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- Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 18:36:50 +1000
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THE NET EFFECT July 02, 2000
Weekly Newsletter
The Net Effect is Copyright (c) 2000
by WebSearch and Dez Blanchfield
http://www.websearch.com.au/?enter=tne2k0702
_________________________________________________________________
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--| ABOUT THE NET EFFECT
The Net Effect bewsletter is a high quality publication
created to provide timely commentary on events taking place
on the internet from week to week.
The Net Effect newsletter is one of the largest newsletters
available on the web focusing on this topic. It is read
weekly by over 541,000 webmasters and website owners.
Please, do forward this newsletter to all your friends and
co-workers who might be interested!
Interested in writing articles for this Newsletter?
Email mailto:Editor@WebSearch.COM.AU and find out how.
To subscribe, please see the end of the message!
--| IN THIS WEEK'S EDITION
- Editorial:
Is your DOT COM project making money? No!?
Well it should be!
- Letters to the editor:
Cookies - the way I like 'em
- Word / Quote / Site of the week:
- e-Marketplace
- Brooke Shields said..
- Whales Alive "site"
- Merging Paradigms:
Integrating Learning Technologies into the Academy
- For the Webmaster in all of us:
Tools you should be making good use!
--| FROM THE EDITOR
Is your DOT COM making money yet? If not, why not?
by Dez Blanchfield ( mailto:dez@websearch.com.au )
So you have a DOT COM, it's been your consuming passion for
some time now, but is your creation, your property, is it
making money?
This is a rather important question to be asking yourself on a
regular basis, it's one I live with every day, and time after
time I find it the most relevant question for every single
bright idea I hear about - particularly in the context of the
average internet technology "start up".
With this in mind, I've been working on a project recently,
which might do something about the average DOT COM and it's
issue of atleast covering costs.
"adNet" - the project I recently launched to address this
issue, is now online for all of you with those exciting
startups that are just not quite making ends meet, or perhaps
for those of you with that all time brilliant startup that
just needs more revenue.
adNet is an agregation or network of disparate web sites,
which have signed up to allow us to serve banners on their
sites and in return we pay them a fixed service fee per banner
impression.
When I went out to investigate the market recently, I found
that most well designed sites were easily acheiving a monthly
impression count of atleast 5,000 page views, infact, most
good sites we found were easily breaking 10,000 to 15,000.
With that soft of traffic, any sight is going to strain to
make any form of money from their online traffic regardless of
what they are offering - so how do they make money to cover
even just their hosting fees and perhaps a dialup account for
the brain trust?
Simple - adNet has come to the rescue - by simply joining up
with adNet, upon approval of your site, you just cut and paste
the HTML our traffic managers send you, and we can begin
sending paid ads to your site - it is that simple.
We're working on a new web site with full details, but for the
time being, so that you don't get held up, we have a basic
info site online already and I hope you will take a moment to
consider the offer and consider having us atleast qualify your
site for potential revenue even if not immediately - better to
be signed up and ready than to miss the opportunity:
http://ads.imgserv.com/join/
So what are you waiting for - click the URL and see what we're
offering. If you don't think we've answered your questions,
then for goodness sake tell us by emailing
dez@websearch.com.au right away as we're having trouble with
our ESP module this week *grin*.
] Ed
_________________________________________________________________
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--| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Have your say - we like it that way!
by Readers of The Net Effect just like you
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2000 12:05:20 +1000 (EST)
X-Sender: wicked@wicked.com.au
Mime-Version: 1.0
To: dez@websearch.com.au
From: wicked <wicked@wicked.com.au>
Subject: The Net Effect
Status:
Cookies aint a big deal. Run Netscape. edit your
cookies.txt file to empty and then convert it to
read-only. The world thinks you're accepting cookies but
none get resident. As soon as you're off-line you're
anonymous again.
Wicked
Thanks to all of you who continue to write in each week, it's
great to hear from every one of you and your feedback, even
those who point out fault, and we will be including as many
letters as possible in this new section for Letters to the
Editor.
] Sub-Ed
--| WORD / QUOTE / SITE OF THE WEEK
Our word of the week this week is:
e-Marketplace
I chose this new coinage as it has quickly become the single
most over used e-anything catch cry, but when you actually
stop to ask what it really means, almost none of the abusers
can give an accurate or reasonable description of what
e-Marketplace means, so I've qualified it as this weeks acid
test of all things DOT COM.
Our quote of the week this week is:
"If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life."
-Brooke Shields
hmm... well - there's something telling me that if I go near
this one, I'm going to have a head ache for a week just trying
to get my head clear of the problems with this sort of thinking!
