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Volume I
Issue 5
8 September 1999 |
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Linkage For this, the back-to-school Newsletter, some links to / about places and ways to learn: Things To Learn: There is an abundance of websites full of things to appreciate, learn, savor, pass along to others. Some are clearly intended as curricula for a structured education program; others are more open-ended. A smattering follows: EdSitement coordinates government and private enterprise to sponsor K - 12 educational programs available to classroom teachers over the Internet. One cache of Depression-era photos, available in a "Crossing Borders in History" lesson plan, includes a children's nine-piece stringband (banjo, ukulele, mandolin, and more). A lesson plan for high school students, "Live from Antiquity," includes a link to the Perseus Project of the Classics Department at Tufts University - a good resource for images and information on things classical, and as recent as Elizabethan England. http://edsitement.neh.gov/guides/g3_b2.htm A controversial proposal has been adopted: The National Institutes of Health announced the new website PubMed Central, opening in January 2000. Covering the life sciences - biology, medicine, plant and agricultural research - PubMed Central will post to the Internet primary research reports, peer-reviewed scholarly papers, as well as "pre-print" papers (not peer-reviewed) recommended by independent screening organizations to PubMed Central. An international network of open access to research is expected to develop. This could change the rules for the sharing of scientific research. http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/aug99/od-30.htm Recently added to the EDUCAUSE homepage is this report from Washington DC, on a new government initiative promoting high-quality education for adults, through the Education Department's Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnerships (LAAP) program. (Educause resulted from the merger of EDUCOM and CAUSE, in 1998. All archived materials from the predecessor groups' sites are also available at the Educause site.) http://www.educause.edu To benefit from others' experiences in arts administration, consult the Lessons Learned, made available by the National Endowment for the Arts. A rich set of essays about how to plan change is accompanied by case studies, narrating how change was accomplished at a variety of arts organizations. "The art of planning is best revealed when art is in the planning," says essayist Gregory Kandel, in The Art in the Process. One case study, In Tune With The Times: The St. Louis Symphony Creates Its Own Recording Company by Deb Aronson, tells how St Louis became the first American symphony orchestra to establish its own direct sales and distribution capabilities for its musical recordings. http://arts.endow.gov/pub/Lessons/index.html Schools, Communities, and the Arts: A Research Compendium is just what it says - a very extensive accumulation of essays and papers advocating the importance of arts education to children. Not just a bibliography, this listing includes the links to each of the primary sources, including North American Indian Music Instruction: Influences upon Attitudes, Cultural Perceptions, and Achievement, by Kay Louise Edwards; Learning to Act/Acting to Learn: Children as Actors, Critics, and Characters in Classroom Theatre, by Shelby Wolf, and The Effects of a Folklorist Residency upon Student Self-Esteem: A Descriptive Study, by Keith Cunningham. http://aspin.asu.edu/%7Erescomp/contents.html American Verse, an ongoing project to collect and archive American poetry before 1920, is available online for browsing or searching, through the University of Michigan. Emily Dickinson's collected poems are available (see for example Remorse) as are works by Sidney Lanier, Emma Lazarus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Boolean searches are permitted - A search for poems containing the words "remorse" and "truth" resulted in a list of 26 (!) poems, Ella Wheeler Wilcox's High Noon among them. http://www.hti.umich.edu/english/amverse/ Growing Old in a New Age, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, and The Power of Place are among courses offered through the Public Broadcasting Service's Telecourse programs, televised curricula that can be adopted by colleges and universities as additional educational resources for their adult students. http://www.pbs.org/adultlearning/als/college/catalog/index.ht
ml Women Artists of the American West is a course curriculum for college-level instruction; it is also a densely populated website for the curious - registered, matriculated student or not. In her Introduction to the site co-author Susan Ressler expresses the site's founding principle this way: "I believe art is a profound mirror of our humanity, and that to reflect an accurate image, it must include us all. A sanctioned or 'official' art can only be partial, limited by definition in scope and value. A healthy society will honor diversity and will 'fear no art.'" (The name of Ressler's co-author, Jerrold Maddox, may already be familiar to you masthead-watchers: he is the designer for this Newsletter.) http://www.sla.purdue.edu/WAAW/ Distance Education: Distance Education seems to be much in the news lately, and gaining popularity as an effective way to reach students young and old, throughout the world. The following sites are not exclusively arts-oriented; instead they explore the concerns facing all teachers and learners intereacting at a distance, and very often using digital technology. For a comprehensive analysis of the problems and promises of distance education, take advantage of the extensive research provided by the World Bank's Global Distance Education project. Topics include National and regional differences, Jurisdictional issues, Recruitment and admissions, Printed and recorded media (textbooks, newspapers, audio cassette tapes, correspondence units), and Learners with disabilities. http://www-wbweb5.worldbank.org/disted/text.html For information on their annual conference (Learning, Teaching and Technology, mid-October, 1999 in Myrtle Beach, SC), with presenters and exhibitors from the electronic media gathering to share information about using digital technologies in education, visit the site for the Association for Applied Interactive Multimedia (AAIM) http://www.aaim.org/conference/program.htm For a partial list of US colleges and universities offering distance education courses, consult the site of the National University Continuing Education Association (NUCEA) http://www.nucea.edu/Distance2.htm The United States Distance Learning Association site provides free access to some of the scholarly articles on distance education public policy matters published in its ED Journal, including the organization's position paper included in the comments solicited by the US government in its fact-finding pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This legislation, passed in the fall of 1998, requested recommendations from interested parties, on how best to promote distance education through digital technologies (including changes in the Copyright statute, if needed). http://www.usdla.org/ If you want to read the actual statutory language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Copyright Office has made it available for download. Segments of greatest relevance to distance-education concerns will be found from pages 19 to 44 in the pdf file. http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/hr2281.pdf The document can be read using Adobe's Acrobat Reader version 3, which can be downloaded for free from Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html |
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