I. The Virtual Universities bibliography sources:
Avgerakis, George and Becky Waring. "Industrial-Strength
Streaming Video" New
Media 7(12) (Sept. 22, 1997): 46-58 (http://www.newmedia.com/NewMedia/97/12/feature/Streaming_Video.html).
- The state of the art of video for the web. Streaming video (playback
in nearly real time instead of download-and-watch-later) has come
of age. This article concentrates on reviewing 7 current video servers
for the web, but it does mention other server-less options such
as plugins for QuickTime and MPEG formatted video can take advantage
of. Perhaps not surprisingly, the handy list showing numbers of
different video formats on the web to date reveals the server-less
formats far outrank the pricier server-based formats. Another irony
revealed is that QuickTime, until recently authored only on Macintosh,
is the most popular video type on the web, while none of the 7 web
servers reviewed even run on Macs. Beyond the review, this article,
with discussions of background, formats, and tips, will be very
useful to bring you up to date on options for serving video from
your website for distance learning, putting film resources online,
or just viewing that oh-so-cool QuickTime panorama taken from the
local university's bell-tower. -
Wilson, David L. "New California State Campus has
Ambitious Plans for Technology" Chronicle of Higher Education
XLIII(8) (October 18, 1996):23-24. -- With a focus on multi-disciplinary
study and information technology, CSU
Monterey Bay has been touted as an experiment in high technology
learning. However, according to John C. Ittelson, director of distance
learning, "getting people to do things differently is a process
of seduction." Although it's early to draw conclusions, Wilson interviews
a variety of faculty and students and finds at least some resistance
to the plan: "too much email and voicemail," says one professor.
Yet top administrators, including President Peter P. Smith, are
committed to finding new ways to teach, and show no sign of retreat
from their vision.
CONFU:
The Conference on Fair Use (http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/confu.htm)
-- Spawned by the federal National Information Infrastructure project,
the working group on Intellectual Property Rights convened the Conference
on Fair Use: a meeting of stakeholders in copyright from content
developers and publishers to end-users, universities, and libraries.
This working group was charged with developing broadly accepted
guidelines for fair use (free, educational use) of electronic resources,
from databases to multimedia. Five areas were chosen to focus on:
Distance Learning, Multimedia, Electronic Reserves, Interlibrary
Loan, and Image Collections. The Multimedia and Images groups lead
in reaching tentative agreements (all of which can be read online).
The groups convened were not individuals, but rather professional
organizations such as the College
Art Association, the American
Association of Museums, the Visual
Resources Association, Association
of Research Libraries, Association of American Publishers, and
so on. This suite of documents deserves reading by anyone involved
in electronic media for education at any level and anyone developing
or distributing electronic resources. This is a very large group;
but then again, this project will have equally large implications
for these areas.
Wilson, David. L. "Campus 'intranets' Make Information
Available to Some but Not All, Internet Users" Chronicle of
Higher Education 62(47) (August 2, 1996): A15-A17. -- Higher
education was the primary launching pad for Internet information
systems (along with the defense industry), but higher education
is just beginning to catch up the corporate sector in the development
of "intranets." Where corporations have moved quickly to implement
web-based internal services that are safe behind firewalls, higher
education has moved more slowly, mainly due its open computing environment.
The author explores several of the issues that arise when colleges
seek to define who should and who should not have access to college
intranets, and some of the technological challenges of distance
learning and remote registration (to name just a couple issues).
There's an interesting discussion of the downstream impact of choosing
proprietary software (like Lotus Notes) over Internet software;
and, according to many quoted, there's plenty of room for improvement
in all the options.
Hitch, Leslie P. "Aren't We Judging Virtual Universities
by Outdated Standards?" Journal of Academic Librarianship
26(1) (January 2000): 21. - An interesting look at the role of distance
learning in the context of traditional university values. What it
means to be learner centered and how we define the role of faculty
in "teaching" or merely "training" students in the online environment,
the outmoded concept of the credit hour as a means for defining
and translating completed student work among and between institutions,
as well as a good chunk of library issues - where the most significant
appear to be not how and when to provide distance learners with
information, but how to provide them with the necessary information
literacy skills to help them plow through the ever growing quantities
of information available to them online. Intriguing for the implications
of library technology in contributing to the developing definitions
of library user services in the increasingly online context of higher
education.
