October 1994 No. 16
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.
Thesaurus, Lexicon, Glossary
Gimme Money, That's What I Want
Wait Till the Midnight Hour
Another Internet Guide for Educators
U.S. AIDS Patents Online
Copyright and New Media
Searching the WWW
Cognitive psychologist George Miller is compiling WordNet, an electronic thesaurus that goes beyond the usual collections of synonyms. According to an article in Lingua Franca [Sept./Oct. 1994, p. 16], WordNet contains not only a word's definition and its synonyms, "but also its meronyms (components, as 'handle' is to 'cup'), holonyms (larger whole, as 'cup' is to 'handle'), and hyponyms (subsets, as 'rose' is to 'flower'). The idea is to produce a dictionary that will allow a user to replicate the process of normal language acquisition." The creation of WordNet's "semantic concordance" is an ongoing process at the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University. The concordance includes variations of a word's meaning according to its context for more that 125,000 words.
More information on WordNet is available through the World-Wide Web. The URL for the site is: http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/index.html
UNIX, PC (both DOS and Windows), and Macintosh versions of the program and synonym databases can be downloaded by anonymous ftp on host: clarity.princeton.edu; directory: pub. Note: although the files are in compressed archives, they are very large (PC version is 5+MB and unarchives into 16+MB).
Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life [ISSN: 1051-3310] is published by Lingua Franca, Inc., 172 E. Boston Post Rd., Mamaroneck, NY 10543 USA; tel: 914-698-9427. Subscriptions are available from Lingua Franca, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA for $19.95/year/individual (US), $40/year/institution (US). Foreign subscriptions are available.
GIMME MONEY, THAT'S WHAT I WANT
In conjunction with a new workshop that the IAT is offering, we have a new document in our Information Resource Guides Series. "Exploiting Technology Grants: Information Resources" provides pointers to grant information in U.S. government publications and Internet sites as well as non-government directories, guides, and online services. The paper also includes a bibliography of books and articles on grant writing. The publication is available on the Web at URL http://www.unc.edu/cit/guides/irg-07.html.
Another useful information source for money seekers is, "A Grant Getter's Guide to the Internet: A Brief Summary of Available Federal Grant Information and Where to Find It," by James M. Kearney of the University of Idaho. The guide is available by gopher at URL gopher://gopher.uidaho.edu:70/11s/e-pubs/grant
Project Gutenberg has added the following works to its electronic text collection just in time for your online Halloween reading pleasure:
Charlotte Temple, by Susanna Rowson -- filename: chtem10.xxx
Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley -- filename: frank10.xxx
The Haunted Bookshop, by Christopher Morley -- filename: hbook10.xxx
The Haunted Hotel, by Wilkie Collins -- filename: hhotl10.xxx
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, by Sax Rohmer -- filename: fuman10.xxx
The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux -- filename: phant10.xxx
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde -- filename: dgray10.xxx
The Well At The World's End, by William Morris -- filename: wwend10.xxx
["xxx" indicates file format extension, such as .txt for plain text;
.zip for zipped files; .txt.gz or .txt.Z for UNIX compressed files.]
The Project Gutenberg electronic text archives are located at several
sites around the world. The authoritative site for Project
Gutenberg files is at URL ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/,
but users are urged to use
alternate sites if this one is overloaded.
Regardless of which ftp site you use, the instructions should be the
same: login as anonymous; your email address is your password; then
give the commands:
cd /pub/Gutenberg/etext94 (or cd /pub/cd gutenberg /etext94)
get filename
(be sure to set file type to binary, if you are getting the zipped or
compressed files).
Here are a few of the sites that have the Project Gutenberg collection:
http://ftp.sunet.se/ftp/pub/etext/gutenberg/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Web/booktitles.html
More information on Project Gutenberg is available on the World-Wide Web. The URL for their home page is http://jg.cso.uiuc.edu/PG/welcome.html
ANOTHER INTERNET GUIDE FOR EDUCATORS
In response to last month's article "Educational Resources on the Internet" [IAT Infobits, September 1994], Patrick Golden of the Virginia Space Grant Consortium sent in information about another guide. The Educator's Guide to the Internet, written for teachers who are Internet novices, provides enough detail to get the beginning user of telecomputing up-and-running on common Internet functions. Many of the examples used to guide readers through the process of mastering the Internet are computer sites and discussion groups of immediate use and appeal to educators. Of particular interest to teachers interested in using this emerging technology in their classroom is the section of model lessons. These lessons will give educators at all grade levels from Kindergarten through high school ideas of the ways they can integrate Internet-accessible math, science and technology resources into their curriculum. Activities range from communicating with other classes and subject matter experts around the world to gathering weather data from remote locations and comparing climate trends with those at the students' own school.
