BALL STATE TO HOLD 10-COUNTRY ONLINE SEMINARS - Ball State University
plans to link its students with those at 10 other universities around the world through an
Internet-based videoconferencing network. The new Global Media Network will allow all
the students to take seminar courses together through two-way transmission of video and
audio signals among the universities. Each classroom in each country will be equipped with
cameras, microphones, projectors, and a semicircular table facing a screen. When the images
are projected onto the screens of each room, it will create the illusion that all participants are
sitting at one circular table. The director of the program, Scott Olson, told the Chronicle of
Higher Education that Ball State has forged partnerships with institutions in South Korea;
Brazil; Hong Kong; and Australia and is also working with universities in China, Thailand and
Germany.

In the 2003 phase of the project, Ball State will aim for partnerships with institutions in
Africa, Japan and additional European countries. Courses to be offered include English,
literature, landscape architecture and nanotechnology - with most courses taught in English.
The university is paying the estimated $1.1 million for the project with money from a larger
Lilly Endowment grant. The grant was given to enhance the use and study of digital media
at Ball State. (UCEA infocus Newsletter, June/July 02) For the complete article go to:
http://chronicle.com/free/2002/05/2002053001u.htm

NEW TOOLS CAN BUILD A COMPREHENSIVE ARCHIVE - Some institutions,
including MIT, are developing tools for professors and other researchers to add resources
including data sets, notes, research reports, and otherwise unpublished papers to large,
searchable, digital archives. Testing of DSpace, MIT's archive project, will begin this
summer, and officials at the school hope that eventually nearly every professor will
contribute to the body of work. Submission to the archive is voluntary, so developers have
tried to make the system as simple as possible. Metadata will be included to aid in the
organization and searching of the content, though submissions will not be actively filtered or
moderated. Other archives have been established at the California Institute of Technology
and the University of California system. Critics say that institutional repositories will fail
because effective dissemination depends on the publishing process and editorial filtering that
journals provide. (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 July 02 - Edupage 1 July 02) For the
complete article see: http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i43/43a02901.htm