Wandering Web Watchers
Trip Reports
February 27, 2001
Faculty View
A Day in the Life of a New Type of Professor
A Columbia U. Professor Praises the Interactivity of Teaching Online
A Professor of English Broadcasts From His Own Internet 'Radio' Station
A Professor Prefers Online Self-Publishing to Scholarly Journals and Books
Faculty Resources
Technology as a Teaching Tool
Asking the Right Question -What Does Research Tell Us About Technology and Higher Learning?
The Technology Source January/February 2001
Trading Mules for Tractors: The Pros and Cons of Adopting a Course Management System
The Educational Applications of Streaming Audio: Accessible, Do-It-Yourself Multimedia
IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF)
Distance Learning
The Power of the Internet for Learning: Moving from Promise to Practice ***
Ensuring High Quality in Distance Education for College Credit (July, 2000)
Is Anyone Making Money on Distance Education?
Distance Learning in Higher Education
Higher Education
Education Must 'Transform' Itself or Become Irrelevant, Educause Official Says
A Rant About the University: Can the Problems with Higher Education Ever Be Solved?
Trends
iBEAM Teams With University Of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute To Deliver Streaming Content To 600,000 California End Users - Agreement Expands iBEAM Network's Reach to 30 Major Universities, over 70 Community Colleges, Five ISPs and Select Corporations (1/22/01)
CUSEEME NETWORKS FIRST TO SHIP VIDEOCONFERENCING INTEGRATION OPTION FOR MICROSOFT EXCHANGE
eLearning
Impact?
How Much Information? "This study is an attempt to measure how much information is produced in the world each year. We look at several media and estimate yearly production, accumulated stock, rates of growth, and other variables of interest."
"The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage." (Note: Report published in 2000 based on 1999-2000 data.)
"In 2000 the World Wide Web consisted of about 21 terabytes of static HTML pages, and is growing at a rate of 100% per year. Many Web pages are generated on-the-fly from data in databases, so the total size of the "deep Web" is considerably larger."
'Although the social impact of the Web has been phenomenal, about 500 times as much email is being produced per year as the stock of Web pages. It appears that about 610 billion emails are sent per year, compared to 2.1 billion static Web pages. Even the yearly flow of Usenet news is more than 3 times the stock of Web pages. As Odlyzko (2000) puts it, "communication, not content, is the killer app." 'Added sites for Wandering Web Watchers - Live
Wandering Web Watchers - Online
Montgomery College Selects Eduprise, Inc. to Expand e-Learning Program (2/20/01)
Education Network Australia - Online (EdNA)
November 28, 2000
Bird's-eye View
The 2000 National Survey of Information Technology in Higher Education - Struggling with IT Staffing
Get Smart: The Pluses and Minuses of E-Learning
COM 333 - Communicating through Internet
Digital Learning Interactive and SMARTHINKING Partner to Take Online Learning to the Next Level
Web Company Founded by Columbia U. Opens a 'Beta Version' of Its Site
e-learning - the magazine of distributed learning
Speech at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University)
National Institute for Science Education -College Level 1 "The NISE College Level One Team, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a nationwide community of post-secondary science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) faculty, education researchers, faculty developers, and students."
Houghton Mifflin Developmental English (Suggested by Ferol Benavides)
The English Pages (Suggested by Ferol Benavides)
3-D
A Free Computer Program Offers a Detailed Look at the Human Skull
Future Trends
"This Way to the Future - Where the World Will Always Be On", New Scientist, October 23, 2000
"The Future of Colleges: 9 Inevitable Changes" by Arthur E. Levine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 27, 2000, page B10
October 25, 2000
Bird's-eye View
Physical Anthropology Online "Dr. Dennis O'Neil, of the Palomar College Anthropology Department, has won the first California Virtual Campus online teaching website award. Visit his tutorials site and you will see why! " "While this course has been modified for distance learning, it has the same content and rigor as the conventional lecture course. Instead of lectures, however, you will use online tutorials. You also will interact regularly with your instructor and other students in the class via online discussions."
Fairleigh Dickinson U. Will Require Distance Courses of All Students
Arthur Levine:Creating an Education System for an Information Age
Instructors Try Out Updated MOOs as Online-Course Classrooms
Media
Interactive Streaming: The Creative Foundation of More Compelling, More Competitive Web Sites by Jon Leland. (2.5MB PDF file) (8/31/2000)
computing power and the Web’s vast interactive, global network of users) Web developers and video producers are presented with a mission critical opportunity. In light of the new forms of interactive streaming that are explained in this document, the development of first generation Web pages begins to look inconsequential, something like "light appetizers." The "real meal" is yet to come. Bottom line, next generation streaming applications (referred to here as "interactive streaming") are setting the stage for a new breed of compelling, engaging and highly effective online content.""As bandwidth expands to converge with other mega-trends (like increased
Examples sited in the above article:
Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality on a Desktop Hailed as New Tool in Distance Education
Future Trends
Magazines
"The Future of Digital Entertainment", Scientific American, November, 2000
"The Future of the Internet: Everything is about to change - again", Fortune, October 9, 2000
Books
Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World by George Gilder, Free Press, 2000
September 19, 2000
Bird's-eye View
Extending the Classroom Walls Electronically
Measuring Students' Learning is a Major Challenge for Distance Education
Accrediting Bodies Consider New Standards for Distance-Education Programs
How Interactive are YOUR Distance Courses? A Rubric for Assessing Interaction in Distance Learning
When Professors Create Software, Do They Own It, or Do Their Colleges?