Our site of the week this week is:
"Whales Alive"
If you've been reading the news this week you would have seen
that Australia is hosting some very serious discussion
regarding whaling, and so I went searching WebSearch AU for a
site "down under" with some info on the status of the fight
against whaling, and here's what I found:
Whales Alive is a non-profit organisation dedicated to the
protection and celebration of Whales and their fragile marine
habitat. Check out their site now at:
http://search.websearch.com.au/cgi-bin/ratthing?url=http://www.whalesalive.org.au/
note: we found this site by searching for the keyword "whales"
at the WebSearch AU search engine located at:
http://www.websearch.com.au/
] Sub-Ed
--| MERGING PARADIGMS
Integrating Learning Technologies into the Academy
by Denny Prussian (jessprus@bri.net.au)
All birds and mammals educate their young; the 'lower' animal
species by example, the 'higher' human species by design. We,
the humans, create systems of learning in the hope that we
might teach our young the fundamental requirements of survival
in a human world. We call these systems 'schools' or
'colleges' and as our young learn to assimilate and act upon
those fundamental teachings, we promote them into higher
systems that incorporate specialised schools or colleges. We
call these higher systems Academies or Universities, and
through them attempt to ensure the survival of our specific
cultures in a socially cathartic human world.
"What makes public schools public, is not so much that schools
have common goals but that students have common gods. The
reason for this is that Public Education does not serve the
public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of
public, schools contribute toward strengthening the spiritual
basis of [a particular] Creed. (Postman, 1995. WWW Doc.)
The ultimate irony of the human 'parental' teaching design is
that, like the 'lower' mammal parent, the parental Academy
always teaches by example. The difference between the 'lower'
example and the 'higher' example is profound: the lower takes
wing or hunts, and 'says' do as I do, the higher takes a
'position', and says think as I think, learn as it is
textually remembered, survive on past 'truths' and historical
examples.
How then, do we break the historical hold on our own
educational design? How do we open our Academies to knowledge
uninfected by the bug of past agendas? Does such knowledge
exist? Will the answers to these questions become evident if
we integrate open-information technology into traditional
educational design? This paper will contend that, in the final
analysis, we humans have created technology to overcome our
own learning limitations. That we have finally left the
bending bough or comfortable den to soar like our beaked
compatriots or seek out, bring down and ultimately devour our
sustenance as our more carnivorous cousins do. And what
sustains us? The knowledge that, through knowledge, we can
shape our own destiny as a species and control the process we
call evolution.
With this knowledge and its subsequent agenda, we have created
a 'brain' that spans the globe, containing nearly every byte
of information we as a species have ever contrived. We call it
the World Wide Web. We are the body and blood, the heart and
soul of this, our global brain - maintaining it, growing it
and maturing it. If sheer volume of information were
accountable in years, the Web's human equivalent would be the
most ancient of ancients. But without a connection to a
sophisticated body, an experienced host, the Web, in this
moment of its short history, is still in its infancy.
Educators now face the challenge of integrating our
sophisticated academic processes into our global brain and, by
taking advantage of its incredible possibilities, creating a
truly universal University. The difficulties we must overcome
to achieve this integration are numerous and perhaps the
largest difficulty lies in adapting the old education systems
to the new technology.
In this moment, for the first time in history, a phenomenon
has occurred that is beyond the control of the Academy. The
World Wide Web has evolved as a repository of opinion that
directly challenges the accepted truths and facts of the
educators. Ideas, philosophies and concepts are added to the
human database faster than the educators can validate them.
Publishing no longer serves to qualify a text as reasoned,
respected academic knowledge, for now, with a few deft clicks,
we can all publish our own texts and offer them to a worldwide
readership. This tends to weaken Professor Ian Thompson's
position on the 'mission' of the University. He states:
The mission of all Universities is essentially to act as
custodians, critics and transmitters of the universitas - our
common human heritage, and by re-search and re-examination of
the tradition to propose innovations for the common good.
(Thompson, 1999. WWW. Document)
But the Web adds a whole new dimension to the concept of
commonality. It is fast becoming the true custodian of the
texts that define or describe 'our common human heritage'. It
provides a critical arena, open to everyone with the means to
access it, regardless of their academic or moral
qualifications. And there is no question of its ability to
transmit information. What it cannot do, however, is plan
strategies that will promote a desire to assimilate knowledge.
