California Virtual Campus

“Sometimes our tools are our politics, and that’s not always a good thing. Last week, the Copyright Clearance Center announced that it would integrate a ‘Copyright Permissions Building Block’ function directly into Blackboard’s course management tools. The service automates the process of clearing copyright for course materials by incorporating it directly into the Blackboard tool kit; instructors post materials into their course space, and then tell the application to send information about those materials to CCC for clearance.

For many, this move offers welcome relief to the confusion currently surrounding the issue of copyright. Getting clearance for the materials you provide to your students, despite the help of organizations like CCC, is still a complicated and opaque chore. Instructors either struggle through the clumsy legal and financial details or furtively dodge the process altogether and hope they don’t get caught. With the centralization offered by CCC and now the automation offered by this new Blackboard add-on, the process will be more user-friendly, comprehensive, and close at hand. As Tracey Armstrong, executive vice president for CCC, put it, ‘This integration is yet another success in making the ‘right thing’ become the ‘easy thing.”

Certainly, anything that helps get intellectual resources into the hands of students in the format they find most useful is a good thing. I have no doubt that both the CCC and Blackboard genuinely want the practical details of getting course materials together, cleared, and to the student to be less and less an obstacle to actually teaching with those materials. But I’m skeptical of whether this “easy thing” actually leads to the “right thing.” Making copyright clearance work smoothly overlooks the question of whether we should be seeking clearance at all - and what should instead be protected by the copyright exception we’ve come to know as ‘fair use.’”

More at http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/21/gillespie

“A new survey by Vault Inc. finds that 85% of employers feel that online degrees are more acceptable today than they were five years ago. But online degree holders are still not quite on equal ground with those who have traditional degrees.

Although a majority of the 107 employers surveyed by Vault Inc. said they would favor job applicants who got their college degree from a traditional school, 45% of those polled said they would give candidates with online degrees equal consideration as those with traditional degrees.

Additionally, 86% of employers said they would be open to hiring someone with an online degree, with the remaining 14% feeling that an online degree, whether it was a bachelors or graduate degree, was unacceptable.”

More at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003647

"To get through the reading in this course (or in any course for that matter), you will need to skim some material. Contrary to popular belief, skimming is not a less engaged kind of reading; arguably, it requires even more concentration and focus. But if you skim effectively, if you direct your full attention to the parts of an assignment that deserve the most attention, you can spend less time reading and comprehend more of what you read. Some of the brief tips below are also discussed here by Timothy Burke, a history professor at Swarthmore College. I encourage you to read (or skim!) his advice as well.

All of these tips are based upon a fundamental idea, adapted from the book Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph Williams. Williams argues that clear writing comes from thinking about how readers read. Conversely, clear-headed reading comes from thinking about how writers write. Your goal as a skimmer is to grasp as quickly as possible what a writer is trying to say. This means trying to sit in the writer’s chair. Here are some ideas about how to do that …

1. Always ‘pre-read’ by skimming the titles, both for the whole work and for sections. When authors choose titles, they are attempting to do your work as a skimmer for you. Titles, ideally, boil down crucial concepts into brief phrases, and they can give important clues about a work’s argument. You should therefore look for key words in the title. Then, while you are skimming, you can pay special attention to the parts of the work that bear directly on those key words….

Before skimming, you should look not only at the title of the whole work, but also at the titles of subsections. Scan the table of contents. Find other key words. Make a note of whether some of the title’s key words are repeated in the table of contents; if so, that means they will be doubly important. But also notice any new key words not contained in the title; those concepts will also be important in the book, but probably in a secondary way."

More at http://modeforcaleb.blogspot.com/2005/10/how-to-skim.html

"The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications.

The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.

The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers….

Even the lowest estimates of compliance costs would, on average, increase annual tuition at most American universities by some $450, at a time when rising education costs are already a sore point with parents and members of Congress…."

More for NY Times website registrants at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/technology/23college.html?ei=5094&en=caee4eed74533703&hp=&ex=1130126400&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1130070111-9Lj5s0fkeETnVQDjHvfySw

‘Faculty commitment and buy-in are essential to move into distance delivery; specific issues to address include the impact on faculty workloads, appropriate compensation and recognition, and how to provide professional development opportunities on technology use and teaching methods that promote learning communities. Technology support is essential; specific issues to address include selecting and securing appropriate and reliable technology that is user friendly for both faculty and student access and use. Once a vision is established that complements the institution’s strategic plan, leadership must emerge to establish a departmental strategy over a given time frame that includes promoting, marketing, and implementing courses. Departmental leadership may also need to "push" other administrative levels to deal with providing appropriate course security, integrating the distance education effort into tenure guidelines, and providing access to student services.

College level administrative responsibilities. College level administration normally addresses financial and student related issues along with those focused on quality and effectiveness. Funding up-front costs in distance education as well as integrating financial needs into an on-going budget creates challenges. Funding formulas need to be addressed so that distance education is recognized as an intricate part of the educational process so reliance on external grants to support distance education programs can be minimized. Addressing financial issues is crucial in bringing along department chairs who have not yet implemented distance education.

