20.088 new on WWW: CIT Infobits for June from Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty <willard.mcc on 2006-06-30 (Humanist Archives Vol. 20 )

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 06:53:15 +0100

                Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 88.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
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                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 06:45:53 +0100
         From: "Carolyn Kotlas" <kotlas_at_email.unc.edu>
         Subject: CIT Infobits -- June 2006

CIT INFOBITS June 2006 No. 94 ISSN 1521-9275

About INFOBITS

INFOBITS is an electronic service of The University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and Learning division. Each month the
ITS-TL's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a
number of information and instructional technology sources that come to
her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to
educators.

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Infobits Title Change Coming in July
Tablet PCs and Faculty Users
A Report on the Success of Online Education
Open Access/Source Conference Papers
Fair Use Network
Virtual Reality-Based Learning Environments
Teachers Sell Lesson Plans Online
Google vs. Libraries
Recommended Reading

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INFOBITS TITLE CHANGE COMING IN JULY

From July 1993 to June 1998, the title of this newsletter was "IAT
Infobits," reflecting its affiliation with the former UNC-Chapel Hill
Institute for Academic Technology. The CIT in "CIT Infobits" refers to
the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for Instructional Technology. However, due
to reorganization and realignment of our staff, once again, a title
change is in order. With the July 2006 issue, the newsletter will be
re-titled "TL Infobits" to reflect its association with UNC-Chapel
Hill's Information Technology Services Teaching and Learning division
(ITS-TL).

Other related changes:
the newsletter's ISSN
the URL where back issues will be kept

          (Pointers will be put in place to direct users from the old URL
          to the new one so that subscribers' will have time to update
          their bookmarks.)

What won't change:
          the newsletter's focus
          intended audience
          editor
          frequency of publication

UNC-Chapel Hill's commitment to the continuation of this
publication

......................................................................

TABLET PCS AND FACULTY USERS

Many recent studies on tablet PCs in higher education have focused on
student users. The purpose of the Seton Hall University project
described in "The Tablet PC For Faculty: A Pilot Project" (by Rob R.
Weitz, Bert Wachsmuth, and Danielle Mirliss in JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL
TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY, vol. 9, issue. 2, 2006, pp. 68-83) "was to test
and evaluate faculty applications of tablet PCs apropos their
contribution to teaching and learning. Put another way, how would real
faculty teaching actual classes use tablets, and how would they
evaluate the utility of doing so?"

Some of the study's findings:

-- "only a fraction of faculty are motivated to use tablet technology:
roughly a third of faculty expressed an interest in replacing their
notebook computer with a tablet computer"

-- "generally, participating faculty did indeed use tablet
functionality in their classes and were convinced that this use
resulted in a meaningful impact on teaching and learning."

The paper is available online at
http://www.ifets.info/journals/9_2/6.pdf.

The Journal of Educational Technology & Society [ISSN 1436-4522
(online), ISSN 1176-3647 (print)] is a peer-reviewed quarterly online
journal published by the International Forum of Educational Technology
& Society (IFETS). Current and past issues are available in HTML and
PDF formats at no cost at http://www.ifets.info/.

......................................................................

A REPORT ON THE SUCCESS OF ONLINE EDUCATION

Each year the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) conducts an annual survey on
the state of U.S. higher education online learning. This year, the
Consortium published its first annual special edition, "Growing by
Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005 - Southern
Edition." Some of the findings reported include:

"Online learning is thriving in the southern states. The patterns of
growth and acceptance of online education among the 16 southern states
in this report are very similar to that observed for the national
sample, with one clear difference: online learning has made greater
inroads in the southern states than in the nation as a whole."

"[S]chools are offering a large number of online courses, and there is
great diversity in the courses and programs being offered:

-- Sixty-two percent of southern schools offering graduate face-to-face
courses also offer graduate courses online.

-- Sixty-eight percent of southern schools offering undergraduate
face-to-face courses also offer undergraduate courses online."

"Staffing for online courses does not come at the expense of core
faculty. Institutions use about the same mixture of core and adjunct
faculty to staff their online courses as they do for their face-to-face
courses. Instead of more adjunct faculty teaching online courses, the
opposite is found; overall, there is a slightly greater use of core
faculty for teaching online than for face-to-face."

You can download the complete report at http://www.sloan-c.org/.

