__     __ __     __ __     __      web's eye view                    05-06-97
| | /| / /| | /| / /| | /| / /      alan levine                          
| |/ |/ / | |/ |/ / | |/ |/ /       Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction
|__/ |__/ |__/|__/  |__/|__/        http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/eye/
..............New bag of URLs.......http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/eye/bag/
==============================================================================


Web Teaching
Here ia an excerpt from an online article of interest to those trying to pin down
the effectivess of "virtual" teaching.

Virtual Teaching in Higher Education:
The New Intellectual Superhighway or Just Another Traffic Jam?
Jerald G. Schutte
California State University, Northridge

An experimental design was carried out during the Fall, 1996 in which 33 students
in a Social Statistics course at California State University, Northridge were
randomly divided into two groups, one taught in a traditional classroom and the
other taught virtually on the World Wide Web. Text, lectures and exams were
standardized between the conditions. Contrary to the proposed hypotheses,
quantitative results demonstrated the virtual class scored an average of 20%
higher than the traditional class on both examinations. Further, post-test
results indicate the virtual class had significantly higher perceived peer
contact, and time spent on class work, but a perception of more flexibility,
understanding of the material and greater affect toward math, at semester end,
than did the traditional class. http://www.csun.edu/sociology/virexp.htm

In doing some research with Betsy Cooper and Stephan Williams (GCC), we came
across a rich set of web-based course material from the University of Arizona's
Biology Learning Center:

   http://www.blc.arizona.edu/
   
including the highly publicized "Tree of Life", a distrubuted library aiming to
"contain information about the phylogenetic relationships and characteristics of
organisms, to illustrate the diversity and unity of living organisms, and to link
biological information available on the Internet in the form of a phylogenetic
navigator."

   http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/phylogeny.html

To see some educational efforts from the commercial side, see Magellan
University:

   http://magellan.edu/
   
As well as "Digital Think"

   http://www.digitalthink.com/
   
which is impressive for the expertise of their content experts.

Old Pages and New Climbs
These two items are from EDUPAGE:

SPRING CLEANING TIME FOR SOME WEB SITES
According to AltaVista, which has indexed a total of about 30 million Web
pages, five million of them haven't changed at all since early 1996, and
some 424,000 pages haven't been updated since early 1995.  "People have
enough enthusiasm to design the sites once -- but it's not clear that they
have the resources to update them regularly," says Louis Monier, the
architect of Digital Equipment's search engine.  (Wall Street Journal 11 Mar 97)

EXPERIENCING EVEREST THROUGH THE INTERNET
Students at an estimated 500 high schools from across North America will
experience real-time interaction with climbers as they leave the base camp
for their assault on Mount Everest in mid-April.  An expedition Web site has
been set up at
http://www.vrsystems.com/everest/  


Web Master/Mistress/Wizard/Guru Listserv
Thanks to Shelle Witten (PVCC) for sending us info about a list for those tame
web servers:

The webmaster-l list provides a forum for discussion and information
exchange concerning the role, responsibilities, activities, knowledge,
skills, and concerns of Webmasters and others who are involved with
Internet and Web server site building and maintenance including content
development, design, implementation, system administration, scripting,
programming, internetworking, and other activities related to a variety
of servers, clients, objects, programs, and applications operating
across Intranets, the Internet, or computer networks generally.

To subscribe send a message to majordomo@cybercorp.net
with the body of the message containing only these two lines:

subscribe webmaster-l
end

Bag of URLs
The latest bag is at:

  http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/eye/bag/
  
including:

        Virtual Laboratory
        The University of Oregon Physics Department's Virtual Laboratory
        provides interactive Java-based tutorials on the principles of
        physics and astronomy.
        http://jersey.uoregon.edu/vlab/

        DigitalThink
        web-delivered short training course in computers, Internet,
        Finance, and Lifestyles. They offer a free demo course called Smart
        Searching: The Power of Simple Searches
        http://www.digitalthink.com/

        Argus Clearinghouse
        formerly known as "Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Resource
        Guides". It provides a central access point for topical guides
        which identify, describe, and evaluate Internet-based information
        resources. They also provide a Digital Librarian's Award.
        http://www.clearinghouse.net/

        Archive.edu
        a storehouse of instructional materials on a variety of topics that
        educators can easily access. But more than just another Web site,
        Archive.edu is a location where educators will have permission to
        download any of the materials. These materials can be used as they
        are, or customized and incorporated into other instructional
        projects.
        http://www.coe.uh.edu/archive/

        Education Index
        an annotated guide to the best education-related sites on the Web.
        http://www.educationindex.com/

        Multicultural Pavilion
        provides resources to teachers and others interested in
        multicultural education and issues. Some of its resources include a
        multicultural activity archives, a variety of online discussion
        forums for the exchange of information or ideas, a page on
        multicultural resources for english teachers, online literature
        archives, and many, many others.
        http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/go/multicultural

        Ask the JavaScript Pro
        is "the definitive Javascript resource on the Internet" The site is
        geared toward developers at all levels.
        http://www.inquiry.com/techtips/js_pro/
        

To be JavaScripting or Not...
JavaScript offers much to extend what one can do on a web page. Some of the
pitfalls are the browsers that do not support it (older versions of NetScape,
different versions of Internet Explorer). The other side of the coin is that when
you get down into JavaScript, it is a bit more complicated thatn just slapping on
some HTML tags.

One of the better resources out there is the JavaScript Cut-N-Paste site:

   http://www.infohiway.com/javascript/indexf.htm
   
where, as it name states, you can easily copy their scripts and use them in your
own page. However, it is not always that easy, as Stan Becker (MCC) told us after
trying to use one of their scripts. Stan eventually got it working.

One of the scripts makes it so you can have an interactive multiple choice quiz
on a web page. On my first attempt at using the copied code, it did not work
because the copied code was missing about 6 lines that were in the source of the
demo page. You can see our modfied version at:

  http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/proj/jquiz/
  
Another place we are starting to use JavaScript is to create a common footer
page; what JavaScript can do is to update certain pices of the information so
that we do not have to do it for every page:

  <script language=JavaScript>
  <!-- this hides Javascripts from incapable browsers

  // This script creates a dynamic footer for all MCLI web pages

  // Append the document title as decalred in the TITLE tag
  document.write('<font face="helvetica,arial"><b>' + document.title +
'</b><br>');

  // this is plain okd HTML
  document.write('<A HREF="http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/">');
  document.write('Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (MCLI)</A><br>');
  document.write('<A HREF="http://www.maricopa.edu/">Maricopa Community
Colleges</A><p>');
  document.write('The Internet Connection at MCLI is '); 
  document.write('<a href="http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/">Alan Levine
--}</a><br>');

  // write a mailto tag that appends the URL of this document to the subject line
  document.write('Comments to <b><A HREF="mailto:levine@maricopa.edu?' +
document.location + '">levine@maricopa.edu</A></b><p>');

  // append a last modified date
  document.write('<tt><b>last modified: </b>' + document.lastModified);

  // append the URL for this document
  document.write('<br><b>URL: </b>' + document.location + '</TT></font><p>');

  // done hiding from incapable browsers-->
  </script>

What the script can do is automatically embed its title, last modification date
(if read from a web server), and url. For the mailto: tag, it inserts the URL for
the document on the subject line of the mail message, so that when someone clicks
and makes a comment about the page, we know what page they are referring to. 

If you are doing some creative things with JavaScript, how about sharing them?