Mendels, Pamela. "Study
on Online Education Sees Optimism, With Caution" New
York Times (January 19, 2000) (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/01/cyber/education/19education.html).
- The pick of the crop from the recent New York Times Cybertimes
features on education examines the University
of Illinois-based Online Pedagogy Report (http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/tid/report/),
the product of 16 tenured professors under the lead of John R. Regalbuto
from the Unversity of Illinois at Chicago. The
University of Illinois Online program (http://www.online.uillinois.edu/)
appears to have provided considerable impetus for the study. In
this short article, Mendels characterizes the group's results as
at once cautious and optimistic, and lays out a few of their findings
regarding various strengths and pitfalls of distance learning. Strengths
included enhanced interactive multimedia capabilities in fields
such as geometry, and increased dissemination of and participation
in course material across the board. On the latter note, e-seminars,
playing themselves out on electronic bulletin boards and e-mail
lists, appear to foster broader-based written discussion, even among
less outgoing students. The major discovered shortcoming comes as
no surprise: a sense of digital alienation, which makes creating
and maintaining a teacher-student bond difficult. Major cautions
also come as no surprise: a full slate of distance learning courses
engineered to provide a complete undergraduate or graduate program
was deemed inappropriate, as was "excessive" class-size, ranging
from 35 to 1000 students, depending on whom one consults.
II. The Multimedia bibliography sources:
Guernsey, Lisa. "Video technology transforms the teaching
of art history." Chronicle of Higher Education 63(23)
(February 14, 1997):A20-23. This article describes recent developments
at Columbia University's Media Center for Art History. Faculty member
Stephen Murray is using multimedia technology to teach history of
architecture, with stunning results. This article includes a two-page
spread of photographs of Amiens Cathedral, which students can navigate
through in three dimensions. Although this approach is similar in
appearance to advanced Computer Automated Design (CAD/CAM), it combines
animation with design to enhance the quality of the learning experience.
CONFU:
The Conference on Fair Use (http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/confu.htm)
-- Spawned by the federal National Information Infrastructure project,
the working group on Intellectual Property Rights convened the Conference
on Fair Use: a meeting of stakeholders in copyright from content
developers and publishers to end-users, universities, and libraries.
This working group was charged with developing broadly accepted
guidelines for fair use (free, educational use) of electronic resources,
from databases to multimedia. Five areas were chosen to focus on:
Distance Learning, Multimedia, Electronic Reserves, Interlibrary
Loan, and Image Collections. The Multimedia and Images groups lead
in reaching tentative agreements (all of which can be read online).
The groups convened were not individuals, but rather professional
organizations such as the College
Art Association, the American
Association of Museums, the Visual
Resources Association, Association
of Research Libraries, Association of American Publishers, and
so on. This suite of documents deserves reading by anyone involved
in electronic media for education at any level and anyone developing
or distributing electronic resources. This is a very large group;
but then again, this project will have equally large implications
for these areas.
Koopman, Ann and Sharon Hay. "Large-scale Application
of a Web Browser" College & Research Libraries News
57(1) (January 1996): 12-15. -- Librarians at Indiana
University- Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) recount their
experiences building a multiplatform, multimedia, integrated workstation
using a World Wide Web browser as an interface. Providing access
to muliple Internet sites, online catalogs, indexes/abstracts, video
resources, personal storage space and communications, this new information
system is the primary tool through which most students are delivered
information. The authors describe the campus and library environment
and the development process for establishing the library's information
system. The long list of lessons learned which includes such sage
advice as "design for long-term flexibility, assuming changes in
technology will be the norm" or "graphics are not necessarily better
than text" or "patron education was and continues to be paramount"
should prove to be invaluable for any information professional participating
in similar projects at their own institutions.