Economics Professor Replaces Himself with a CD-ROM Set
A Historian of Computing Abandons Traditional Publishing for CD-ROM's
Harcourt's Virtual University Gears Up for Marketing Effort, Courses
Handhelds
Universities Begin Creating Palm-Sized Versions of Campus Web Pages
Electronic Books
Media
ETERNAL TRUTH OF THE MOMENT: The Tower of Babel "Film is dead. I don't mean barely breathing. I mean dead. Regardless of Roger Ebert's claim that digital will never replace celluloid, it will and here's why . . . It's cheaper at the point of acquisition. Even the most efficient films run a 10:1 ratio of film shot to the end product. HD (high definition) costs a fraction of film. The difference adds up to millions. It's easier to deal with."
Future Trends
How Voice Processing Will Change The Web
Scenarios -The art of preparing for an uncertain future
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March
Professor Says Colleges Should Eschew Commercial Software (The Chronicle 2/20/01)
World Association for Online Education
What Matters in Judging Distance Teaching? Not How Much It's Like a Classroom Course
'Automatic Professor Machine' Is Unveiled -- by a Longtime Technology Critic
Online Course at U. of Central Florida Examines Space Policy, Past and Present
The Node Learning Technologies Network "The Node Learning Technologies Network is a not-for-profit organization which promotes effective uses of Internet-based technologies in education and training. We forge links between the capabilities of new technology tools and good pedagogical practice. Our publications, workshops, research and consulting services, online resources and electronic forums support informed decision-making by individuals and organizations in the postsecondary and k-12 education sectors and in industry. The Node understands present and emerging Internet applications for education and training, and the importance of strategic planning to realize their potential within organizational goals."
Pro Plugging in to Course Evaluation
Con Electronic Course Evaluation Is Not Necessarily the Solution
Can we bank on e-learning? -"The online education market is still in grade school. One thing for sure: e-learning companies have a lot of homework to do." Red Herring, February 13, 2001 This is the introduction to several articles concerning the e-learning business.
- Software and hardware customers e-learn the ropes - "Companies like Lucent and Nortel Networks, in looking to tie up market share, have decided that a well-trained customer is a loyal customer."
- VCs go back to the drawing board - " After dumping billions into e-learning startups, venture capitalists are finally slowing down. They learned a hard lesson in overinvestment."
Author Says Colleges Must Reallocate Money to Academic Technology
Education Network Australia - Online (EdNA)
Montgomery College Selects Eduprise, Inc. to Expand e-Learning Program (2/20/01)
Does Technology Make a Difference? International Conference on Learning with Technology, March 8-10, 2000
Australian Students Protest Plan for Global Online University
MIT Professors Propose a Costly Effort to Put All Course Materials Online (The Chronicle 3/1/01)
"Administrators and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are debating what could become a $100-million effort to create extensive World Wide Web pages for nearly every course the university offers. Under the program, which was proposed by a committee of faculty members and administrators, the university would publish a vast collection of course materials on the Web, although it would not deliver courses to students at a distance."
MIT Discusses Online Courses -Faculty Raise Concerns About OpenCourseWare at Meeting (2/23/01)
National Institute for Science Education -College Level 1 "The NISE College Level One Team, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a nationwide community of post-secondary science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) faculty, education researchers, faculty developers, and students."
Is the Digital Divide the New Civil Rights Issue?
Who Is Teaching In U.S. College Classrooms? -A Collaborative Study of Undergraduate Faculty, Fall 1999
"Full-time faculty are being replaced by lower paid part-time teachers attractive to higher education administrators, who are under pressure to keep costs down. In addition to receiving few if any benefits, most of these faculty members receive less than $3,000 per course (Table 4). Nearly one third of them earn $2,000, or less per course. In fields like English and history nearly half of the part-timers are in this category. At this rate of pay, part-time teachers—almost all of whom have the masters degree and many of whom have the PhD—would have to teach five courses to earn between $12,000 to $15,000 a year. They could earn comparable salaries as fast food workers, baggage porters, or theater lobby attendants. "One does not need PhD in mathematics to calculate how many classes such a historian would have to teach to earn a decent living, or to realize that it is impossible for most adjuncts to function as research scholars or keep up with historical literature under these conditions," observed to Eric Foner, President of the American Historical Association and Professor of History at Columbia University."
Active Learning For The College Classroom
Introducing Web Accessibility (Web Review 3/2/01)70 Ways To Handle Text-Intensive Web Sites
Internet 2 "Internet2 is a consortium being led by over 180 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 is recreating the partnership among academia, industry and government that fostered today´s Internet in its infancy. The primary goals of Internet2 are to:
-Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community-Enable revolutionary Internet applications
-Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community."
Internet2 Project Will Broaden Access for Community Colleges and Schools (the Chronicle 3/2/01)
"Anna Solley, the vice chancellor for academic affairs and student development at the Maricopa Community College District, in Phoenix, said she was intrigued by the possibility of having access to things like the databases of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, as well as to digital-video applications that could be useful in teacher-education courses."
Students Find a Web Site to Be a Valuable Supplement to a Poetry Anthology