Accompanying the Educator's Guide is a NASA videotape on using the Internet in the classroom and a diskette of IBM or Macintosh software and documents. An order form for The Educator's Guide to the Internet is available by contacting the Virginia Space Grant Consortium at 2713-D Magruder Boulevard, Hampton, VA 23666 USA; tel: 804-865-0726; email: vsgc@pen.k12.va.us. The 170-page guide, videotape and software diskette (either IBM or Macintosh) are available for $16 (US). Priority or international orders are available at additional cost.
The Virginia Space Grant Consortium is a non-profit coalition of Virginia colleges and universities, the state community college system, NASA, state government agencies, and other organizations with wide-ranging aerospace interests. The Consortium works to improve math, science, technology, and engineering education in Virginia and to build the Commonwealth's aerospace-related research infrastructure. For more information, contact: Patrick Golden, Program Manager, Virginia Space Grant Consortium; email: vsgc@pen.k12.va.us; tel: 804-865-0726.
On October 26, 1994, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced the availability of a database that gathers every AIDS-related U.S. patent at one site on the Internet. Patent information can be retrieved from the database by abstract, full patent, front page only, and image (if available). Currently, the database resides at MCNC in Research Triangle Park, NC, and the URL for the database is: http://patents.cnidr.org/pto/access.html. (You can also reach the database a little less directly through the USPTO's World-Wide Web site. The URL for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is: http://www.uspto.gov/).
Educators planning to produce and market multimedia curriculum materials can quickly be overwhelmed by how complicated it can be to sort out the required permissions to use intellectual property in the multimedia environment. "Legal Issues in New Media" by Mark Radcliffe, Esq. in Multimedia: Gateway to the Next Millennium provides a brief walk-through for getting rights to use text, computer software, photographs, film clips and video, news programs, recorded music, and feature films. Radcliffe also gives examples of some of the legal problems encountered in this new market.
Aston, Robert, and Joyce Schwarz, Eds. Multimedia: Gateway to the Next Millennium. Boston: AP Professional, 1994. 287 pp. ISBN: 0-12-065625-6. Cost: $39.95 (US).
"What rules will we follow when we're all hooked into the information superhighway?" "Who will own what?" "How will schools gain access to digitized materials?" "What will fair use be then?" Questions like these about copyright law, fair-use guidelines, and new technologies were topics of discussion at The Educational Fair Access and the New Media National Conference held last June. The Agency for Instructional Technology (AIT) cosponsored the event with the Consortium of College and University Media Centers. The conference was convened to begin the process of developing new fair-use guidelines in the wake of an explosion in multimedia. What's Fair? A Report on the Proceedings of the National Conference on Educational Fair Access and the New Media is available from AIT's TECHNOS Press for $14.95 plus $2.00 shipping and handling. (AIT will pay shipping for prepaid orders.) Twenty-five or more copies may be purchased at a 10% discount. To order contact: Amy Bond, Administrative Assistant, AIT, Box A, 1111 West 17th Street, Bloomington, IN 47402-0120 USA; tel: 812-339-2203; fax: 812-333-4218; email: technos@linkent.com.
The IAT publication "Computers and Copyrights: Bibliography" also contains references to new media copyright issues. You can get a copy from our Web site at URL http://www.unc.edu/cit/guides/irg-04.html.
With hundreds of new World-Wide Web sites appearing weekly, it's getting harder to locate information. Here are some good sites for either doing World-Wide Web searches or finding WWW sites by subject:
Web Crawler:
http://www.webcrawler.com/
World-Wide Web Worm:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html
Carnegie Mellon Lycos searcher:
http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/
EINet Galaxy:
http://www.einet.net/galaxy.html
The Whole Internet Catalog:
http://nearnet.gnn.com/wic/newrescat.toc.html
The World-Wide Web Virtual Library: Subject Catalogue:
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html
Comprehensive HTTP Site List:
http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mkgray/comprehensive.html
And if you prefer a serendipitous journey through the Internet, try one of these sites which will randomly connect you to other WWW sites.
URouLette
http://www.ukans.edu/uroulette.html
Random Link from Yahoo
http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/ryl