Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 583.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "James L. Morrison" <morrison@unc.edu> (103)
Subject: January/February Issue of The Technology Source
[2] From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@english.uga.edu> (103)
Subject: ELRA News
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 11:17:27 +0000
From: "James L. Morrison" <morrison@unc.edu>
Subject: January/February Issue of The Technology Source
Below is a description of the January/February 2001 issue of The
Technology Source, a free, refereed Web periodical at
http://horizon.unc.edu/TS
Please forward this announcement to colleagues who are interested in using
information technology tools more effectively in their work.
As always, we seek illuminating articles that will assist educators as
they face the challenge of integrating information technology tools in
teaching and in managing educational organizations. Please review our call
for manuscripts at http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/call.asp and send me a note
if you would like to contribute such an article.
Jim
--
James L. Morrison morrison@unc.edu
Professor of Educational Leadership CB 3500 Peabody Hall
Editor, The Technology Source UNC-Chapel Hill
http://horizon.unc.edu/TS Chapel Hill, NC 27599
Editor Emeritus, On the Horizon Phone: 919 962-2517
http://www.camfordpublishing.com Fax: 919 962-1693
IN THIS ISSUE:
Albert Ip and Roni Linser introduce this issue of The Technology Source
with their assessment of a Web-based role-play model that they use to
teach their world politics class at the University of Melbourne. By
virtually filling the shoes of various local statesmen, world leaders, and
media figures, students experience politics hands-on, an approach that Ip
and Linser believe fosters long-term retention. In addition to challenging
students to take responsibility for tough diplomatic issues, the model
offers opportunities for creativity and enjoyment. As Ip and Linser
explain, "the increase of fun and playfulness, which enhance student
motivation, justifies the effort."
John Hibbs discusses the importance of maximizing technology use in his
commentary on the format of distance education conferences. Hibbs shares
an illuminating fantasy with readers: a chat with a kingpin in distance
education who defends face-to-face conferences. But with a $3,000 cost per
attendee, double that for international attendees, Hibbs contends,
"Something about this story doesn't seem quite right. . . ." He reminds us
that up-to-date technology can make conferences, much like classrooms,
cost-effective, efficient, and accessible to all.
Stephen Downes takes Hibbs' argument a step further, arguing in this
issue's second commentary that the approach to conferences Hibbs describes
is representative of a deeper attitude: a general discrediting of online
discourse, even among distance education professionals. To Downes, the
hypocrisy is that "while distance educators talk about online learning as
inclusive and empowering, their practice remains exclusive and
disempowering."
While technological advances are revolutionizing distance education, Ellen
Chaffee cautions against overlooking the importance of universal access.
In this issue's third commentary, she explains, "Rather than viewing
technology as a tool for delivery, like an interactive video system, we
can view technology as a tool for learning, like a textbook or problem
set." She cites improved student and faculty experiences at Valley City
State University and Mayville State University as evidence for the
successes of universal access, emphasizing that those successes are well
worth additional costs.
Like the authors of our assessment article, Diann Schindler-Ender calls
for greater interaction on the Web. In our fourth commentary,
Schindler-Ender argues that the human resource shortage faced by many
institutions means that their future success hinges on the ability to
attract skilled and competent candidates. The way to tackle this potential
employment crisis, she emphasizes, is to take the job search process to
the Web, following the examples of business and industry. She concludes
that "online employee recruitment promises a fast, easy, cost-efficient,
and effective tool for addressing a fast-approaching human resource
crisis."
Joel Foreman has much experience with the world of distance education. In
his case study of WebCT, a course management system (CMS), Foreman
discloses the current benefits and disadvantages of the system, suggesting
improvements that may encourage more teachers to use a CMS in their
courses. Foreman predicts that, like farmers trading mules for tractors,
teachers' adoption of improved course management systems represents a new
era in instruction.
In our second case study, Grover Furr discusses Internet technology in the
classroom, sharing his insight into teaching using streaming audio. The
technology allows Furr's and others' lectures to be accessible outside of
class, encouraging further study of the material and making time in class
more active. Overall, Furr explains, "With this simple and cheap streaming
audio technology, I can use all of my class time to enhance
student-centered, interactive education."
In faculty and staff development, Ann Luck takes Technology Source readers
for another visit to Penn State's World Campus to share the online course
development process. Those who remember last spring's case study, in which
Luck first introduced this exciting distance learning program, will be
eager to learn how World Campus faculty and staff create their courses in
a team environment and to read Luck's advice for avoiding common pitfalls.
Those who didn't catch last spring's article won't want to miss out again.
This issue's spotlight shines on "JURIST: The Legal Education Network," a
site with a plethora of resources for those interested in legal studies.
As Stephen Downes reveals, the site is a must-view for students,
professors, librarians, and practicing lawyers alike. It offers extensive
material on conferences, books and articles, law schools, bar exams,
current laws and legislation, and job openings. Check out Downes's article
and see why he calls it "probably the best educational portal on the
Internet today."
Sometimes traditional numerical, multiple-choice, or fill-in-the-blank
questioning drills just can't be beat when it comes to promoting and
assessing student learning. Yet educators must weigh the advantages of
such assignments against the tedious hours required to grade individual
exercises. Often, too much time on paperwork means too little time for
creative lesson planning and meaningful interaction with students. John C.