Reinhardt, Andy. "New
Ways to Learn" Byte 20(3) (March 1995): 50-72 (http://www.byte.com/art/9503/sec7/art1.htm).
-- This article covers the impact of new technology in learning,
both in education and the workplace. The three areas of technology
credited with the most impact are networking, multimedia, and mobile
computing. The article also contains useful sidebars with case studies
from NYU, Carnegie Mellon, and UCLA. The article is rife with statistics,
and mentions briefly that in the race of educational institutions
to utilize new technology as a means of reducing overall costs,
we should take the time to consider how the technology is changing
our audience as well as the way they learn, and not just the tools
they learn with.
Wilson, David. "Teaching a Computer to Find and Retrieve
Stored Images" Chronicle of Higher Education 40(7) (October
12, 1994): A20-21. -- One of the as yet unrealized promises of multimedia
computing is to transform the image into something beyond a 'dumb'
object into an integral part of the structure of the data for both
storage and retrieval purposes. Currently, images are helpless objects,
dependent on attached text to serve any purpose other than mere
illustration. Alex Pentland of the conceptual- computing section
of MIT's Media Laboratory has taken a first step toward liberating
the digital image from its slavery to textual tags. Pentland has
created a system whereby images can be searched visually; one starts
with an image to finds 'hits' of similar images. His 'photobook'
projects used faces as the experimental pool of images. And amazingly,
when starting with one man's face and searching for similar ones,
his system even found other photos of the subject's face when he
was pictured wearing a false beard or with an altered expression.
The implications for research in medicine, art history, and any
field dealing with images are exciting to say the least.
DeLoughry, Thomas J. "Museums Go High-Tech" Chronicle
of Higher Education. 40(3) (September 14, 1994):A47,A49.
-- As an introduction to the world of information technology in
museums, this article offers a brief, concise guide. It touches
upon some of the salient issues facing museums using new technology,
from the need to garner administrative commitment to improving services
with technology, to the changing nature of the traditional, quiet,
museum-going experience. A variety of approaches to using technology
are covered, from a WWW site at the Krannert Art Museum [http://www.art.uiuc.edu/kam/]
to a kiosk at the Michael C. Carlos Museum which allows visitors
to "play" an ancient flute in the museum's collection by choosing
various finger positions via a multimedia kiosk and hearing the
resulting sound. One of the most useful parts of the article is
the sidebar listing addresses of several museum efforts on the Internet.
The article ends by making the point that new developments in the
'virtual museum' will not replace the traditional museum, but will
draw new types of visitors and increase interest in the museums
of the future.
Jerram, Peter. "Who's Using Multimedia" New
Media 4(10) (October 1994):48-58. -- This article examines
a recent survey, conducted by Dataquest, of businesses about their
use of multimedia technology. Education and other non-profit markets
are not well-represented, as this is a business survey, and neither
is the market that is really fueling the multimedia industry: the
consumer market. However this survey can be very useful in outlining
the types of use multimedia is often put to most (presentations)
and by which business type (manufacturing) and by what profession
(engineers). The article is more than a series of statistics though,
as it cites case studies of how six businesses have put multimedia
to use, as well as delving into future trends such as video-conferencing
and multimedia public kiosks. This article is an informative snapshot
of the current forces driving the multimedia market; forces which
can eventually affect everyone who uses multimedia technology.
Peterson, Norman, and Wilhelm, Laurn. "Multimedia
in a Traditional Library Setting" Computers in Libraries
14(6) (June 1994):23-26 -- The main issue this article deals with
is integrating information technology into the educational process.
In a very clear manner, the authors explain that the first step
should be to integrate this new technology into the education of
teachers. To accomplish this, the education program at the University
of Wyoming entered into a partnership with the library to provide
a computer laboratory for students of education, and for pilot classes
they may teach to local high school students. The crux as they saw
it was that multimedia needed to be used as a tool in learning,
and not necessarily a subject itself, nor as merely an add-on to
traditional ways of educating. Seeing digital technology as a tool
helped the decision to locate the laboratory where other learning
tools are located: the library. Placing the tools within the library
eased issues of access, and leveraged use of scarce computer resources
among many programs. The article is very useful in its outline of
the issues raised in integrating new technology into education,
and as a guide for setting up an educational computer laboratory.
