptions are free to qualified educators in the U.S. Individual subscriptions are $24/year for unqualified U.S. subscribers and to Canada and Mexico; $75/year outside North America. Institutional subscriptions are $75/year in North America and $135/year outside North America.

LIBRARIAN'S LINKS

"VERA: An Intranet for the Institute for Academic Technology" is a paper describing how an internal information network was set up for IAT staff.
http://www.unc.edu/cit/guides/veratalk.html

One new item was added to the IAT's Information Resource Guides series this month:

"Electronic Performance Support Systems: Readings and Resources"
http://www.unc.edu/cit/guides/irg-47.html

The following IAT Information Resource Guide was recently updated:

"Distance Learning Resources"
The document formerly titled "Distance Education: Electronic Sources for Information and Discussion," was last revised in February 1995. This month it was completely revised and reworked. All unverifiable or extinct resources have been deleted. Several links to Web sites for distance learning centers and some meta lists of distance learning resources have been added.
http://www.unc.edu/cit/guides/irg-06.html

To access a list of the documents in the Information Resource Guides series, link to http://www.unc.edu/cit/guides/guides.html

INFOBITS SUBSCRIBERS -- WHERE ARE WE IN 1997?

In the January 1995 issue of IAT Infobits we initiated an annual article listing the countries represented by our subscribers. As of January 9, 1997, there were over 4,440 subscribers to IAT Infobits. Here are some brief statistics about our current subscribers:

The majority (2,480) of the subscribers are in the USA. Other countries with large numbers of subscribers are Canada (339), Australia (189), and the United Kingdom (148). This is to be expected for a newsletter that is only published in the English language.

Each of the following countries have at least 10, but no more than 50, subscribers: Austria, Brazil, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden. These countries are each represented by 1 to 9 subscribers: Argentina, Belgium, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovak Republic, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

In addition to subscribers that we can identify by geographic location, 523 subscribers are from commercial sites and 370 subscribers are from BITNET, .org, or .net sites, none of which have been attributed to a particular country.

Thanks to all the subscribers for your support in 1996! After three and a half years of publishing this newsletter, I continue to look forward to bringing you more IAT Infobits in 1997.
-- Carolyn Kotlas, IAT Infobits Editor