Quest For Knowledge ™

The QFK e-learning environment provides a cognitive odyssey through the ideas, practices, and artifacts of ancient to contemporary culture. Its goal is to gain deeper understanding of fundamental issues in learning, teaching, and the representation and use of knowledge. This program is composed of two complementary parts:

1. Quest For Knowledge Web - An interlinked set of cases of ancient ideas, practices, and artifacts. Follow cues for reasoning from these cases to our contemporary concerns. Shared understanding is built through Web-based discussion forums, mailing lists, and other cognitive artifacts.

2. Quest For Knowledge Study Abroad - a study abroad program in selected countries. In 1998, Quest For Knowledge explored Greece and its culture of learning.

Palimpsest

The Palimpsest e-learning environment provides an historical, social, and cognitive exploration of the palimpsest - a shared artifact of learning, interaction, and collaboration. This tradition is examined in ancient manuscripts and its benefits for e-learning are explored through interactive hypermedia on the World Wide Web.

Tiddlywiki. is an experimental microcontent WikiWikiWeb built by Jeremy Ruston. It is kin to the popular read-write Wiki applications, but it is distinct in its form as a portable, read-write Web site contained in one HTML file. Doc's Tiddlywiki. is a early-stage work-in-progress educational use of Ruston's tiddlywiki template. This limited version is being used to evaluate user acceptance and ease-of-use and to provide a brief introduction to its use.

The compact, transparent, and mobile capability of this type of wiki may prove useful for making course materials such as a syllabus more portable and interactive. Based on the work of Ed Coll, Asst Prof, Computer Science at Kauai Community College, Hawai'i, a syllabus contained in a single wiki of this type could be used to collaboratively refine it when teaching a course for the first time or to fine-tune it to meet individual learner differences. In extended application, this single file wiki could carry the syllabus and assignments, including student assignment responses. Students could save the syllabus wiki on their laptops and use it as the basis for their course assignment work, including responding to the assignment within the wiki. When assignment work is completed, students can upload the wiki or send it as an email attachment to the instructor for review and comments. This can be iterated as many times as needed.

Online courses offered through accredited schools and certified training providers abound, but here are a few online learning sites that provide a more home-grown perspective on how individuals and organizations can support learning and schools.

CyberSchoolBus - the United Nations "CyberSchoolBus" site provides information and interactivity for students and educators as part of a global teaching and learning project.

Dave's ESL Cafe This site is designed for ESL/EFL teachers and students. It supports a chat room, discussion forum, mailing list, FAQ, e-mail, and other applications of technologies for learning.

KIDLINK: Global Networking for Youth through the age of 15 Kidlink encourages kids around the world to talk to each other online. They also provide informal meeting places for teachers, coordinators, parents, and others interested in kids.

Odyssey Online provides an educational journey using museum objects from the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. Children can make their own discoveries about the objects from the Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

ThinkQuest - a global network of students, teachers, parents, and technologists exploring youth-centered learning on the Net. They have thousands of student-created entries in their Web-based library for you to explore as well as a competition that awards prizes to the best educational Web sites.

UNICEF Voices of Youth Home Page is a web site maintained by UNICEF in New York City where students, educators and community meet to discuss education related to global issues such as children and work, children's rights, etc.

World Lecture Hall - The World Lecture Hall (WLH) contains links to pages created by faculty worldwide who are using the Web. It includes course syllabi, assignments, lecture notes, exams, class calendars, multimedia textbooks, etc.

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ALN Web - This site is sponsored by the Sloan Organization and is an information interchange for researchers and practioners in the field of asynchronous learning. There is an online journal as well as a magazine.

California Virtual Campus Professional Development Center - a Web-based resource for online faculty development that includes communities centered around academic discipline.

Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine Computer-Mediated Communications Magazine is a monthly electronic magazine that covered several areas of interest for Cognitive Scientists, Educators and Students.

elearningpost is a Web-based digest of daily links to articles and news stories about e-learning.

NEA Teaching, Learning and Technology This is the National Education Association's Web site for Education in Cyberspace. It offers a message board for educators, an educational links database, a listing of events, and other information about technology and teaching.

Ready2Net at California State University - Monterey Bay provides free Webcasts about e-learning. This service requires the use of RealPlayer for streaming audio and video content. They provide both live events as well as an archive of previous Web casts. Although many of the topics lean toward interests of the higher education audience and feature guests from that e-learning population, the underlying concepts and examples presented seem to apply to corporate and K-12 education segments as well.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) provides free access to publications, surveys, data tools, fast facts, school search, and reports related to education.

The United States Distance Learning Association promotes distance learning for education and training in Pre-K through grade 12 education, higher education, home school education, continuing education, corporate training, military and government training, and telemedicine.

U.S. Department of Education provides a portal to educational research, statistics, evaluation, and assessment sites.

Virtual University Gazette - a Website and email newsletter providing information about distance learning offerings in higher education.

Web-based Education Commission provides a comprehensive report (in many text formats) on issues and strategies for improving e-learning as compiled through consultations with leading researchers and practitioners. Though the focus is on K-12, it also has implications for the post-secondary and corporate training segments as well.

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Distance.Gradschools.com - search for online graduate programs by discipline/degree.

Petersons - the online site for searching this popular directory to distance learning programs and courses.

Monster.com Learning - find certification and degree-based program courses using this popular directory service.

DANTES Distance Learning Program - helps military service members find useful distance learning information and approved online courses.

UNESCO Portal for e-learning - a newly established site to promote access to education resources in different regions of the world (in different languages).

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Web site and Domain Hosting

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Downloading Sources

There are many sites on the Web that describe and provide links for downloading freeware, shareware, and beta or evals of commercial software. Here are just a few:

Sites like download.com and tucows.com provide user reviews and rating scales:

http://www.download.com/

http://tucows.com

Newsgroups

For a Web-based access to USENET newsgroups: http://groups.google.com/

File Transfer

http://www.internet-soft.com/ftpcomm.htm. Browse information about the free and commercial versions of the FTP Commander ftp client software. Download, user's guide, and features links follow a desctiption of this easy-to-use "interface consisting of two side-by-side local computer and FTP server panels." For FTP services that require a secure connection (i.e., the entire session is encrypted and no passwords are sent in cleartext form), you can use the following secure ftp software: (PC) WinSCP http://winscp.vse.cz/eng or (Mac OSX) Fugu http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu

Audio and Video Streaming

http://www.RealAudio.com/then browse the Progressive Networks, Inc. RealAudio home page for information about the RealAudio Player, Encoder, and several types of servers.

Multimedia Conferencing

There are peer-to-peer conferencing clients you can download and use, including:

• Groove

• ICUII

• iVisit

CNET reviews Reviews of netconferencing or videoconferencing H/W and S/W. Find out who CNET recommends.

Instant Messaging

Yahoo Chat allows more than two particpants for text and audio chat: http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/yahoo/

Windows Live Messenger supports text and audio chat and file transfer: http://messenger.msn.com/

AOL Instant Messenger supports text and audio chat and file transfer: http://www.aim.com

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