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``To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose ...''
Ecclesiastes 3.1
... a time to study, and a time to act. As scholars, we are accustomed to contemplate interesting phenomena, trying to understand their essential qualities, analyzing and describing them. The emergence of the global computing and communication infrastructure (cyberspace is so much easier to say) is restructuring the ground on which we perform our scholarhip faster than we can understand that ground. This is a time to act: to help create cyberspace and to craft a place for scholarship inside of it. I describe how I have adapted my own editing and teaching to cyberspace. I encourage you all to go out and do something different.
The structure of a communication medium has profound impact on the structure in which information is produced and presented. Oral, written, and printed communication have been around so long that we take their structures for granted. In cyberspace, we may (and must) choose the structure in which we present information, with substantial consequences for future uses of the information. I favor empowering the reader of information as much as possible.
As managing editor of the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science I chose a structural format similar to SGML/HTML as the definitive archival form for articles. Most readers still look at a traditional typeset layout, but the structural format allows maximum flexibility in future applications, such as automated text processing, browsable sonic presentation, etc.
``He recognizes that there is a difference between information and experience and he vastly prefers the latter.''
John Perry Barlow
Besides the static structure of particular presentations of information, teaching depends critically on the interleaving in time of different communications between curriculum developers, teachers, assistants, students, ... In the past, we have taken the interactive structures of lectures, seminars, tutorials, assignments, exams largely for granted. Teaching in cyberspace, we may (and must) choose which interactive structures to create, with substantial consequences for the effect on students.
In my teaching, cyberspace enriches and complicates the structure of interaction between course development, teaching, and learning. I augment tutorial textbooks with a suite of World Wide Web materials developed at different sites with little or no special organizational effort between co-creators. I replace the transformation of instructor's notes into students' notes by my continual editing of online materials. I extend oral discussion in class with collaborative creation of an online discussion through the Web.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/,
follow the link to ``Publications'' on the left side.http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/,
follow the link to ``Publications'' on the left side.http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/,
follow the link on the left side.
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