Welcome to Degree.net: the web’s number one resource for information on distance learning, provided by John Bear, Ph.D., author of the long-time best-selling Bears’ Guide to Earning Degrees Nontraditionally.
Distance learning is a booming field: More and more schools are making it possible for people to get the degree they want or need without ever setting foot on a college campus. It can also be a baffling field, fraught with misinformation, false expectations, complexities such as accreditation, and outright dangers such as diploma mills.
Degree.net is here to help make distance learning less baffling and more booming. We’re here to demystify accreditation, identify diploma mills, report on the latest developments in the industry, and, most importantly, help distance learners and good distance learning schools to find each other.
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DLRN — For Educators
“Designing Instruction for Web-Based Distance Learning”
Would you like to know more about online teaching and learning?
Are you interested in teaching a class via the Web or turning your existing class into an online course? If you answered yes to these questions, the Distance Learning Resource Networks “Designing Instruction for Web-Based Distance Learning” is for you. This guide will help you design a course or materials for the Web or convert an existing course into an online course.These scenarios raise many issues and questions that we hope this guide and its activities will address. One of the main issues distance education instructors face is how the impact of teaching a course on the Internet changes the interaction between student and teacher, as well as between student and student. We hope that completion of this course will lead to satisfying, new teaching experiences for you and success in creating a dynamic, interactive Web-based learning experience.
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SmartNet 2000 Programme
Theme : Making It Happen in the Knowledge Economy.
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Judith Anderson
While on the subject of art, I was intrigued by the images here…
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Artchive
I would have a huge screen on the wall and a net connection just to see this site all day!
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Web.Studies, first chapter, by David Gauntlett
“PART II: WEB LIFE, ARTS AND CULTURE
4. A Home on the Web: Presentations of Self on Personal Homepages
Charles Cheung
5. I-love-Xena.com: Creating On-line Fan Communities
Kirsten Pullen
6. Artists’ Websites: Declarations of Identity and Presentations of Self
Eva Pariser
7. Webcam Women: Life on Your Screen
Donald Snyder
8. Queer ‘n’ Asian on – and off – the Net: The Role of Cyberspace in Queer Taiwan and Korea
Chris Berry and Fran Martin
9. The Web goes to the pictures
David Gauntlett
10. The Teacher Review debate
-Teacher Review: Just what the internet was made for
Ryan Lathouwers and Amy Happ
-Teacher Review: The Dark Side of the Internet
Daniel Curzon-Brown”
The first chapter and probably the whole book broad overview saying what we already know. Yet these basic things do need to be said and said well, this book may do that. The section & headings quoted above may be useful to generate some playful surfing. What is the *Dark Side of the Internet*, porn? this is the obvious answer but that to me is the dark side on the Internet, what is the dark side *of* it? I’ll see what there is on Daniel Curzon-Brown.
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AdSubtract.com We Subtract the Ads!
“Internet Ads:
- Slow down web surfing
- Distract you with screen clutter
- Endanger your online Privacy”
And they are ugly. Is this a sacred place? At least it needs to be aesthetic! Several years ago I bought this program after having it on a month free trial. I’ve used it ever since. I am often shocked when I look at other people as they surf. It is so distracting and ugly. A one off fee fixes it. OK it might sound like an ad as I write, but it is a plea for aesthetics and I have no financial interest in the product at all. There may be others as good, but this one has workrd without a glitch.
CDL Directory
The CDL Directory includes records for electronic journal titles, databases, archival finding aids and reference texts. You can re-try your search in the CDL Directory below, or you can automatically send your search into another search system.
Talking about libraries here is access to the academic type.
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Entrez-PubMed
Mind-Body Dualism and the Biopsychosocial Model of Pain: What Did Descartes Really Say?
Found this using Searchlite (see next item, above).
More on Psyche and Libraries
Been thinking about what I wrote about Amazon being Alexandria. It is not quite right, the whole Net is the new Alexandria. And I doubt the future is corporate. XML plus peer-to-peer sharing means literature and texts of all kinds will be “free” like music is now. However *right now*, and that is all there is, there is nothing like Amazon, and it may be like that for a while yet.
Memory is something of a seat of the soul, and computer memory is in the same class. All of our written words our *written traditions* are what the Maori call whakapapa. Our ancestors and their stories have a spititual quality – in a library these spirits are all around us – the library is a sacred place.
Privacy vs the need for connection – to live & learn.
The Psychological Meaning of Internet Privacy
Some news clips and then some musings from me.
Groups Criticize Amazon Policy
By D. IAN HOPPER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP)
“Consumer groups say a change in Amazon.com’s privacy policy could leave customers of the Internet retailing giant no recourse if they don’t want personal information such as credit card numbers and home addresses passed on to some other company.
Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc., which sells a wide range of products, including books, toys and hardware, posted a revised privacy policy on its Web site Thursday telling customers the information they give is considered a company asset that can be sold. A company spokeswoman, Patty Smith, said the new policy is actually more restrictive in some cases, and better explains what Amazon can and cannot do with customer data.
“As we continue to develop our business, we might sell or buy stores or assets,” the new policy reads. “In such transactions, customer information generally is one of the transferred business assets.”
No. 3.6 . The Filter. 9.08.00 from Harvard at has a section on this… they say:
“Now, in the wake of a decision by the Massachusetts Bankruptcy Court overseeing the ToysMart case not to consider its agreement with the FTC in the absence of a buyer for ToysMart’s assets, leading e-tailer Amazon.com has introduced modifications to its privacy policy making it clear that Amazon customers’ personal data is considered a company asset and can therefore legitimately be shared with Amazon’s growing cadre of corporate partners�or, if need be,sold.”
The question of privacy is and will be debated from a legal, political and social perspective. From a psychological perspective what is happening as Amazon changes policy? A lot.
First Some thoughts about Amazon . This is a super Alexandria – and an Amazon customer is a scholar in the greatest library ever, so what happens as we access this database of books in print? It is not only a library it is a huge many-to-many discussion about books. Yet the networks of people here is not social – “I learn that people who bought this also bought this” – that is a psychometric or psychological revelation. I can look at reviewers and their profiles, meet them, see what is on their wish list and in their “purchase circle” and move to the website of fan clubs and authors. This is not like meeting people in a physical bookstore – here we read their minds – we enter into a mind-space. We find books without the help of librarians, but with each other in systems of automated and non-automated collaboration that runs deep. Because this library will work best if there is only *one* people flock to the biggest, where they find the most. Perhaps it is sad that this is a store, and a commercial, corporate, capitalist place – that is not unlike many universities – there is no class neutrality when it comes to learning. With immunity to the Orwellian nightmare inherent in the inherent impact of the words: knowledge about the customers is called an asset.
That knowledge of the scholars in this modern Alexandria is the very thing that is used to tune the scholars into the information using automated collaborative filtering or psychometry as Moreno would have called it. It would seem a marvelous virtue if it was *one librarian* who had the knowledge about the scholars. This virtue becomes scary in the panopticon.
As individuals we are not able to learn, learning is in relationship with others, always. These relationships are so vital that we will seek them out wherever they work best – even if we have to be humiliated by being seen as a “user, a customer, and an asset”. Can the impulse to seek the purest collaborative knowing be stronger than any companies ability to exploit that need for its own greed? Can our collective spirit and soul transcend the ugliness of some of the culture invading the Net?