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Local events of particular interest to FCN members (see also On Campus below):
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YAMADA VIRTUAL LANGUAGE LAB. If you haven't visited it yet, check out the Yamada Language Center's virtual language lab. Students now have access to their audio language labs over the Internet, available 24 hrs a day in Quicktime format. <http://babel.uoregon.edu/YLC-AV/>.
DOCUMENT CAMERA/VISUALIZER. Try out the new Canon document camera available in the Social Sciences Instructional Lab. Bring in a set of overheads or other lecture materials -- or even small 3 dimensional objects -- and in minutes turn them all into a set of JPEG files for use on the web or in your powerpoint presentations. <http://ssil.uoregon.edu/>. You can schedule time using the visualizer, or training in how to use it efficiently, by contacting Cathleen Leue <mailto:cleue@Oregon>.
SEMINAR ON COLLEGE SCIENCE TEACHING. This weekly seminar, Winter 2000, is focused primarily on GTFs in the sciences. ALS 609 (2 credits (P/NP only), 3:00pm-4:50 Wednesdays in PLC 627; CRN 21112. <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rambers/als609/>.
MATHEMATICA 4. If you are a Mathematica user on Mac or PC, you can now upgrade to version 4.0.1. See <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~hak/mathematica/>
NEWS FROM THE ED TECH COMMITTEE. The UO Ed Tech committee had its fall meeting on 11/16. Among the new projects:
HUGI ON EDUCAUSE BOARD. Joanne Hugi, the UO's Director, Computing Center, has been elected to the Educause board of directors. <http://www.educause.edu/about.html>
SEEING CRIMSON. Arthur Miller, renowned Harvard Law professor, and Harvard University are at odds over Miller's decision to offer videotaped lectures on civil procedure to Concord University School of Law, an online school. Harvard wants to end Miller's Concord arrangement. Miller has often been featured on various television programs and Harvard Law leases a CD-ROM version of Miller's civil procedure course to other interested law schools. For the disputed Concord course, Harvard Law is not directly involved and Miller is acting as a freelance law professor, a practice Harvard permits and is commonly undertaken by resident professors. The key issue, according to Miller himself, is "how much of Arthur Miller does Harvard own?" Miller points out that he has offered audiotaped and videotaped lectures for 25 years and he doesn't see how this is any different, although he concedes he did not seek permission from the dean prior to signing the contract. Harvard says its policies bar a professor from teaching at another institution during the academic year. Miller taped his lectures over the summer break and will have no interaction with students of the online course. Harvard Business School Dean Kim Clark says a Harvard education needs to be reserved for those actually attending Harvard classes although the Business School is developing online executive-education courses to be sold to companies. (Wall Street Journal 11/22/99). See also <http://chronicle.com/free/99/11/99112401t.htm> (Chronicle of Higher Ed, Nov 24, 1999).
MORE ON COPYRIGHT. Yet another excellent copyright-awareness web site, this one an article from Booklist Magazine by Esther Sinofsky reviewing web sites: <http://www.ala.org/booklist/v95/rbb/je1/45copyri.html>.
CATCHING PLAGIARISTS ON THE WEB. Distance ed has raised the stakes on student cheating. Maybe the total amount of cheating hasn't increased, but it's certainly easier than ever to copy text from the web and submit it without attribution. And, particularly in distance ed courses, it can be harder for professors to detect cheating without the traditional face to face cues. For a good analysis of the problems and some proposed solutions, see "How to Proctor From a Distance", in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, 12 Nov 99, <http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i12/12a04701.htm>
A CAUTIONARY TALE. "More than half of the 1,900 students in an experimental on-line course at the University of Iowa received F's on their mid-term report cards. The failing students should not have been surprised, however, since none of them had even started the self-paced program." The moral: you can't expect freshmen to be self-motivated and self-paced learners, particularly in a totally on-line setting. <http://chronicle.com/free/99/11/99111601t.htm>
FUTURE OF ONLINE JOURNAL PUBLISHING?
