About this Issue

About this Issue; Interface


This is the third issue of the Journal of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies, The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet. We continue to be pleased with our progress, and dismayed by how much we yet have to learn. Our traffic continues to rise, and we now frequently hear from readers. We have added some editors to our editorial board. We have a greater flow of submissions. These are all very positive signs for a journal that is less than three months old. On the negative side, we have annoyed more than a few people with some of the errors we have made in communicating with our audience. Our apologies, we can only promise to attempt to avoid making the same mistake twice.

In this issue we feature several articles of interest to teachers. T. Mills Kelly in his piece, "For Better or Worse? The Marriage of the Web and the Classroom," discusses a project for measuring student learning from web resources used within the classroom. This article was the "article of the year" for our sister journal, The Journal of the Association for History and Computing <http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/jahcindex.htm>, posted from the Berglund Center, in cooperation with the Matsushita Center for Electronic Learning, also housed at Pacific University. The article has been widely reprinted as it is one of the few that truly approaches assessing the learning impact of electronic resources. We think that those other than teachers will also find it very useful; Kelly argues that certain kinds of learning are more appropriate to the Internet, and that one impact of the Internet is going to be that Internet users increasingly will challenge materials that are delivered not in depth, but in breadth.

Another article, "Pedagogy, Ubiquity, Opacity: ICT in Higher Education", by Berglund Fellow Marc Marenco, discusses his "conversion" to the use of electronic resources in his teaching. Marc probably speaks for many who are reluctant to make this conversion, just as he once was.

Jeff Cooper, an ed tech specialist in the graduate program in education at Pacific University discusses a wide variety of rich resources for teachers, and explains in detail has he himself has found them useful.

In addition, we present the second posting of our new feature, "Tech Corner". In this edition Matt Ernst discusses "Lesser Known Network Resources." Matt, a computer science major, discusses a variety of basic but very useful applications which can much extend one's ability to use not just the World Wide Web, but also several other important areas of the Internet. Our editor Drew Harrington reviews several important books, and Berglund Fellow and editor Dr. Mark Szymansky continues to enrich resources intended for teachers.

Finally, we finish up our series of editorial essays on Netwar and the events of September 11 with "Netwar, Bin Laden, and Al Quaeda". Some of our conclusions will strike many as controversial or mistaken, and we will be happy to present contrary opinions in future issues, linking back to the editorials themselves.

For those with a serious interest in our mission, studying the impact of the Internet, we wish to draw your attention to our call for Berglund Fellows. We support a minimum of four Berglund Fellows per year with grants. We expect that they will write one major piece for us each year, and that they will work with us during several weeks during July of 2002. Please see the call for applications in this issue.

In the February issue of Interface we will also invite applications from those who are less expert but interested in learning more about the Internet and its uses. We invite a number of "Berglund Affiliates" on campus each summer for workshops led by Berglund Fellows and other experts in the field.

The Journal welcomes all communications. We are interested in the impact of the Internet upon society and individuals, including business and education. To inquire as to our interests in publishing particular pieces, please see our Call for Submissions. We pay for pieces published as "articles."

We are also interested in working with editors who might be responsible for features to be published on a regular basis in Interface. To inquire as to our interests, please contact <barlowj@pacificu.edu>.

We hope that you find The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet, useful to your work and a complement to your own interests in the impact of the Internet.

It is with some relief that we also announce that we are taking the month of January off, and will post Vol. II, no. 2 of Interface in the first week of February 2002. During this downtime we will be adding significant new features to Interface. Please check us out in February of 2002, after having had a happy New Year.

Jeffrey Barlow , Editor
The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet.