Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 500.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: scaife@uky.edu (109)
Subject: [STOA] Digital-Library Company Plans to Charge
Students a Monthly Fee for Access
[2] From: Arun-Kumar Tripathi <tripathi@statistik.uni- (43)
dortmund.de>
Subject: the Fall 2000 issue _Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of
Writing in Webbed Environments_ with theme "Critical
[3] From: Arun-Kumar Tripathi <tripathi@statistik.uni- (90)
dortmund.de>
Subject: [EdResource] How does technology change learning and
teaching in formal!
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 07:14:35 +0000
From: scaife@uky.edu
Subject: [STOA] Digital-Library Company Plans to Charge Students a
Monthly Fee for Access
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from: scaife@uky.edu
Tuesday, November 14, 2000
Digital-Library Company Plans to Charge Students a Monthly Fee for Access
By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK
A new digital-library company that claims it will "transform
how academic research is done" hopes to entice students to pay
as much as $360 a year for online access to searchable books
and journals.
The company, Questia Media, is relying on a classic Internet
marketing strategy called "viral marketing" to create a buzz
about itself among students. The strategy uses a tell-a-friend
e-mail campaign to "create a hype" for its service even before
it begins in January, according to Ann Brimberry, the
company's manager of marketing and public relations. The
e-mail messages include an offer of a free monthlong trial of
the service.
Questia says it will have more than 50,000 scholarly books and
journals in its electronic collection by January, and five
times as many by 2003. The company says its service will help
"time-crunched students" write their papers more quickly.
Questia will sell subscriptions to its collection for $20 to
$30 a month, depending on the price the company ultimately
sets. For that amount, users will be able to search for topics
by keyword, copy the material into their papers
electronically, and have the footnotes for those references
created automatically. For papers submitted electronically,
the footnotes can be hyperlinked to the source document, which
would allow a reader of the paper to check them with a simple
click of the mouse -- assuming, of course, that he or she is
also a Questia subscriber.
Troy Williams, a 1998 Harvard Law School graduate who is
Questia's founder, president, and C.E.O., says the service's
search-and-copy features respond to the way students really do
their papers. "They're not reading the books," says Mr.
Williams.
The company has circulated news of the offer through e-mail
messages and postings on several discussion lists used by
librarians. The e-mail technique is similar to one used to
promote the free Hotmail e-mail service and other Internet
products, not to mention movies such as The Blair Witch
Project. Several thousand people have signed up for the offer
already, Ms. Brimberry says.
Whether those users and paying customers will find the service
helpful, however, is far from certain. Questia boasts of
signing 135 publishers willing to make some of their titles
available through the service. At a time when many publishers
are still wary about electronic distribution, that's no mean
feat. But a good deal of what the publishers are providing is
out-of-print material, which may prove less useful to the
liberal-arts undergraduates the company is focusing on as its
prime market.
Ann Okerson, associated university librarian at Yale
University, says that she has had indications that the company
is assembling a legitimate collection, but she adds that she
hasn't seen what Questia plans to offer. "You don't yet know
what's inside the black box," says Ms. Okerson, who has just
agreed to serve in an unpaid position on the company's new
Librarian Advisory Council.
The company, based in Houston, has raised $130-million in
venture capital and is expected to go public eventually. It
has also attracted as members of its unpaid Advisory Council
the likes of Barbara Bush; John Seely Brown, the chief
scientist for Xerox; and Clifford Lynch, the director of the
Coalition for Networked Information.
Questia's business model, which relies on the sale of
subscriptions to individuals, is one that a rival, netLibrary,
had previously tried as well. But netLibrary has since
abandoned the approach because it was costly and because the
company found that winning business directly from libraries
gave the company more credibility.
Some academics, including Ms. Okerson, have also worried that
the Questia service could be too expensive for some students,
putting them at a disadvantage to wealthier classmates. At
Yale, she says, people would say, "You don't create a set of
have and have-not users."
She says one reason she joined the library board was to try to
persuade the company to consider selling institution-wide site
licenses, so that all students could have access to the
service. Questia says it has no plans to offer such licenses.
As for how Questia might affect the way students research and
write, Ms. Okerson says the service just creates a more robust
approach to what many already do now with information they
locate on the Internet. "I keep hearing this called the
'cut-and-paste generation,'" she says. "It's going to be up to
teachers and librarians to keep instilling the values of
teaching and research."
_________________________________________________________________
Chronicle subscribers can read this article on the Web at this address:
http://chronicle.com/free/2000/11/2000111401t.htm
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--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 07:21:15 +0000
From: Arun-Kumar Tripathi <tripathi@statistik.uni-dortmund.de>
Subject: the Fall 2000 issue _Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of
Writing in Webbed Environments_ with theme "Critical
Dear Humanists,
((Hello, I thought, this might interest you..thanks..-Arun))
===============================================================
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 12:18:59 -0500
From: j0stim01 <j0stim01@louisville.edu>
[--]
Dear _Kairos_ reviewers:
We're excited about working with you on the Spring 2001 issue. In the
meantime, the Fall 2000 issue has been released. Please help us publicize
_Kairos_ by forwarding the announcement below to your colleagues.
