CIT INFOBITS February 2003 No. 56 ISSN 1521-9275 About INFOBITS INFOBITS is an electronic service of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Instructional Technology. Each month the CIT's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a number of information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators. ...................................................................... Does the Internet Foster Shallow Learning? Student Citation Behavior The Next Major Wave of Change in U.S. Higher Education Learning Communities Creative Commons and Copyright Recommended Reading ...................................................................... DOES THE INTERNET FOSTER SHALLOW LEARNING? The Pew report, "The Internet Goes to College: How Students are Living in the Future with Today's Technology" [see CIT Infobits, September 2002, http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitsep02.html#2] has provoked discussion of the place of the Internet in college teaching. In "Does the Internet Foster Shallow Learning?" (AFT ON CAMPUS, February 2003), David Rothenberg, professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, argues that "The Web makes research look so much easier than it is, because it instantly generates results without teaching students how to evaluate what it promises." He believes that "Technology may well have delivered an unprecedented kind of global village. But only good teaching and careful questioning can help students become the village shaman rather than the village fool." Steve Jones, professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reasons that "the dire predictions that the Internet is the latest medium to encourage laziness, plagiarism, disrupt the classroom, decrease literacy and reduce attention span" are wrongly based on the assumption of the "primacy of face-to-face communication as a medium of interaction and of the value of work as an indicator of learning." Read both sides of the debate online at http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/feb03/speakout.html. AFT On Campus is published eight times a year by the American Federation of Teachers, 555 New Jersey Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001 USA; tel: 202-879-4400; email: online@aft.org; Web: http://www.aft.org/ Current and back issues are available at no cost at http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/index.html. ...................................................................... STUDENT CITATION BEHAVIOR A recently-released report of a study conducted at Cornell University, "Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior," indicated that students in the study "generally used fewer and fewer scholarly materials in their library research in the past six years," relying more on websites as research resources. Often faculty find that the links that students cite are "broken," making it impossible to verify the resource. The study pointed out that faculty, in cooperation with library staff, can reverse the trend by providing students with guidelines on the types of scholarly materials that they should use in their research. The report was published in PORTAL: LIBRARIES AND THE ACADEMY, vol. 3, No 1, January 2003, and is available online to subscribers at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v003/3.1davis.html A summarizing article in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION is freely available at http://chronicle.com/free/2003/02/2003020601t.htm ...................................................................... THE NEXT MAJOR WAVE OF CHANGE IN U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION In "The Next Great Wave in American Higher Education" (PLANNING FOR HIGHER EDUCATION, vol. 31, no. 2, 2002-03, pp. 52–59), James Ottavio Castagnera, Associate Vide President for Academic Affairs at Rider University, predicts that the Internet and new media forms will soon cause major changes. "When the shakeout is complete, higher education will not be populated exclusively by e-educators. Nor will the landscape of higher education boast only the largest and wealthiest bricks-and-mortar institutions." Some of the results of the wave that Castagnera believes will occur include partnerships between nonprofit and for-profit institutions, colleges merging to pool resources, and U.S. universities forming international institutional relationships. The article is available online at http://www.scup.org/phe.htm under the "Read" links. The direct URL is http://207.75.158.201/PHE/FMPro?-db=PubData.fp5&-lay=VP&-format=read_inner.htm&-error=error.htm&ID=PUB-KzAByWxQ4q4YzKvabn&-Find Planning for Higher Education is published quarterly by the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). For more information, go to http://www.scup.org/phe.htm SCUP, established in 1965, is an association "focused on the promotion, advancement, and application of effective planning in higher education." For more information, contact Society for College and University Planning, 311 Maynard Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2211 USA; tel: 734-998-7832; fax: 734-998-6532; email: info@scup.org; Web: http://www.scup.org/ ...................................................................... LEARNING COMMUNITIES The theme of the January 2003 issue of SIDEBARS is Learning Communities. Articles and resources cover a wide range of communities of online learners, from informally-organized groups to formal networks of educational institutions. The issue is available at no cost on the Web at http://online.bcit.ca/sidebars/index.htm SideBars is distributed by email and on the Web and is published by the Learning Resources Unit of the British Columbia Institute of Technology [http://www.lru.bcit.ca/] to provide "useful information and news items for instructors, course developers, educational technologists and anyone else who has an interest in distributed learning in its various manifestations." For more information, contact the editors at email: sidebars@listserv.bcit.ca. Subscription information: http://online.bcit.ca/sidebars/subcribe.html ...................................................................... CREATIVE COMMONS AND COPYRIGHT This month, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Creative Commons Executive Director Glenn Otis Brown presented an overview of what the organization has accomplished and what projects and challenges lie ahead. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization founded in 2001 on the notion that some people would prefer to share their creative works (and the power to copy, modify, and distribute their works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law. Referring to the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft (which unsuccessfully sought to overturn the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act), Brown spoke about what is happening to public domain and about what Creative Commons is doing to preserve and expand public domain. Creative Commons has devised a set of copyright licenses which allow you to retain your ownership while offering some of your rights to others under certain conditions. Some of the licenses include: -- Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work -- and derivative works based upon it -- but only if they give you credit. -- Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work -- and derivative works based upon it -- but for noncommercial purposes only. -- No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it. -- Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. To learn more about Creative Commons, go to http://creativecommons.org/ For more background on recent changes in copyright, see "'The Progress of Science and Useful Arts': Why Copyright Today Threatens Intellectual Freedom" by Marjorie Heins at http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/copyright.html. Eldred v. Ashcroft documents (including dissenting opinions): http://www.copyright.gov/pr/eldred.html ...................................................................... RECOMMENDED READING "Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column. The latest issue of CITE (vol. 2, issue 4, 2003) contains the text of Alfred Bork's lecture, "Interactive Learning," which he presented in 1978 as the American Association of Physics Teachers' Millikan Lecture. In "Interactive Learning: Twenty Years Later" Bork reviews his earlier predictions and reviews the current role of computer in schools today. You can read both the original lecture [http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss4/seminal/article1.cfm] and his current reflections [http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss4/seminal/article2.cfm] online. CITE (Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education) [ISSN: 1528-5804] is a free, online publication of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). It was established as an electronic counterpart of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education and funded by a U.S. Department of Education Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) catalyst grant. For more information, contact: Lynn Bell, Managing Editor of CITE, c/o Center for Technology and Teacher Education, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, 1912 Thomson Road, PO Box 400279, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4279 USA; email: publisher@citejournal.org; Web: http://www.citejournal.org/ ...................................................................... To Subscribe CIT INFOBITS is published by the Center for Instructional Technology. The CIT supports the interests of faculty members at UNC-Chapel Hill who are exploring the use of Internet and video projects. Services include both consultation on appropriate uses and technical support. To subscribe to INFOBITS, send email to listserv@unc.edu with the following message: SUBSCRIBE INFOBITS firstname lastname substituting your own first and last names. 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