UWEX UPDATE - Prospects for Education Using Web TV
VIRAL INFECTION - Warning: The New Virus is Very Real
ED TRENDS - Wooing Prof's to Technology, Research Universities Team Up to create a 'Portal' for Online Education, It's Academic
COPYRIGHT UPDATE - Copyright Office Releases Recommendations for Online Distance Education
NEH SITES - NEH Sites Online Offers Top Fifty Humanities Web Sites and More
NEW BIZ/ED TRENDS - Surf Your Way into College, Is Education the Next Online Moneymaker?
FYI - News, Institutes, Conferences

UWEX UPDATE

PROSPECTS FOR EDUCATION USING WEB TV - With digital television on the horizon, UW-Extension professionals are looking at how they might get a head start on providing the informational content that will be such a big component of the new technology. At a recent Cooperative Extension Faculty-Staff Conference in Madison, participating faculty and staff got a taste of the data-delivery opportunities available through Web TV Plus, a Technology that Wisconsin Public Television is using to serve citizens now and as a way to prepare for the digital TV future. "Combining computers and broadcasting can extend the value and reach of Extension," said UWEX Vice Chancellor Kevin Reilly. By offering viewers crossover computer links to enhance what's on the TV screen, Web TV Plus users (and those with properly equipped Windows 98 computers) can go directly to Web sites to expand on topics discussed on television programs. "Nobody else in the country is doing this, connecting live TV (programming) with Web site information," said Byron Knight, director of Wisconsin Public Television. To help develop this new medium, Cooperative Extension is providing support for four pilot groups of faculty and staff to work with WPT while they explore Web TV's educational potential. (Extension News and Ideas - June 99)

VIRAL INFECTION

WARNING - THE NEW VIRUS IS VERY REAL - Worm.ExploreZip is a virus capable of destroying data. It enters your system through email. If you don't catch it, it may destroy crucial files on your system. Mail systems at major corporations have been shut down in a protective response to this virus. Training and Learning professionals should make sure that the IT department is working on informing the employee base about this latest virus. A great summary of the virus is located on Jesse Burst's Anchor Desk today at: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_3500.html (TechLearn Trends #128 - 11 June 99)

ED TRENDS

WOOING PROF'S TO TECHNOLOGY - A program at the University of Washington called Uwired is winning converts among faculty 'wary adopters'. In workshops and one-on-one training sessions, Uwired's trainers say that the process focuses on helping professors become comfortable with technology and fit it into their learning styles. "Technology is just a tool, "the session leaders say, "like a pen." The leaders use non-technical people as trainers, who are comfortable with technology but rarely use technical acronyms or terms. Rather than setting up regular programs to train the faculty (they tried, but found them less than successful), the training group has designed a set of instructional manuals and strategy guides as well as basic Web tools and templates called Catalyst, and posted them for faculty at: http://depts.washington.edu/catalyst/home.html. A paper presented at last year's CAUSE conference that documents their change from a formal program to the less formal workshops and individual sessions can be found at: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/cnc9846/cnc9846.html (The Chronicle of Higher Education - 28 May 99)

RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES TEAM UP TO CREATE A 'PORTAL' FOR ONLINE EDUCATION - Fourteen prominent schools are collaborating to provide a central Internet site listing their distance learning courses. The participating schools, public and private, are members of the Research I division of the Carnegie Classification. The site will be organized by the University of Washington to provide a central directory for distance learning courses offered by Research I universities. Online students will earn a degree from a member school. The participating schools are: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; Pennsylvania State University; Stanford University; University of British Columbia; University of California at Berkeley; University of California at Los Angeles; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Pennsylvania; University of Texas at Austin; University of Washington; University of Wisconsin at Madison. All other Research I schools are welcome to participate. (Chronicle of Higher Education Online 06/10/99 - Edupage - 11 June 99)

IT'S ACADEMIC - Columbia University decided to jump into the online instructional market, and to further that end the school hired Ann Kirschner - once a Princeton University English professor - away from NFL.com Columbia University's for-profit venture, Morningside Ventures, is now Kirschner's charge as CEO and president, and her goal is to put the university's core content onto the Internet and to charge users a fee for it. Morningside Ventures is scheduled to launch at the end of the year. Kirschner intends to make Columbia's resources available to a wider audience than just students and teachers. One of the markets that Columbia is seeking is that of corporations that want to strengthen their staff's skills. The university has already made a deal with Unext.com, in which it will provide courses and materials in exchange for company royalties that can be swapped for stakes in Unext.com (Industry Standard 06/07/99 - Edupage 2 June 99)

COPYRIGHT UPDATE

COPYRIGHT OFFICE RELEASES RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ONLINE DISTANCE EDUCATION - A report from the U.S Copyright Office makes several recommendations for changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in order to protect educators' ability to use copyrighted materials in distance education. The act was passed last October to prevent piracy, as an increasing number of copyrighted materials have become available online. But some distance- learning experts say the act limits use of educational materials in online classrooms. Traditionally, educators have been granted fair-use exemptions from copyright laws, allowing them to use materials such as book excerpts, audio recordings, and motion pictures in the classroom. To maintain that right, the report suggests a number of steps: lawmakers should clarify laws to lessen the distinction between traditional and distance-learning classrooms; teachers should voluntarily incorporate education about copyright laws into their classrooms in order to prevent piracy; students should be given a password to grant them access to copyrighted materials; the materials should be removed from computers and servers when they become unnecessary; and classroom exemptions from copyright laws should be granted only to non-profit institutions, as they have in the past. (Chronicle of Higher Education Online 2 June 99 - Edupage 4 June 99)