Jennifer and Rich
************************************
_Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments_ is
delighted to announce the publication of its newest issue, 5.2, with theme
"Critical Issues in Computers and Writing."
<http://english.ttu.edu/kairos>
The issue, a selected and edited proceedings of Computers and Writing 2000,
includes the following content:
CoverWeb:
"Critical Issues in Computers and Writing: Strands from C & W 2000" with
contributions from Dene Grigar, John Barber, Hugh Burns, Lisa Gerrard, Karen
D. Jobe, Lynne Spigelmire Viti, Jennifer L. Bowie, Angela Crow, Walt Turner,
Carole Clark Papper, Susan K. Reynolds, Rich Rice, and Joanne Buckley.
Features:
"Computers and Writing Town Hall One" with contributions from Bill Condon,
Dene Grigar, Gail E. Hawisher, James A. Inman, Susan Lang, Rich Rice, Rebecca
Rickly, Mike Salvo, and Cynthia L. Selfe. Site design by Anne Wysocki.
"Computers and Writing Town Hall Two" with contributions from Sally Henschel,
Corinna McLeod, Nancy Patterson, Eric Crump, and Kathy A. Fitch. Site design
by Kathy A. Fitch.
NewsWired:
Conference Reviews, CFPs, Announcements
Reviews:
Book and web site reviews by Anthony Atkins, Lisa Bruna, Christopher Carter,
Tracy Clark, Christopher Dean, Patrice Fleck, Jane Lasarenko, Tim McCormack,
Jeff Rice, Rich Rice, Dawn Rodrigues, Chris Sauer, Ellen Strenski, and Carl
Whithaus.
Kairos Interactive:
Graduate Research Network, A Formal Debate, and Kairos Meet the Authors (KMTA)
Discussions
For more information about any aspect of this issue or about _Kairos_ in
general, please contact Co-Editors Douglas Eyman and James A. Inman at
kairosed@cfcc.net.
----------------------
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 07:22:03 +0000
From: Arun-Kumar Tripathi <tripathi@statistik.uni-dortmund.de>
Subject: [EdResource] How does technology change learning and
teaching in formal!
Dear Humanist scholars,
**With thanks to Prof. Frank Withrow. It is an exquisite honour for me to
forward an e-mail from Millennium EdTech Project Site, which can be found
at <http://millennium.aed.org>
There is no question that a child growing up in a digitally rich
knowledge and information society matures and grows in a world we have
never known before.
What influence to these factors have and how is learning and teaching
different? As we approach the year 2000 an interesting question to ask is
how much time an average eighteen-year-old in 1900 and in 2000 would have
spent in their lives doing different things. What are their options? They
will have lived for 160,000 hours. Assume that they average 7 hours of
sleep each day they will have slept for 46,000 hours giving them 114,000
hours of waking life. At best they will have spent 14,000 hours in formal
schools. By the time they have started to school they will have watched
about 10,000 hours of television. They will have talked on the telephone,
listened to recorded music, played video games, and traveled thousands of
miles on modern transportation systems. In 1900 the average 18-year-old
had not been more than fifty miles from his or her place of birth. In 1900
the world had just reached its first billionth living person. In 2000 the
world population will be plus six billion people. One and one/third
billion of those people live on less than $1.50 per month. On the other
had at the affluent extreme the children of developed nations have the
world and its goods at their fingertips.
In this vastly complex world learning and teaching are different because
of the digital age? The perplexing issue is just how is it different? That
is what we will focus on in this discussion. With the current Colorado
tragedy we have many self proclaimed experts detail just how youth are
going to the devil. However, I would remind you that if you read Socrates
he too felt the youth of his day were going to the dogs. Perhaps as we get
older we have some comfort in damning youth because we know that we are
leaving this life and if the world were getting better we would like to
stay a little longer. Research has shown that all communications and
information technologies influence child growth and development. It can as
it did in Colorado result in disasters. The challenge is to manage such
resources for good rather than evil uses.
Since knowledge has expanded is learning and school just too hard for
children to master high academic standards? NO, we have always had more
knowledge than a single person could master. So the extent of knowledge is
not the problem with learners and teachers. It is however more difficult
to agree on what the CORE curriculum should be.
If learning and teaching are different from the past what are the
characteristics of that difference? For the past decade or so American
educators have been asking to define the National Standards for content
areas.
Some would like to return to a classical education suitable for the 1890s
and others echo the progressive education movement started in the 1870s.
There are conditions today that enter into the general society that our
decisions must consider.
1. Information is accessible in many more places today. Radio,
television, cable television, recorded materials, Internet, and the common
telephone are available for learners of all ages. 2. Special Interest
groups from hobbies to choral singing groups to Star Trek group meetings
and clubs are available. 3. The society is more inclusive of diverse
people including disabled people. 4. Age differences are merged and a 14
year old can dialogue with a Nobel scientist if their skills, knowledge
and are interest are the same. 5. More learning takes place outside the
school, in the home, church, library, museum and little league parks.
The digital world has blurred the walls of the schools and places of
learning. Individual learners can learn anywhere anytime and at their own
pace. We have always had some children that use broad community resources,
but the ease of doing it today is greater than ever.
I would like to welcome your thoughts on these issues.
Sincerely
Arun Tripathi
=============================================================================
"I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think." -SOCRATES
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