FUTURE OF TEXTBOOKS? Textbook publishers generally agree that at some still-unknown time in the future textbooks will be dead. But when will electronic content actually replace them? And what to do in the meantime? Just because electronic delivery is clearly the wave of the future doesn't mean that very much else is clear; one industry observer points out: "Everyone thought that CD-ROMs would be the delivery method because they can hold an entire textbook or more, but those came and went. They're still bundled with textbooks, but simply as add-ons." The question, as always, is how to combine technology and business in a single plan. (Information Access Company, "College Publishers Grapple With Future of Electronic Content Delivery," Electronic Education Report, 27 Oct 99) <http://www.simbanet.com/products/pr_edusr.html#nl2>.
FACULTY UNION RALLIES AROUND THE OLD WEB SITE. Teachers and union leaders at the Pennsylvania State University system have been using a Web site created by an associate professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania to share information and organize activities during yearlong contract negotiations with the state system of higher education. In addition, the site serves as the basis of a distance-education course on "Introduction to Picketing," an online tutorial intended for professors that offers tips on protest etiquette and other negotiating strategies.<http://www.iup-apscuf.org/>.
JALN. Check out the November issue of the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, <http://www.aln.org/>. For example, these tips from an article on keeping online discussions on target: "1) Carefully design questions that specifically elicit on-topic discussion, 2) provide guidelines to help online learners prepare on-topic responses, 3) reword the original question when responses are going in the wrong direction and 4) provide discussion summary on a regular basis."
LAPTOP PRICES DIP BELOW $1,000. EMachines, maker of sub-$400 PCs, has introduced the first laptop computer priced below $1,000. The eSlate 400k will reportedly sell for $999, and if it's actually available will presumably drive down prices for competing low-end laptops. (NewsScan Daily, 16 Nov 99)
One of the useful features of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 web browser (PC only) is support for a variety of add-ons. Many are available at the Microsoft web site, <http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/webaccess/> . Of particular note are the "Web Accessories for IE 5", that include such convenience features as a right-click menu item to open a frame in a new window (very nice if you feel trapped by a web site that overuses frames) and an image toggler to turn off images for faster downloads (a feature Netscape has always had). For HTML authors or anyone interested in how a web page is coded, an even more useful add-on is the "Microsoft Web Developer Accessories." Simply highlight the area of the Web page that you want to see the source for, right click on it and select "View Partial Source" to see the HTML tags that generated that part of the page! No more scrolling through hundreds of lines of HTML on the "view source" screen.
If you're a Mac user, your MSIE customization options are much more limited, but they still exist. In this case the relevant web site is Microsoft's Mactopia, <http://www.microsoft.com/mac/ie/>.
This space highlights new listings of conferences of possible interest to UO faculty interested in educational technology. For more meetings see <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/conferences.html>.
(quoted without editing from a Harvard listserv)
How many PAC-10 students does it take to change a light bulb?
| At Stanford: | It takes 2. 1 to change the bulb and 1 to explain how they did it every bit as well as an Ivy League school. |
| At Cal: | It takes 4. One to screw in the bulb and 3 to figure out how to get high off the old one. |
| At UCLA: | It takes 3. One to change the bulb and two to phone a friend at Cal to get instructions. |
| At USC: | It takes 5. One to change it, two to talk about how John McKay would have done it, and two to throw the old bulb at a Bruin. |
| At ASU: | It takes 7 and each one gets four semester-hours of credit for it. |
| At Arizona: | It takes 8. One to screw it in and the other seven to discuss how much brighter it shines during basketball season. |
| At Oregon: | It takes 110. 1 to change it, 49 to talk about how they do it better than Oregon State, and 50 to realize from a Marxist perspective that the working class bulb-changer was being exploited by the capitalist class, and 10 to figure out how to get high off the old one. |
| At Oregon State: | It takes all 20,000. 1 to screw it in and 19,999 to insist that next year will finally be the year they have a good football team (and how they kicked U of O's ass this year). |
| At Washington: | It takes 10. One to change it, four alumni to give him money and a new car so he can concentrate on his bulb-changing technique and not worry about academics, two to mix the drinks, and three to find the perfect J. Crew outfit for the occasion. |
| At Washington State: | It takes none. There is no electricity in Pullman. |
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