Editor's Corner
Welcome to the first
edition of Wandering Web Watchers - Online. Faculty, staff, or
administrators interested in the impact of technology on higher
education may find the collection of web sites presented in this, and
future editions, useful in their attempts to find appropriate,
effective, and efficient applications of technology to teaching and
learning.
Entries with an asterisk
( *)
indicate sites that I believe are exceptional either in terms of
content, design, or impact on teaching and learning.
Three
editions per semester plus one during the summer are planned. To
get on the mailing list just send me an e-mail at blbird@mail.aacc.cc.md.us
indicating that you want to receive WWW-Online. (You will not
receive the next edition unless you subscribe.)
Comments
and suggestions are always welcome.
Build
the Future,
Bruce
Bird ( Your occasionally grumpy, but usually smiling, editor)
CALT
News
Examples
of what can be done with the latest version of Macromedia Flash,
a widely used interactive multimedia authoring program, have recently
been added to the CALT site. Flash
5 examples
N-Scribe
BookonWeb.com
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." '