Lazarus, Anthony. "School's Out on CD-ROM: Private
Developer Invests in Public Education" Digital Media 4(1)
(June 8, 1994): 37. -- San Francisco State University's multimedia
program has received an interesting arrangement for funding from
a private CD-ROM publisher. the Interactivity Research Lab at SFSU
recently entered into an agreement with Wadsworth publishing and
Haukom Associates to produce 3 new CD-ROM titles based on their
educational experience. The CD-ROM titles will cover an intro to
multimedia, as well as designing and producing multimedia titles.
The agreement is notable because it was not a grant that the university
is using to fund a broad project, but rather each student and faculty
member who works on the project will be compensated and share in
the profit from sales. The titles may be marketed toward other institutions
with multimedia programs, but will not be limited in focus to educational
institutions. Of course this brings up the obvious issues of control
over academic programs, and although private funding is nothing
new to universities, this direct arrangement poses new implications
as well as possibilities for new digital media programs. The actual
titles produced will hopefully be of equal interest to this novel
funding arrangement.
Mendels, Pamela. "Study
on Online Education Sees Optimism, With Caution" New
York Times (January 19, 2000) (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/01/cyber/education/19education.html).
- The pick of the crop from the recent New York Times Cybertimes
features on education examines the University
of Illinois-based Online Pedagogy Report (http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/tid/report/),
the product of 16 tenured professors under the lead of John R. Regalbuto
from the Unversity of Illinois at Chicago. The
University of Illinois Online program (http://www.online.uillinois.edu/)
appears to have provided considerable impetus for the study. In
this short article, Mendels characterizes the group's results as
at once cautious and optimistic, and lays out a few of their findings
regarding various strengths and pitfalls of distance learning. Strengths
included enhanced interactive multimedia capabilities in fields
such as geometry, and increased dissemination of and participation
in course material across the board. On the latter note, e-seminars,
playing themselves out on electronic bulletin boards and e-mail
lists, appear to foster broader-based written discussion, even among
less outgoing students. The major discovered shortcoming comes as
no surprise: a sense of digital alienation, which makes creating
and maintaining a teacher-student bond difficult. Major cautions
also come as no surprise: a full slate of distance learning courses
engineered to provide a complete undergraduate or graduate program
was deemed inappropriate, as was "excessive" class-size, ranging
from 35 to 1000 students, depending on whom one consults.
III. The Electronic Publishing bibliography sources:
Gasaway, Laura N. "Scholarly Publication and Copyright
in Networked Electronic Publishing" Library Trends
43(4) (Spring 1995): 679-700. -- A very useful and informative article
that surveys the current and impending broad changes in the way
scholars have, do and will publish their works. The opening brief,
yet detailed history of scholarly publishing does a good job of
providing a context for the new role of electronic publishing in
academics. As one might expect, much of the article is a discussion
of copyright basics as it applies to the academic publishing world.
This section provides an excellent overview of this complex issue.
Hickey, Thomas B. "Present and Future Capabilities
of the Online Journal" Library Trends 43(4) (Spring
1995): 528-543. -- A sound, even-handed discussion of some of the
primary issues facing the online journal. Hickey addresses his topic
by providing lists of the advantages and disadvantages for several
of the challenges, both general and specific, which surround the
debate about the online journal. The treatment of the subject is
broad enough that it addresses many of the same issues being debated
concerning electronic publishing in general. It would serve well
as a primer for anyone with a basic interest in the issues surrounding
electronic publishing and in the direction it may be headed.