Student issues that may need attention at the college level include student participation in learning communities for peer support in the learning process, processes for accessing library and instructional materials, course and program services, a help desk support, individual services, and student financial aid. The college also needs to assume primary leadership for course quality standards that support all departments within a college as well as developing strategies for measuring the effectiveness of the educational programs.

Central administration. Integrating technology into the educational paradigm and using it for distance delivery pushes some issues to the forefront and requires special attention so the institution addresses them properly; these include intellectual property and academic control issues, transfer and articulation of courses policies, consortia and partnership relationships, and regulations imposed by accrediting agencies, boards, taxing authorities, and federal laws."

More at http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/fall83/schauer83

"In a significant corporate move to bring the benefits of open source to education, Sun Microsystems announced it will spin off the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC) as a nonprofit organization serving the needs of the education community. The move helps to improve education through the sharing of open content and best practices through online access. The GELC provides an online portal for teachers to share resources and knowledge that would otherwise go undiscovered, breaking new ground in free and open source computing and helping educators meet the needs of students by sharing best practices around the globe. As a nonprofit, the organization will have access to more resources, including participation from other major corporations and governmental entities as well as benefit from independent direction from a seasoned advisory board and an executive director.

‘Technology is changing our daily lives, yet significant work remains in providing teachers, students and parents access to the educational resources they need,’ said Scott McNealy, CEO and Chairman at Sun Microsystems. ‘Sun started the GELC to drive knowledge sharing, and now we’re giving it to the education community to continue the development of resources they need to improve the quality of education worldwide.’

The GELC is a growing community for developers, teachers and Ministries of Education (MoE), who are collaborating on 324 projects. Leading project examples include recent contributions made by the Curriculum Corporation of Melbourne, Australia, and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education. Coupled with curriculum contributed by the Curriculum Corporation, the GELC is initiating a pilot with the Shuttleworth Foundation to utilize these materials in South African math and science middle school classrooms. The GELC is focused on curriculum in the math and science area for middle school and high school students."

More at http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=2908&cid=11

The GELC is at https://edu-gelc.dev.java.net/

"As more than 30 campus technology officials traded tales from the file-swapping trenches at this year’s Educause conference, one point quickly became clear: Music and movie piracy is alive and well. The general tone of the discussion — moderated by David Futey, the associate director of academic computing at Stanford University — was one of measured, but apparent, exasperation."

More at http://wiredcampus.chronicle.com/2005/10/at_educause_lit.html

“The UC systemwide Academic Senate has approved, in principle, the idea of a universitywide undergraduate minor. The proposal calls for campuses to jointly create a curriculum, which would be taught simultaneously throughout the UC system by faculty on several campuses. The plan calls for distance technology coupled with local staff resources as the primary means of delivering the courses.

“The main motivation for the Universitywide minor is to offer undergraduates an educational program that arguably would not be as feasible on a campus-by-campus basis,” says the writer of one minor proposal, David Messerschmitt, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley and member of the Academic Senate’s committee on Information Technology and Telecommunications Policy (ITTP). ‘To develop a minor like this on a single campus probably requires on the order of eight to ten faculty FTE. To do it systemwide, each campus could hire or reallocate one or two faculty FTE, which is probably more practical for many subject areas, especially those not identifiable as emerging research initiatives.’

Messerschmitt has proposed that the first of these minors be in ‘Information Technology Fluency and Impact’; however, a detailed curriculum proposal has not been developed and the Academic Senate and UC Educational Policy (UCEP) committee have not yet formally endorsed it.”

More at http://www.uctltc.org/news/2005/10/minor.html

“E-learning as we know it has been around for ten years or so. During that time, it has emerged from being a radical idea-the effectiveness of which was yet to be proven-to something that is widely regarded as mainstream. It’s the core to numerous business plans and a service offered by most colleges and universities.

And now, e-learning is evolving with the World Wide Web as a whole and it’s changing to a degree significant enough to warrant a new name: E-learning 2.0.

Where We Are Now

Before talking about where e-learning is going, it is worth spending a few words to describe here we are now.

When we think of learning content today, we probably think of a learning object. Originating in the world of computer-based delivery (CBT) systems, learning objects were depicted as being like lego blocks or atoms, little bits of content that could be put together or organized. Standards bodies have refined the concept of learning objects into a rigorous form and have provided specifications on how to sequence and organize these bits of content into courses and package them for delivery as though they were books or training manuals.

Today, e-learning mainly takes the form of online courses. From the resources distributed by MIT’s OpenCourseware project to the design of learning materials in Rice’s Connexions project to the offerings found from colleges and universities everywhere, the course is the basic unit of organization.

As a consequence, the dominant learning technology employed today is a type of system that organizes and delivers online courses-the learning management system (LMS). This piece of software has become almost ubiquitous in the learning environment; companies such as WebCT, Blackboard, and Desire2Learn have installed products at thousands of universities and colleges and are used by tens of thousands of instructors and students.”

More at http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1

“Google said Monday that it had begun operating local-language sites in eight European countries for its Google Print program, its closely watched effort to make all of the world’s books searchable online, expanding into territories where it has drawn fierce criticism.

The Google Print sites - for France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain - enable users to search books provided by publishers in each country as well as English-language books in the Google library for which the company has secured local rights.”

More for NY Times website registrants at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/technology/18book.html?adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1129708916-unByYnsZIIG7hPpUJrXhTA