Sloan-C is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to
help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and
breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive
missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life,
accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide
variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation. For more information go to http://www.aln.org/.

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OPEN ACCESS/SOURCE CONFERENCE PAPERS

The June 2006 issue of FIRST MONDAY features selected papers from "FM10
Openness: Code, Science, and Content," a conference held in May and
sponsored by First Monday journal, the University of Illinois at
Chicago University Library, and the Maastricht Economic Research
Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT). The theme of the
conference was open access (in journals, communities, and science) and
open source. Links to the online papers, along with citations to those
not available online, are available at
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/.

First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose
aim is to publish original articles about the Internet and the global
information infrastructure. It is published in cooperation with the
University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more
information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor,
PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA; email: ejv_at_uic.edu; Web:
http://firstmonday.dk/.

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FAIR USE NETWORK

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has
created the Fair Use Network website "to support fair use and other
free expression safeguards within the law, because free expression is
essential to creativity, culture, and a healthy democracy." The site
does not provide legal advice or act in place of an attorney. It does,
however, provide answers to questions regarding intellectual property
rights, such as

-- "How much can you borrow, quote, or copy from someone else's work?"

-- "What happens if you get a 'cease and desist' letter from a
copyright owner?"

The site also contains basic legal guides and a selection of legal
reference resources. The Fair Use Network is at
http://fairusenetwork.org/.

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VIRTUAL REALITY-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

"As with any other technological advancement, the introduction of this
technology [virtual reality] brings about excitement and high
expectation among educators of its capabilities. However, it is
important to note that this technology is merely a tool, as is a
chalkboard, television, overhead projector, or an Internet connection.
Tools by themselves do not teach. They have to be carefully and
effectively implemented to assist in the learning process."

In "The Design, Development and Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Based
Learning Environment" (AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY,
vol. 22, no. 1, 2006, pp. 39-63), Chwen Jen Chen used a virtual reality
project to construct an "instructional development framework for VR
based learning environments. . . [and to develop an] understanding of
the educational effectiveness of such a learning environment and its
effect on learners with different aptitude." The paper is available
online at http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet22/chen.html.

The Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET) [ISSN
1449-3098 (print), ISSN 1449-5554 (online)], published three times a
year, is a refereed journal publishing research and review articles in
educational technology, instructional design, educational applications
of computer technologies, educational telecommunications, and related
areas. Back issues are available on the Web at no cost. For more
information and back issues go to
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/.

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TEACHERS SELL LESSON PLANS ONLINE

Entrepreneur and former public school teacher Paul Edelman has created
Teacherspayteachers.com, an website where teachers can sell lesson
plans that they have created. Sellers pay an annual fee, set their own
prices, and 15% of each sale goes to Edelman. Currently, almost all of
the lesson plans cover K-12-level subjects, but the site already
includes some university-level materials covering math, history, and
criminology. To view the site's lesson plan collection, go to
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/.

For more information, read "High-School Teachers Can Buy and Sell
Lessons at an eBay-Like Website."
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17043.

For critical comment on the service, see TeachBay.
http://dhawhee.blogs.com/d_hawhee/2006/02/teachbay.html

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GOOGLE VS. LIBRARIES

In "Libraries and Google/Google Book Search: No Competition!" (GOOGLE
LIBRARIAN NEWSLETTER, issue 4, June 21, 2006), Walt Crawford, provides
four reasons that Google services can complement, but not replace,
traditional libraries:

-- Locality
Good libraries -- even large university libraries -- reflect the
interests and needs of their communities.

-- Expertise
The professional education of librarians enables them to pick up where
web searching leaves off.

-- Community
"'Cybercommunities' can be fascinating -- but the physical community
continues to be vital."

-- Resources
"Google Book Search helps people DISCOVER books. Libraries help them
READ books."

You can read the article online at
http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0606_03.html.

Google Librarian Newsletter is a free online newsletter published by
the Google Librarian Center. For more information, to read current and
past newsletters, or to receive newsletters by email, go to
http://www.google.com/librariancenter/.

Walt Crawford, a senior analyst at the Research Libraries Group, Inc.,
is publisher of CITES & INSIGHTS: CRAWFORD AT LARGE [ISSN 1534-0937], a
free monthly online journal of libraries, policy, technology, and
media. Current and back issues are at available on the Web at
http://cites.boisestate.edu/.

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