Ide, Nancy and Jean Veronis, ed. "The Text Encoding
Initiative: Background and Contexts" Computers and the Humanities
29(1) (1995) -- In an effort to provide much needed 'background
and context for the contents of TEI Proposal 3', Computers and the
Humanities is dedicating three issues of Volume 29 to the Text Encoding
Initiative. Parts I and II, General Topics and Document-wide Encoding
Issues are covered in this first issue. The second issue will contain
Part III, Encoding Specific Text Types, and the third, Part IV,
Special Encoding Mechanisms. With a preface by Charles Goldfarb,
inventor of SGML, and introduction by the editors of the triple
issue, Ide and Veronis, this collection of papers introduces the
Text Encoding Initiative and provides illuminating discussions of
many topics essential to the TEI-conformant encoding of electronic
texts. C.M. Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Bernard, the editors of the
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, provide
a good introduction to the guidelines, commonly referred to as TEI
P3 (TEI Proposal number 3). This issue also contains the following
papers: "The TEI: History, Goals, and Future" by Nancy Ide and C.M.
Sperberg-McQueen, "What is SGML and How Does It Help?" by Lou Bernard,
"Character Representation" by Harry Gaylord, "The TEI Header and
the Documentation of Electronic Texts" by Richard Giordano and "Practical
Considerations in the Use of TEI Headers in Large Corpora" by Dominic
Dunlop. Taken as a whole, the triple issue promises to be a rich
and valuable reference work.
Jacobson, Robert L. "'Fair Use' Impasse" Chronicle
of Higher Education 41(49) (September 18, 1995): A20, A22.
-- In another discussion about the conflict between copyright holders
who want to restrict access to electronic information and professionals
such as educators and librarians who seek to make information as
widely available as possible, this article presents the issues associated
with the concept of "fair use" in the electronic age. The author
predicts that unless professionals from the academic community participate
more actively in the debate, soon-to-be-issued Clinton Administration
guidelines on copyright will favor the publishing industry thus
threatening educational and scholarly interests.
Lancaster, F.W. "The Evolution of Electronic Publishing"
Library Trends 43(4) (Spring 1995): 519-527. -- Offering
a summary of the development of electronic publishing over the last
30 years, this article outlines four basic yet co-existent steps
in the evolution of electronic publishing: 1) Using computers to
generate conventional print-on-paper publications allowing new capabilities
such as printing on demand or producing customized publications
tailored to individual needs. 2) Distributing text electronically
which is the exact equivalent of the paper version; this includes
full-text articles available through commercial vendors such as
DIALOG and projects such as TULIP which provide electronic access
to text and graphics of journals which are also available in print
form. 3) Distribution in electronic form of print publications providing
"value-added" features such as search capabilities and data manipulation.
4) Generating publications that take advantage of such electronic
capabilities as hypertext, hypermedia, sound and motion. In addition
to outlining the history of electronic publishing, Lancaster provides
an in-depth analysis of electronic journals and discusses sustainability
of electronic journals and the role that they play in scholarship.
Lancaster, F.W. "Attitudes in Academia Toward Feasibility
and Desirability of Networked Scholarly Publishing" Library
Trends 43(4) (Spring 1995): 741-751. -- In a survey of university
library directors and academic administrators, the author sought
to determine attitudes toward the electronic distribution of scholarly
publications. While university administrators felt that there were
significant benefits associated with electronic publishing, it was
widely felt that there were many obstacles to the academic community's
ability to implement an electronic publishing network. Benefits
associated with electronic publishing included the reduction of
costs in disseminating electronic information, the potential for
more timely publication of research articles, more effective current
awareness through electronic profile matching, and the idea that
academia could have greater control over its own research results
therefore freeing itself from commercial interests. However, these
benefits were outweighed by the fact that the administrators who
were surveyed felt that academia is not well-equipped financially
or technologically to support widespread networked scholarly publishing.
Weiss, Jiri. "Digital
Copyright: Who Owns What?" New Media 5(9) (September
1995): 38-43 (http://newmedia.com/newmedia/95/09/fea/Digital_Copyright__Who_Owns_What_.html).
-- Any library or museum involved in a digital media project has
become, perhaps unwittingly, a developer and arbitrator, if not
owner, of digital content. So, whether you are adding value to information
in the form of a catalog, or creating primary source material in
the form of an educational CD-ROM you need to be informed about
digital copyright from all angles. This article is very helpful
in that respect, outlining the issues and some proposed solutions
(such as a copyright service bureaus as opposed to individual contracts).
