FCN News 5 Dec 96

Don't read this by e-mail! Instead, read the hypertext version of this newsletter: <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/news/current.html>. Contents:

Upcoming Events

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Local events of particular interest to FCN members (see also upcoming conferences below):

Color Transparencies for Classroom Use

You're teaching a large lecture course, and would like to improve the quality of your transparencies. Perhaps you've considered doing computer assisted presentations but aren't ready to risk equipment failure or unavailability. Don't despair -- you have other options.

The Instructional Media Center now has a color laser printer available for faculty use. If you have color images that you would like to display in class, you can print transparencies and show them using your familiar overhead projector. For use in classes, the IMC will charge your department essentially the cost of the transparency stock, so a color transparency costs about the same as a black and white one, and can have far greater impact:

regular paper

transparencies or
glossy paper

CRN classes

$.10

$1.00

other uses

.25

1.50

The IMC can accept files for printing over the network in a variety of formats, or can for an additional fee assist in the preparation of your materials. Contact the IMC Graphics Arts Service for additional information, x6-1940, or send email to JQ Johnson, <mailto:jqj@darkwing>

Not sure how you might use visuals more effectively to improve your lectures? The Teaching Effectiveness Program can help! TEP staff can offer you individual consultation to help you use this, and other educational technologies, more effectively in ways that work for your own pedagogical style. Contact Georgeanne Cooper, <mailto:gcooper@oregon>, to schedule a personal meeting.

Stanford Web Week

The 26 November issue of the Chronicle of Higher Ed contains an interesting story about Stanford's Web Week, an effort to increase the general web literacy of all Stanford students through a theme week devoted to web training. During that week, Stanford students were barraged with a variety of training sessions devoted to teaching everything from basic use of Netscape, to sophisticated web searching, to web publishing.

UW Asia-Pacific Educational Network

From EduPage, <http://www.educom.edu/ >, 1 Dec 1996:

Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced that the University of Washington will become the center of a new Asia-Pacific network called APEC EduNet, formed to link universities via the Internet. Ron Johnson, the University of Washington's vice president for computing and communications, says the network will extend the electronic laboratory concept and will be the first virtual learning project to be such a large, transcontinental scale. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer 23 Nov 96 A1) <http://www.apec.org>

Electronic Communication Considered Harmful?

For an interesting article that examines the effect of the Internet information explosion on scientific communications, see "Could the Internet Balkanize Science?", by Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, published in the 29 November issue of Science. The authors argue that greater access to scientific information can boost productivity, but also potentially creates serious problems separating the wheat from the chaff, with one strategy being a narrowing of the focus of your attention, producing increased "balkanization". They argue that it can also result in greater stratification as prominent scientists retreat to private e-mail lists and discussion groups to preserve the quality of their interaction . For the full text online see <http://www.sciencemag.org/science/scripts/display/full/274/5292/1479.html>.

Conferences and Workshops, Real and Virtual

This is a selected and somewhat idiosyncratic list of upcoming conferences relevant to educational tech., both "virtual" (online) and traditional. For conferences that require physical travel, my emphasis is on conferences in the Northwest and on those I find personally interesting. The Educom and CAUSE calendars, <http://educom.edu/web/calendar/calendarHome.html> and <http://cause-www.colorado.edu/information-resources/events.html>, contain a more extensive list of mainstream conferences. Virtual conferences and tutorials:

Traditional conferences and workshops:

The Lighter Side -- chemistry

Reputedly from a 5th Grade science essay, but a useful observation independent of source:

To most people solutions mean finding the answers. But to chemists solutions are things that are still all mixed up. [Niladri CHATTERJEE <mailto:N.Chatterjee@cs.ucl.ac.uk>]

 

Administrativa

Erratum: some copies of the 22 Nov 1996 issue of this newsletter contained a typo. In the article entitled Risks of Web Publishing, the first sentence in the last paragraph should have read " One point in the above is clearly false: publication on the web does not in itself place your works in the public domain."

The UO Faculty Consultants Network Newsletter is published (approximately) twice a month. If you have materials for inclusion in the newsletter you can send them to <mailto:jqj@darkwing>. This newsletter (as well as other FCN-related material) is available on line in <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/>.