It cannot provide personal guidance from learned sources
motivated to teach. It cannot ask questions. The things it
cannot do belong to the educator and, as Edward L. Davis
writes, 'curriculum design becomes the art of posing problems,
introducing large questions and then facilitating work on
them.'(Davis, 1998) This brings us back to the difficulties of
attempting to incorporate conventional academic principles
into a worldwide information network. Citation is a major
problem for students and faculty of modern Universities. There
are three problematic issues involving citation of published
works. The first is copyright and the mechanism required to
reimburse authors for the use of their Web-accessed texts, and
the second is the rather sticky subject of 'disappearing' Web
pages cited as sources by the student, but unavailable at the
time of assessment. The third issue is the stickiest of all -
academic validation.
I suggest that the first issue could easily be solved by
utilising existing copyright infrastructures. The specific
infrastructure I refer to is the Performing Rights
Associations method of reimbursing song-writers and composers
for the use of their work. Radio and television stations are
required to keep concise play-lists of the songs or musical
compositions they play for public consumption. They pay a set
fee to the associations responsible for administrating public
broadcast copyright. The more times a song is played, the
higher the song-writers percentage of the fee pool. The
'pay-per-click' facility that currently operates on the Web
could be linked to texts posted by authors expecting copyright
fees. The fee pool would come from schools and Universities
that wish to include copyrighted texts in a study program, and
their students would require a valid password to access the
texts via the Web. This would effectively provide 1) a
monitored, economically viable publishing base for authors and
publishers and 2) a way to eliminate the expense of text-books
to students and University libraries, instead charging an
annual fee. Copyright, therefore, would be payable to authors
only after a text is accessed. It is a common occurrence for
students and educators to pay thirty dollars or so for a
text-book that only contains one or two chapters relevant to
their study program. The 'pay-per-view' method would alleviate
this problem.
The second issue I referred to regards the unethical student
and incorporates the concepts of direct plagiarism,
paraphrased plagiarism and the faking of Web sources. It is
fairly simple to resolve this issue, by insisting that cited
Web pages be saved by the student to a 'cited sources' file on
their computer. If the educator cannot access the page through
the address cited in the students bibliography, then he or she
can ask for the saved page to be e-mailed by the student to
the relevant department.
If the study course were to be provided in total on a CD, I
would also envisage a search engine program that is capable of
checking that CD's database for 'coincidental' similarities in
text. For example, if the assessor were to highlight a
paragraph from this text, copy it and paste it into the
described search engine, then find an exact replica of it on
the CD, that assessor could quite fairly assume plagiarism.
The same would apply to paraphrasing.
The third issue regards validation. There may be profound and
enlightening texts floating around the global brain that come
from academically questionable sources; from people with no
recognised academic qualifications. The student is discouraged
from citing or referring to texts such as these for one simple
reason: The Academy has not had the time, the inclination, or
the practical ability to disseminate or validate information
provided by sources outside its own limited boundaries. Those
boundaries are determined by ideas and agendas that
compartmentalise educational method for the sake of the
system. It is time to expand this system, to encourage ideas
from all sources and to assimilate the Academy into the global
brain.
This is an important distinction: we should be incorporating
the Academy into the global brain, not the global brain into
the Academy. I offer two main reasons for this: 1) the 'global
brain' is an existing system with a developed technical
infrastructure, and 2) 'it' has no cultural, religious or
moral agenda. It is, simply, a tool to access information and
a mechanism for transmitting it, it exists now and it grows
exponentially.
The borders that segregate humans into cultural niches are
disappearing as fast as new Internet connections are made. I
suggest that this is because cultural diversity has become
shared knowledge, based on easy access to information and
broader based worldwide communication. James O'Donnell writes:
The invention and dissemination of the personal computer and
now the explosive growth in links between those computers on
the worldwide networks of the Internet create a genuinely new
and transformative environment. (O'Donnell. 1998 p.9)
Today's educators should be taking advantage of this
'transformative environment' by transforming with it. I
suggest that if the 'modern' University does not allow this
necessary transformation, then it will simply be repeating the
mistakes of its ancient counterparts.
Educators of the past became so intent on maintaining their
known, traditional paradigms that the whole process of
knowledge production stagnated. For example, Stephen
Rasmussen's text, 'The Quadrivium', describes the seven
liberal arts: Trivium - grammar, logic, and rhetoric and
Quadrivium - arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, as
the predominating courses of study in the Middle-ages (In
Republic and Laws Plato referred to the Trivium and Quadrivium
as 'essential education for the philosopher').
Each of the Quadrivial subjects had its meta-physical
counterpart (arithmetic - numerology or arithmology; geometry
- geomancy; astronomy - astrology, and music - 'speculative
music theory' eg: the music of the spheres) and, as Rasmussen
points out, students were required to '[uncover] knowledge and
truth through the … reasoning of analogy and correspondence.'