Also useful is the contact info for further reading, current projects,
and groups mentioned in the article.
Penn State Imaging Committee. "Imaging for Process Improvement:
Report of the Imaging Committee" [http://www.psu.edu/computing/imaging.html]
-- This report outlines the recommendations to Penn State University
administration on the use of imaging technology. The report covers
administrative and business use as well as archiving and educational
use of imaging. The report, laid out generally and with concise
recommendations and considerations, serves as a useful reference
as to how one university is planning for the long-range use of imaging.
Platt, Charles. "Interactive
Entertainment: Who Writes It? Who Reads It? Who Needs It?" Wired
3(9) (September 1995): 145-149, 195-197 (http://www.wired.com/wired/3.09/features/interactive.html).
-- As digital hypermedia (most notoriously as CD-ROMs and WWW sites
currently) is adapted from research use to entertainment, the conundrum
appears that hypermedia is well-suited to organizing access to layers
of discrete research facts, even context, but it is less suited
to storytelling or other linear forms of information most used for
entertainment, and often pedagogy as well. This article explores
the apparent rift between author and user control, asking whether
user-control really equals user-engagement. Hypermedia is not trounced
by any means, but rather implicit in the article is the suggestion
that digital hypermedia, like cinema before it, needs to stop relying
on previous-media modes of operation and invent its own. This article
will be useful to anyone developing hypermedia interfaces for educational
or entertainment use.
Schussler, Terry and Tim Tully. "Compression
Tips for QuickTime Video: Codecs" New Media 5(9)
(September 1995): 79-80 -- An intermediate level technical article
about video compression codecs. The advantages and drawbacks of
each codec built into QuickTime are outlined to help you decide
which to select in your QuickTime editing software for your purposes
(archiving video, playback for delivery, etc).
Lowry, Charles B., "Preparing for the Technological
Future: A Journey of Discovery" Library Hi Tech Issue
51 13(3) (1995):39-54. -- Lowry, the university librarian at Carnegie
Mellon University, examines several steps which are crucial for
building the "virtual library" paradigm. Technologies which give
users easy access to information and provide for user privacy and
royalty tracking must be assembled. Bodies of substantive data must
be digitized. Copyright laws need to support distributed electronic
libraries and networked access. The success of the virtual library
depends on the use of open systems and standards such as Z39.50
to promote interoperability. Searching results can be improved by
moving from Boolean or keyword-based retrieval to natural language
processing (NLP) which yields more precise results in searches of
full-text databases. A subject-oriented approach to indexing Internet
resources should be implemented. Libraries must migrate from traditional
OPACS to GUI environments capable of the multimedia available. Some
examples of how Carnegie Mellon is using information technology
and NLP to build the foundations of the virtual library round out
this informative article.
Weibel,
Stuart L. "The World Wide Web and Emerging Internet Resource
Discovery Standards for Scholarly Literature" Library Trends
43(4) (Spring 1995): 627-634. -- Weibel has penned one of the best
overviews I've ever seen of the current benefits and future potential
of the Web for scholarly communication and publishing. He outlines
a set of problems relating to this technology and discusses ways
of addressing them. Weibel's insight into the issues is remarkable,
and is matched by a clear and engaging writing style. If you must
limit your reading to only essential pieces, this article should
top the list. If you are an information professional, you cannot
afford to be ignorant of the issues Weibel so clearly and insightfully
describes.
Weissinger, Nancy J. and John P. Edwards. "Online
Resources for Internet Trainers" College & Research Libraries
News 56(8) (September 1995): 535-539, 572. -- A bibliography
of selected Internet training materials available over the Internet,
this article provides a timely list of course materials that may
be helpful in planning and constructing Internet training sessions
or programs. It also lists references to online courses and tutorials
that have been developed and made available on the Internet as well
as a list of online reference sources and subject guides. Also included
is a list of newsgroups and listservs of particular interest to
Internet trainers.
Back to "What
Distance Education Costs!"
©2000 The Clovis Free Press. All rights reserved.
Accessibility
Guidelines
