UW-EXTENSION - Distance Education Integral to Education Committee's Report
COPYRIGHT - Gore Wants Electronic Bill of Rights, Senate Passes Online Copyright Extension
TECH TRENDS - The Taming of the Web, Paper in Perpetuity?, 3D Modeling
ETC. - Technology Tops Senate Agenda, Corporations Target Academic Market
FYI - Conferences, Institutes and Events
ENDNOTE - Telecommuters Now Number 11 Million

UW-EXTENSION
Distance Education Integral to Education Committee's Report
Distance Education a Part of CCE Workshop and Action Plans

On May 8th, the Board of Regents approved the Education Committee's Report on Extension education in the UW System and voted unanimously to forward the findings and recommendations to the Governor and Legislature. This strong endorsement was based on testimony to the Education Committee by many individuals, during the past nine months, who clearly demonstrated the benefits and value of extension education.

The Board's final report showed that Extension is: 1) responding to emerging state and local issues; 2) developing new collaborative partnerships; 3) exploring distance education's potential; 4) providing stewardship for limited public resources through fund reallocation and reassignment of faculty and staff time priorities and 5) creating new educational opportunities for responding to the needs of the underserved and disadvantaged audiences.

Several areas that should receive special emphasis in the years to come are: 1) assisting K-12 schools in meeting the educational needs of all students, especially minority and disadvantaged populations; 2) expanding the capacity of local governments to meet its challenges by increasing educational opportunities and applied research conducted on specific local government issues; 3) enhancing the capacity of the UW System to test, develop and apply new interactive distance education technologies including digital television and 5) consistent with the recommendations of the Governor's Commission on the 21st Century, increasing workforce training and education programs for the public, private and non-profit sectors to better utilize University resources. (Adapted from a May 8, 1998 News Release by UW-Extension Interim Chancellor, Al Beaver.)

 

Transforming Higher Education: Continuing Education's Role, was the focus of a workshop at the Wisconsin Dells May 14 and 15, 1998 for selected Continuing Education teams of campus vice chancellors, administrators, faculty and staff. Distance Education played a part in the presentations/discussion and will play a role in the resulting actions plans that will address: 1) the changing nature of information, knowledge, work and learning; 2) the changing needs of learners; 3) the impact of these changes on our institutions and 4) ways in which we need to change to most effectively serve learners.

COPYRIGHT
Gore Wants Electronic Bill of Rights
Senate Passes Online Copyright Extension

An "Electronic Bill of Rights" presented by Vice President Gore in a commencement speech at New York University calls for Congress to pass legislation protecting the privacy of medical records, announces establishment of a Web site that consumers can use to delete their names from direct mail and telemarketing lists, requires that each federal department and agency create a privacy officer to ensure compliance with existing laws and announces a privacy conference in June sponsored by the U.S. Commerce Department. (New York Times 14 May 98)

 

The Senate unanimously approved the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which offers the same protection to online computer software, music, movies and written works that they enjoy in more tangible form. In a key provision, the legislation exempts libraries and online services from prosecution for copyright violations committed by patrons and customers. Individuals who violate copyrights for financial gain will be liable for $1 million in fines and up to 10 years in prison. (Wall Street Journal 15 May 98)

TECH TRENDS
The Taming of the Web, Paper in Perpetuity?, 3D Modeling

A team of researchers at Cornell University and IBM's Almaden Research Center have developed a way to narrow down the responses to a Web search inquiry, based on hotlinks rather than just words in a text. Links embedded in a Web page provide "precisely the type of human judgment we need to identify authority," says Cornell's Jon Kleinberg. His software program conducts a standard search based on text only, which is then expanded to include all the pages to which those documents are linked. Then, ignoring the text, the program looks at the links and ranks each page based on the number of links to and from it. After several iterations the compilation is boiled down to an essential list of information sources on the topic. IBM has applied for a patent on the underlying algorithm. (Science News 2 May 98)

 

A recent report funded by the Electronic Document Systems Foundation concludes that despite the ubiquity of desktop PCs, we're no closer to the "all-digital workflow" today than we were to the "paperless office" 20 years ago. The major obstacle is neither technological nor economic, but rather "sociotechnical" - people prefer paper. "It came out that one of the things people really like about a book is the way it smells when you open it. It would certainly be hard to replicate that digitally," says the president of Interquest Inc., which, along with the University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science, conducted the research for the report. The "Network, Screen and Page: The Future of Reading in a Digital Age" predicts: "Over the next 15 to 20 years, we are likely to observe a gradual evolution, not a sudden shift... [and] reading, printing and publishing will still be recognizably similar to what it is today." (CIO 1 May 98)

 

Using the San Diego Supercomputer Center's Laminated Object Manufacturing machine, researcher Mike Bailey has been producing detailed, accurate solid models of such things as complex protein molecules (at a scale of 20,000,000:1) for Salk Institute and Scripps Research Institute; terrain maps of the surface of Venus, the Earth's ocean floor and active seismic zones for planetary scientists and geologists; mathematical functions and abstract shapes and prototypes of mechanical objects. (Discover June 98)

ETC
Technology Tops Senate Agenda
Corporations Target Academic Market

The U.S. Senate has dubbed the week of May 11 as "High-Tech Week," and plans to address several technology-related bills, including the Consumer Anti-Slamming Act, the American Competitiveness Act (which would make more temporary work visas available for foreign high-tech workers and provide 20,000 scholarships for study in high-tech fields), and the Next Generation Internet Act. (Los Angeles Times 11 May 98)

 

High-tech firms, including Cisco Systems, 3Com, Oracle, IBM and others, are boosting their efforts to teach teachers the latest technologies, hoping to reap the benefits of a highly skilled labor force of new college graduates. "You're seeing the beginning of computer vendors going after the academic market," says the VP for business development at Digital Education Systems. Rather than selling products and services to schools - the old route to growing market share - companies are now developing curricula for schools and giving them the equipment to aid the learning process. And while most four-year colleges are reluctant to offer credit for vendor-developed courses, that may be changing - students at the University of San Francisco can take a Cisco course in networking and a database course from Oracle, both for credit. "Our goal isn't to buy our way into schools," says 3Com's director of global education markets, "but to help create a generation of the work force with networking skills." (Investor's Business Daily 12 May 98)

FYI
Conferences, Institutes, and Events

WebNet Journal a new quarterly print magazine focusing on the WWW, Internet and Intranet-based technologies, applications, research, and issues is issuing a *Call for Articles and Reviewers*. The journal, published by AACE, the organizer of the successful and respected WebNet Conference series, will issue its premiere issue in November, 1998. WebNet Journal is designed to be an innovative international collaboration between and forum for the top academic and corporate laboratory researchers, developers, business people and users. All feature articles are carefully peer-reviewed and selected by a respected international editorial review board based on merit and perceived value of the content for readers. For further information see: http://www.aace.org/pubs/webnet

ENDNOTE
Telecommuters Number More Than 11 Million

The decade of the 1980s marked a rebirth of work at home in the United States. By the 1990's nearly three and a half million people worked at their home - a jump of 56 % over the previous census, an impressive growth before the expansion of the Internet. Since then, a 1997 survey for Telecommute America estimated the number of people "telecommuting" to work via computer had reached more than 11 million. (AP 8 May 98)