(Rasmussen, 1998) This method of educational enquiry was to
'end rather suddenly in the 1600's … with the combined
onslaught of the Christian "witch craze" … and the Scientific
Revolution.'(Rasmussen, 1998) Rasmussen summarises the effects
of this rather abrupt ending by describing the Academic system
that we currently maintain. Once the habit of
"pattern"-thinking was replaced by "straight-line" thinking,
knowledge lost its unity and interconnectedness, and began to
fragment into ever smaller specialties, each with its own
jargon, each dominated by its own elite of "experts".
(Rasmussen, 1998.WWW. Document)
Although I am not suggesting we return to the specific studies
of the Quadrivium, I am saying that we must be aware of the
inherent dangers in politicising Academic validation and
knowledge production. We must attempt, through new
technologies and the Internet, to broaden the knowledge we use
to produce knowledge. In his paper 'The Future of Education'
(1998), Edward L. Davis (referring specifically to the
introduction of new technologies and the Internet into
existing Academic systems) writes: 'The "means" of education,
if they are to change on a widespread basis, must impact the
three caveats of reform.' He specifies these 'caveats of
reform' as 'access, cost and quality.' Access to available
courses depends upon the availability of relevant tools (eg:
Computers), and Internet connection. I suggest that the
technical aspects of access are included in the second reform:
Cost. The first and most obvious way for Universities to save
money using computer technology is by eliminating printed
reference text and replacing it with the CD ROM.
A single CD (mass produced for about three dollars per unit)
has the capacity to store a simple word processing program, an
interactive study program (refer to the attached CD for an
example), and over 300,000 pages of text. In effect, the
textual resources for an entire degree could be 'written' on
to one CD. I will not attempt to estimate the costs involved
in supplying the same amount of information via the printed
page, but will presume to suggest that those costs would be
substantially higher.
If a percentage of this saving was re-directed into the
purchase of computers and, as part of their fee, each student
was provided with one, the question of access would be
answered. And if the rest of the saved money was subtracted
from the student fee, students would obviously pay less for
their education. This would make education more attractive to
the fiscally challenged, bringing the University one step
closer to universality. In this regard, Davis asks an
important question:
Information technology has generated dramatic cost-benefit
gains in virtually every other sector of our economy:
financial services, manufacturing, retail distribution, health
care, entertainment, and yes, even government. Why, then, is
our most vital segment lagging so far behind? (Davis, 1998.
WWW Document) It is a good question and one must certainly ask
how our educational institutions will choose to answer.
Davis' third 'caveat of reform' is quality, and that is the
reform that this paper has really been examining. Quality
involves more than methods of teaching and their correspondent
ethical or moral considerations, it also involves methods of
learning and the ways in which educators must adapt to the new
paradigms created by the 'distance' student. . Dorothy Sayers
(1947) writes, ' the sole true end of education is simply
this: to teach [people] how to learn for themselves; and
whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in
vain.'
Tiano's ideas regarding the 'new paradigm' of 'technological
exploitation in higher learning'(Winship, 1996) lean
dangerously close to Ian Thompson's concerns about the
'uncritical application of 'new' models and paradigms from
business management, manufacturing and industrial relations to
universities' (Thompson, 1999). Tiano conveniently labels the
'Old Paradigm' of academia and university governance as an
'ivory tower' and infers that academics are only concerned
with maintaining their own positions and treating students as
an unwanted but necessary evil (in my experience this is not
the reality). Her 'New Paradigm' is an over-simplified
offering, suspiciously market-centred and subjective (not
surprising if one considers her employers). I contend that
this is exactly the sort of thinking and promotion educators
must be wary of: the profit first, worry-about-ethics-later
mentality that can only undermine the quality of knowledge
production.
To conclude I must re-iterate a most important point: the
Internet is simply a repository, technology (no matter how
prettily it is wrapped) is but a tool. We would be surprised
to see a carpenter drilling holes with a hand drill or the
Prime Minister arriving at Parliament House in a horse-drawn
buggy or, perhaps more analogous to the point, an academic
composing a lecture using parchment, quill and ink-pot. So why
are these new tools any less valuable? In this moment in the
history of the Academy, the fundamental responsibilities of
the educator have not changed, nor will they in the 'new
paradigm' of techno-academia. The student is as demanding as
ever. The only difference concerns the tools, and our
acceptance, or rejection of them, will make all the difference
in the world.
] Denny
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ENDS
Received on Wednesday, 5 July 2000 03:40:35 UTC