NEH SITES

NEH ONLINE OFFERS TOP FIFTY HUMANITIES WEBSITES AND MORE - Members interested in Liberal Learning should explore the rich collection of resources available on NEH's EDSITEment Website. EDSITEment builds upon the National Endowment's selection of the fifty best Humanities Websites by adding coordinated online learning guides and lesson plans for each site. Intended primarily for secondary school students, the content is easily deep enough for use in college and some graduate courses. Among the fifty sites covered are the Bucknell Russian Studies Department site, Digital Dante, the Geoffrey Chaucer Website, Labyrinth:Resources for Medieval Studies, the US Holocaust Museum Website, Native Web, the Latin American Network Information Center site, and Documents of African-American Women. You can explore the resources of EDSITEment online at: http://edsitement.neh.gov (E-News from UCEA - 4 June 99)

NEW BIZ/ED TRENDS

SURF YOUR WAY INTO COLLEGE - For many years, various companies have offered scholarships and prizes to students who excel in one field or another. Now some companies are looking for students who are whizzes at Internet research or who design nifty Web sites or games or programs. ArsDigita head Phillip Greenspun is looking for teenagers "who can contribute to an interesting and useful Internet future," and ArsDigita is awarding $10,000 and access to the company's digital equipment to a top young programmer with a useful site. Accounting.Net offers scholarships for accounting students - they must explain how the Internet has changed the business. The Chicago Tribune awards local children who design sites for nonprofit groups, and the Technology Association of Georgia looks for Web sites by and about Georgia high school students. (PC World Online 06/03/99 - EduPage - 9 June 99)

IS EDUCATION THE NEXT ONLINE MONEYMAKER? A number of education- related companies have announced plans to incorporate distance learning into their educational methods. These programs will be designed for professionals who want additional training in their fields, as well as for children who want to supplement their school education. 7thStreet.com is expanding its distance learning offerings greatly, adding more than 150 information technology courses in a partnership with Cytation.com, and preparing for a joint venture with AOL to make its courses available to AOL users. Learning.Net has also established a distance learning site offering continuing education, recurrent training, and certification programs for professionals and businesses. The program notifies professional organizations or state boards when a student finishes a course, and professional organizations can monitor a student's progress in each course. Global DataTel and EDUVERSE are partnering to provide Spanish and Portuguese versions of English as a second language distance learning programs. The companies will offer the EDUVERSE's programs on eHola's Web site, as well as EDUVERSE's free ENGLISH.com Web site. (E-Commerce Times 4 June 99 - Edupage 9 June 99)

FYI

News, Institutes, Conferences

1) Here's a reminder about our 5th Annual TLTR Summer Institute - July 8-12, 1999 at the college of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. As usual it will contain extensive Flashlight work, but this time, for the first time, the focus will be mainly on case studies. For more information on the Summer Institute and how teams and individuals can register, please visit our Web site at: http://www.tltgroup.org/scripts/viewcalendar.asp.

* The Western Cooperative's Institute for the Management of Distance Education MDE Institute, is offering an Advanced Institute for the Management of Distance Education, to be held on August 2 - 4 in the mountain town of Breckenridge, Colorado. The Advanced Institute will be a series of three one-day events that focus on a different topic each day. The sessions will begin at 8:30 a.m. and end at 5:00 p.m. Attendees can attend one, two, or all three days of the Institute. For more information, see the Advanced MDE web site at: http://wiche.edu/telecom/events/99mde/advmde.htm

* Call for Papers - Australia National Training Authority NET*Working '99. NET*Working '99 is the key national event for discussion of the role of online technologies in the vocational education and training (VET) sector. Following the highly successful NET*Working '97 Conference (http://www.nw97.edu.au), NET*Working '99 will again feature an Online Conference and a Physical Conference. The Online conference is scheduled for July 19-August 13 and the Physical Conference September 1 - September 3. Much more detailed information is available from the conference Web site at: http://www.nw99.net.au with specific details about the papers at: http://www.nw99.net.au/guidfin.html

* MultimediaCom, the 1999 Fall Conference & Exhibition, is scheduled for August 30-Sept. 2 at Boston Marriott Copley Place, Boston, Massachusetts. This conference will help you understand: what the explosion in bandwidth will mean to your organization, the implications of network convergence, let you see how multimedia can enhance collaboration and also see technology in operation. For more information see: www.bcr.com

* The Fifth International Conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks Making the Transition to Mainstream Education: The Art and Practice of Online Learning will be October 8-10, 1999 at College Park, Maryland. Sponsored by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in conjunction with University of Maryland, University College, University System of Maryland, ALN Center at Vanderbilt University, Goethe-Institut Washington. Register online! To learn more about The Fifth International ALN Conference, please explore our Web site at: http://www.aln.org/alnconf99

* Announcing Rural Telecon '99 - The 3rd Annual National Rural Telecommunications Conference October 10 - 13, 1999, Aspen Institute, Aspen, Colorado. Early Registration: $195 for the three full-day conference. Registrations are now being accepted on-line at: http://ruraltelecon.org click on "Conference" then click on "Registration." Registration is limited to 350 people, register early. RuralTeleCon '99 provides the information rural leaders need to know to "make technology work for communities."