Dutton has a solution to this problem: WebAssign, which he touts as "a
better homework delivery tool"--better, that is, not only at delivering
questions to students, but also at grading their responses and providing
them with instant feedback, freeing teachers' time for what really
matters.
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 11:26:25 +0000
From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@english.uga.edu>
Subject: ELRA News
>> From: Valerie Mapelli <mapelli@elda.fr>
___________________________________________________________
ELRA
European Language Resources Association
ELRA News
___________________________________________________________
*** ELRA NEW RESOURCES ***
We are happy to announce new resources available via ELRA:
- Telephone Speech Resources
ELRA-S0090 Polish SpeechDat(E) Database
ELRA-S0092 Portuguese SpeechDat(II) FDB-4000
- Desktop Microphone Speech Resources
ELRA-S0087 BABEL Hungarian Database
ELRA-S0088 Twin database - TWINDB1
ELRA-S0089 Albayzin corpus
ELRA-S0093 IBNC - An Italian Broadcast News Corpus
- Speech Related Resources
ELRA-S0091 Pronunciation lexicon of British place names,
surnames and first names
- Written Corpus
ELRA-W0025 A "scientific" corpus of modern French
(La Recherche magazine)
- Multilingual Lexicons
ELRA-M0025 Bilingual English-Russian Russian-English Dictionaries
A short description of each database is given below.
_______________________________________
TELEPHONE SPEECH RESOURCES
_______________________________________
- ELRA-S0090 Polish SpeechDat(E) Database
This database comprises 1000 Polish speakers (488 males,
512 females) recorded over the Polish fixed telephone network.
- ELRA-S0092 Portuguese SpeechDat(II) FDB-4000
This database comprises 4027 Portuguese speakers (1861 males,
2166 females) recorded over the Portuguese fixed telephone network.
_______________________________________
DESKTOP/MICROPHONE SPEECH RESOURCES
_______________________________________
- ELRA-S0087 BABEL Hungarian Database
The BABEL Database is a speech database that was produced by
a research consortium funded by the European Union under the
COPERNICUS programme (COPERNICUS Project 1304).
The Hungarian database consists of:
- the basic "common" set which contains the Many Talker Set (30 males,
30 females), Few Talker Set (4 males, 4 females), Very Few Talker Set
(1 male, 1 female);
-- and the extension part: a short description of Hungarian sound system
- ELRA-S0088 Twin database - TWINDB1
The Twin database named TWINDB1 includes recordings of 45 French
speakers, consisting of 9 pairs of identical twins (8 males and 10 females)
with similar voices, and 27 other speakers (13 males and 14 females)
including 4 none-twin siblings.
- ELRA-S0089 Albayzin corpus
This corpus consists of 3 sub-corpora of 16 kHz 16 bits signals,
recorded by 304 Castillian speakers: Phonetic corpus, Geographic corpus,
"Lombard" corpus
- ELRA-S0093 IBNC - An Italian Broadcast News Corpus
Produced within the European Commission funded project LRsP&P
(Language Resources Production & Packaging - LE4-8335), the collection
consists of 150 broadcast programs from the RAI, for a total time of about
30 hours, issued in 36 different days, between 1992 and 1999.
down-sampled to 16kHz 16 bit, and encoded into the NIST Sphere PCM
format.
_______________________________________
SPEECH RELATED RESOURCES
_______________________________________
- ELRA-S0091 Pronunciation lexicon of British place names, surnames and
first names
This pronunciation lexicon produced within the European Commission funded
project LRsP&P (Language Resources Production & Packaging - LE4-8335)
is an SGML-encoded database. It contains 160,000 entries of British
place-names, surnames and first names All phonemic transcriptions in the
database are based on the SAMPA phonetic alphabet.
_______________________________________
WRITTEN CORPUS
_______________________________________
- ELRA-W0025 A "scientific" corpus of modern French (La Recherche magazine)
Produced within the European Commission funded project LRsP&P (Language
Resources Production & Packaging - LE4-8335), the corpus contains all articles
published in La Recherche magazine in 1998, including issues 305 (January) to
315 (December), which amounts to 447,244 tokens and 30,238 types. Two
versions are available: the raw data (XML format) and the complete version
(XML
and SGML formats)
_______________________________________
MULTILINGUAL LEXICONS
_______________________________________
- ELRA-M0025 Bilingual English-Russian Russian-English Dictionaries
Produced within the European Commission funded project LRsP&P (Language
Resources Production & Packaging - LE4-8335), these bilingual dictionaries
contain more than 350,000 pairs of words (in tabular form) in XML format:
1) Russian-English dictionary - more than 130,000 entries
2) English-Russian dictionary - more than 95,000 entries
Each entry contains: source word (lemma); part of speech of source word;
target word(s) (lemma(s)), grouped by same meaning; part of speech of target
word(s); domain(s).
=====================================
For further information, please contact:
ELRA/ELDA Tel +33 01 43 13 33 33
55-57 rue Brillat-Savarin Fax +33 01 43 13 33 30
F-75013 Paris, France E-mail mapelli@elda.fr
or visit our Web site:
http//www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html
or http//www.elda.fr
=====================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 01/09/01 EST