20.385 new on WWW: TL Infobits for December from Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty <willard.mcc on 2007-01-09 (Humanist Archives Vol. 20 )

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2007 09:18:24 +0000

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 385.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2007 08:37:19 +0000
         From: "Carolyn Kotlas" <kotlas_at_email.unc.edu>
         Subject: TL Infobits -- December 2006

TL INFOBITS December 2006 No. 6 ISSN: Not Yet Assigned

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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Instructional Design Bibliography Updating
Blended Learning Resources
What Makes Online Students Stay the Course?
CMS/LMS Readings
V&A Museum Makes Digital Images Free to Scholars
MLA Report on Scholarly Publishing for Tenure
Recommended Reading
Infobits RSS Feed

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INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN BIBLIOGRAPHY UPDATING

The "Instructional Design Bibliography" resource guide
(http://its.unc.edu/tl/guides/irg-22.php) maintained by this
newsletter's editor is in need of updating. If you are involved in ID
and have recommendations for additions to this bibliography, please
email your suggestions to carolyn_kotlas_at_unc.edu. Thank you!

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BLENDED LEARNING RESOURCES

Blended learning is a combination of face-to-face instruction with
online components. In response to the increasing use of blended
learning experiences in higher education, Sloan-C has launched a
website with free resources for blended-learning educators. "Sloan-C
Blended Learning" includes discussion forums, chapters from the book
BLENDED LEARNING: RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES, and videos of the Sloan-C
Online Seminar Series "Blended Learning: What the Research Says." The
website is at http://www.blendedteaching.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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WHAT MAKES ONLINE STUDENTS STAY THE COURSE?

While much has been written about why students drop out of online
courses, the authors of "Surviving the Shipwreck: What Makes Online
Students Stay Online and Learn?" (by Johannes C. Cronje, et al.,
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY, vol. 9, issue 4, 2006)
wanted to know what keeps students in these courses. For their study of
the issue they set up a six-week, graduate-level course using a game
metaphor based on the television program "Survivor." "Twenty-four
students were put into tribes and allowed to vote one another off the
island at the end of each week. Students who were voted out of their
tribes, were still on the course, but could no longer rely on the
support of their peers." Fifteen students completed the entire course.
The researchers concluded this was due to three factors: "the game
metaphor, the roles and competencies of the facilitator, and the
affective dimensions of peer support in a non-contact environment."
Their paper is available online at
http://www.ifets.info/journals/9_4/16.pdf.

The Journal of Educational Technology and Society [ISSN 1436-4522]is a
peer-reviewed, quarterly publication that "seeks academic articles on
the issues affecting the developers of educational systems and
educators who implement and manage such systems." The journal is
published by the International Forum of Educational Technology &
Society. Current and back issues are available at
http://www.ifets.info/.

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CMS/LMS READINGS

"Peer Comparison of Course/Learning Management Systems, Course
Materials Life Cycle, and Related Costs. Final Report"
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 19, 2006
http://web.mit.edu/emcc/www/MIT-WCET-C-LMS-Final-Report-07-19-06.pdf
"MIT contracted with WCET's EduTools to survey ten selected
peer institutions regarding their use and support of C/LMS products and
the Course Materials Life Cycle used by each institution. The data
gathered in this survey is intended to benchmark these services at peer
institutions and to collect information that will inform future
decision-making."

"Considering Open Source: A Framework for Evaluating Software in the
New Economy"
by Lois Brooks
EDUCAUSE, 2007
http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ERB0701
"Open source software and the community source movement are
raising questions for administrators about whether and when to adopt or
devote resources to software development projects, provoking questions
of sustainability, future directions, and total cost of ownership. This
research bulletin frames the issues an institution should consider with
respect to adding community source products to the portfolio of
software, infrastructure, and services that constitute the IT
environment." [Please note that you will need to register with EDUCAUSE
to read the paper. There is no cost for registration.]

"Slightly Tongue in Cheek Presentation on 'The Future of CMS'"
WCET 2006 Conference presentation by Scott Leslie
EdTechPost, November 6, 2006
http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000828.html
"In a presentation involving the Magic 8 Ball, Leslie makes the
argument that CMS software may have been a false start and that the
future lies in the Web 2.0/social software realm."

[Editor's note: Thanks to Lori Mathis for pointing out this collection
of information. Lori Mathis is a former colleague of this newsletter's
editor. For many years she has reviewed my drafts of Infobits, and she
continues to catch my typos, grammatical errors, and confusing phrasing
before I send it out. Lori currently works for the University of North
Carolina General Administration's Teaching and Learning with Technology
Collaborative (http://www.unctlt.org/).]

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V&A MUSEUM MAKES DIGITAL IMAGES FREE TO SCHOLARS

Beginning in early 2007, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London drops
their fees for reproduction of its collections' images in scholarly
books and magazines. Part of the rationale for this move is because,
although reproduction fees have brought more then 250,000 Pounds
annually, administration costs eat heavily into these revenues. The
upside for scholars is access to more than 25,000 of the museum's
images online (http://www.vam.ac.uk/). It is hoped that V&A's move will
encourage other museums to also afford the same privileges to scholars.

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MLA REPORT ON SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING FOR TENURE

"In 2004 the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association of
America created a task force to examine current standards and emerging
trends in publication requirements for tenure and promotion in English
and foreign language departments in the United States. The council's
action came in response to widespread anxiety in the profession about
ever-rising demands for research productivity and shrinking humanities
lists by academic publishers, worries that forms of scholarship other
than single-authored books were not being properly recognized, and
fears that a generation of junior scholars would have a significantly
reduced chance of being tenured. The task force was charged with
investigating the factual basis behind such concerns and making
recommendations to address the changing environment in which
scholarship is being evaluated in tenure and promotion decisions." The
MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion
report is available online at http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion/.

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